WILL AND KATE’S NEW CRISIS
THE COUPLE ARE UNDER MORE PRESSURE THAN EVER TO SAVE THE MONARCHY AS THE WINDSORS FACE YET ANOTHER FAMILY SCANDAL
The dust was finally starting to settle on the bombshell allegations made earlier this year by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex against the British royal family. But just as Prince William and wife Kate Middleton, both 39, started to focus back on work, a new crisis has emerged that is threatening to destabilise the monarchy. Prince Andrew’s relationship with late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has landed him back in hot water, with the Queen’s second eldest son, 61, accused of molesting a teenage girl. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, now 38, an alleged victim of Epstein, has filed a civil suit against the prince in a US court, accusing him of sexually assaulting her in 2001 when she was just 17.
The crisis is yet another scandal in a string of dramas that have rocked the Windsor family over the past few years. With the popularity of Prince Charles, 72, who is the heir to the British throne, plummeting with the resurgence of Diana-mania recently thanks to the success of TV shows like The Crown, the responsibility for ensuring the monarchy thrives well into the future has now landed squarely on the shoulders of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
“William and Kate and the other senior members of the family will be doing what they can to retrain the focus on the good work the family is doing, rather than the
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scandals surrounding it,” royal expert Katie Nicholl tells British magazine Grazia. “[William and Kate] always strive to promote the monarchy’s good work and to support the Queen and they do that very well,” she adds.
While Andrew has strenuously denied the allegations, public outrage forced the prince to “step back” from his public roles in 2019. But Nicholl admits the palace will need to distance themselves even further from the scandal-ridden prince. As Andrew has long been rumoured to be the Queen’s favourite child, the call on whether he should be stripped of his titles will need to be made by Charles and William.
“There is a great closeness between mother and son,” Nicholl says of Her Majesty and Andrew. “It’s a more remote relationship between both William and Charles, and his brother, which perhaps enables them to be that much more objective,” she adds.
Putting some distance between Elizabeth and Andrew, who lives at Royal Lodge on his mother’s sprawling Windsor estate, is possibly one of the main reasons the Cambridges are “seriously considering” uprooting their young family.
William, Kate and their kids, Prince George, 8, Princess Charlotte, 6, and Prince Louis, 3, currently split their time between Kensington Palace in London and their quiet country estate Anmer Hall in Norfolk. “Anmer Hall made sense while William was a helicopter pilot in East Anglia and it was useful for Christmases at the Queen’s Sandringham estate, but it doesn’t really work anymore,” a source told the MailOnline, as the Queen has moved her permanent residence to Windsor Castle. “They are eyeing up options in the area.”
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“They’ll promote the monarchy’s good work”