Duke needs to retire gracefully, if he can
AND SO it ended, not with a bang but a whimper. Prince Andrew said he was determined to defend himself in court; Virginia Giuffre, née Roberts, said she wasn’t in it for the money. Both appear to have had a rethink. One can only hope thatVirginia can now put the past behind her and get on with her life (although a tell-all book is said to be on the cards), but Prince Andrew? What sort of life can he lead now?
It is an absolute mystery how the Queen, a woman of impeccable moral standing, integrity and possibly one of our greatest ever monarchs produced a son like that. Arrogant, boorish and entitled: whatever faults his siblings possess, they are not like Andrew.
Apart from his service in the Falklands, what use has Andrew ever been to this country? His role as “trade ambassador” seemed to involve visiting an awful lot of golf courses and making some very dodgy friends; and the sale of his former home Sunninghill Park (for £3 million more than the asking price) allegedly benefited a foreign money laundering operation, it was recently claimed in a lawsuit.
This, it hardly bears repeating, is the son of the Queen.And now he’s been forced into a multi-million pound pay-out in a case involving sex trafficking. If your ordinary Joe on the street had been caught up in that, he would be a pariah. And yet Andrew actually seems to think he could make a return to public life.
Just how delusional do you have to be to get caught up with a monster like Epstein and still think that makes you fit to represent your country? If Andrew has any sense, which he clearly doesn’t, he will keep his head down for the rest of his life.
I am a monarchist: the Royal Family has been a source of stability in this country, there is no real appetite for an elected head of state, they bring in millions from tourism and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But Prince Andrew should never be allowed anywhere near the institution he has done so much to drag down.
You would have thought a combination of respect for the system he was born into combined with reverence for his mother would have at least pinged somewhere that decent behaviour was expected of him. Instead, he plunges his bereaved, widowed mother into a scandal, in her platinum jubilee year.
IT IS SAID that Prince Charles had a big role in realising his brother had to sort this out: good. I hope so. It can’t have been easy for him, either: whatever sibling rivalry might exist between them, Andrew is still his brother and blood remains thicker than water and all that.
But Andrew has crossed a line in his behaviour and the heir to the throne clearly recognises this, as does Prince William. Despite all the current lurid headlines, Andrew is fast on his way to becoming an irrelevance.
It can’t come soon enough.