Is Air Miles Eddie scared he and Sophie are being eclipsed by Meghan?
As he spends £13,000 on private jets and helicopters ...
DoeS anyone know who Prince edward really is? The Queen’s youngest son is not the kind of man to draw attention to himself if he can help it.
So headlines in recent days mocking him as ‘Air Miles eddie’ must have caused him considerable discomfort.
Unusually for him, he used a private executive jet as well as a helicopter over two days on public engagements in Dorset and the West Midlands — engagements that he could easily have carried out by road or rail.
The cost to the taxpayer was in the region of £13,000 rather than just a few hundred pounds, giving rise to accusations that he was guilty of ‘a blatant abuse of public money’.
What is strange about this is that ever since he was forced to give up a commercial life as a TV producer, he has been extremely careful, as a full-time royal, to do everything by the book — so very different from his demanding brother Prince Andrew. So what has changed?
The theory among courtiers is that the earl of Wessex fears he and his wife Sophie are in danger of being eclipsed from the excitement of the royal show. He wants to raise their profile.
Tuesday — the opening day of royal Ascot — was the couple’s 19th wedding anniversary. But it was the glamorous Meghan who inevitably attracted all the attention.
All this came on top of those extraordinary pictures of the newest royal and the Queen in highly animated conversation as they carried out engagements together in Cheshire last week.
Sophie, of course, has been the Queen’s favourite family companion for some years. The former Pr girl, now 53, rides out with the Queen at Windsor and also goes carriage driving with her father-in-law Prince Philip, whom she calls ‘Papa’ (just as Princess Diana did).
‘She makes him laugh, which with Philip is half the battle,’ says a friend.
on most Sunday afternoons they and their children Louise, 14, and James, ten, have ‘five o’clock tea’ with the Queen at Windsor Castle, usually in the oak room.
These are precious private moments, where the Queen herself pours the tea, and not even the personable Meghan is ever likely to take Sophie’s place there.
But, in their official lives, edward and Sophie, as senior royals, have never enjoyed the same kind of public affection and enthusiasm as the other members of the family.
Indeed, there are several spoof Prince edward social media accounts which purport to share his homespun royal thoughts, such as: ‘ Don’t you know that feeling in the morning when you are full of energy?! Nah, me neither.’
However, the real edward, 54, is keen to be taken more seriously, especially as he is expected to be elevated from an earl to a duke and inherit his father’s title, the Duke of edinburgh.
He has been chairman of the board of trustees of the Duke of edinburgh’s International Award Foundation for the past three years and travels extensively.
But the fallout of his embarrassing commercial history, and, of course, Sophie’s, too, still weighs heavily on them.
edward’s dreams of a life away from the royal ribbon- cutting routine finally ended in 2011 when Ardent Productions, the television production company which the prince set up in 1993 with £300,000 of his own money, was dissolved.
The company’s most spectacular achievement was the ignominy and very public criticism it faced in 2001 after it had a crew film on the St Andrews university campus while his nephew Prince William, newly arrived as a student, was there.
This move was an apparent contravention of an agreement with the media to leave the young Prince William alone.
For her part, Pr Sophie famously fell foul of a Sunday newspaper sting in 2001 in which she talked about the royal Family and other prominent people to a potential ‘ client’ who was, in fact, an undercover reporter. She described the Queen as ‘ the old dear’ and Cherie Blair, the then Prime Minister’s wife, as ‘ absolutely horrid, horrid, horrid’.
She also created a memorable ‘royals for hire’ storm when, just three months after becoming the Countess of Wessex, she posed beside a rover car at the Frankfurt Motor Show having secured a £250,000 contract to publicise the model.
After this, the couple had to throw in the commercial towel, and no one can say that, in subsequent years, they haven’t worked hard to rehabilitate themselves.
For edward, this would not be difficult, as he was the Queen’s last child and Philip’s favourite son.
In Sophie, the Queen saw her special qualities as a royal consort — ones that blended perfectly with her own quiet approach to duty.
And Sophie is very much a modern royal in the sense that she is surprisingly self-sufficient. She does her own hair, sometimes drives herself to engagements and prefers to make her own ‘briefing’ notes without the help of a lady-in-waiting.
THE daughter of a tyre company executive from Kent, Sophie seems to have little use for airs and graces.
It is edward who is increasingly indignant — and has at times been furious — at the ‘downgrading’ of their royal status.
With Meghan’s arrival, that can only be exacerbated.
For her part, Sophie has never been troubled by slipping down the official rankings. The
subsequent arrivals of two new royal duchesses — Camilla in 2005 and Kate in 2011 — meant Sophie, a mere countess, dropped down to fifth.
The arrival just last month of another duchess, Meghan, pushed her down to sixth — and in the quaint custom of royal protocol she has to curtsy to the Duchess of Sussex ( and to the Duchess of Cambridge), whereas she only has to curtsy to Sophie if Prince Edward is with her.
So in what is the highly competitive world of life inside palace walls, one can perhaps understand Edward’s anxieties, especially as ‘the firm’ moves towards his eldest brother Charles’s plans for a slimmed-down monarchy.
Edward was even angrier than Prince Andrew when, together with Princess Anne, they were excluded from the Buckingham Palace balcony for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee flypast in 2012.
And yet, for Sophie, relative anonymity — one might even call it obscurity — has been a blessing.
It has meant she continues to drive the children to school in Ascot and Windsor like other school-run mums, and can have informal lunches with girlfriends, confident in the knowledge that people won’t keep pointing her out.
However, friends explaining her appreciation of being able to live life as a normal family conveniently overlook the 57-room Bagshot Park, a rambling Victorian mansion which is their home in Surrey. Though it should be pointed out that a large part of the place is office space and they occupy only about a quarter of it.
Their support staff are based in offices there, rather than in Buckingham Palace, and they have a relatively small domestic staff of a ‘house manager’ and an assistant, a chef, two cleaners who live out and a full-time nanny.
SOPHIE’S father Christopher Rhys-Jones, 87, often stays with them. Since Sophie’s mother died in 2005, he has become a regular name on the guest list of the Queen, who likes him very much, and he has been touched by the friendship the royals have shown him.
He was not, however, in the Queen’s Royal Ascot party this week, almost certainly because he finds such major occasions a bit stressful at his age.
In this area, at least, Prince Edward finds enormous comfort. Not for him and Sophie the excruciating spectacle of a father-inlaw in cahoots with the paparazzi, for example, or, in a toe-curling television interview, revealing the private thoughts and views of his royal son-in-law.
But then Christopher Rhys-Jones is no Thomas Markle. Like Kate’s father, Michael Middleton, he has kept a discreet silence on what he has seen and heard.
So can we expect Prince Edward to become ‘Air Miles Andy Mark II’?
Thus far, it must be said, Edward has carefully avoided the royal pitfalls that have characterised his elder brother’s life. Yes, he has made mistakes, but he has never pursued the company of dubious billionaires and never given cause for people to describe him as arrogant.
And unlike Andrew’s daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, Edward has not saddled his children with the style HRH — Louise is not a princess and James is not a prince. ‘They will have to work for a living,’ the Countess of Wessex has said.
So does Prince Edward really want to raise his royal profile, or is it merely a knee-jerk reaction to all the excitement and ballyhoo that has surrounded the new arrival in the family?
The one person who is likely to ensure he gets it right is his wife Sophie. He listens to her. One friend who has known her for a long time says: ‘I can almost hear her now, saying to him: ‘‘Be careful what you wish for’’.’