Downfall OF THE ‘favourite’
Once he was a national hero and the apple of his mother’s eye. But greed, arrogance and jealousy proved his undoing. And after that TV disaster, close friends told the Yorks: ‘The castle walls are crumbling ... it’s time for a full retreat’
HHe’s been heading for catastrophe since leaving Navy
E IS a man who has enjoyed every pleasure the 20th and 21st centuries have to offer while remaining, as a royal prince, several centuries out of date. A prince who has compensated for being only the second son of a reigning monarch by using the influence of his elevated status with breathtaking entitlement, and with relish.
The tragedy of Prince Andrew is that he could have been a life-long royal hero. After all, he piloted a helicopter with great courage during the Falklands War, luring Argentine Exocet missiles away from British ships.
And who could forget, when he came home, how he jumped ashore with a rose clamped in his teeth.
Is this really the same Prince Andrew?
Last night, it emerged that hours before he stepped back from public life, close friends counselled the Yorks: ‘The castle walls are crumbling. It’s time for a full retreat.’
Mercifully, it is only his castle walls, and how ironic that they should fall on the 72nd wedding anniversary of the Queen, whose faultless reign is now in its 68th year. She, in particular, will be wounded by what has happened to the son who is generally described as her ‘favourite’.
Only on Sunday morning, he and the Queen went to church together in Windsor, and he was telling his mother just how well he thought the BBC interview with Emily Maitlis had gone.
Prince Andrew’s love of money and the company of shady billionaires has been no secret. But who would have thought his naivety in the real world would allow him to forget during that interview to utter the words everyone wanted to hear: ‘I am sorry’?
None of the crises that have assailed the Royal Family in recent times have been as embarrassing as this. No one is suggesting, of course, that Andrew’s personal stupidity is seriously endangering the stability of the monarchy, for these days he is only eighth in the line of succession. But the Prince has been heading in the direction of such a personal catastrophe ever since he left the Royal Navy in 2001.
From the moment Lord (Peter) Mandelson arranged for the jobless Duke of York to become a trade ambassador for Britain — he replaced the dull but reliable Duke of Kent — it was apparent he had little compunction in blurring the line between his official role and his private ambitions.
To the influential rich in many parts of the world, being able to introduce Prince Andrew as a friend guaranteed their own acceptance.
One is entitled to wonder just how Jeffrey Epstein made use of his friendship with the Queen’s son.
Whatever Andrew said in that interview about his ‘honour’ in flying to New York to end his friendship with Epstein after he came out of jail, the sex offender would have known all along just why Andrew paid him so much close attention: his money.
Former Epstein friends such as President Bill Clinton had sensibly removed themselves from the billionaire’s company. So had Leslie Wexner, the U.S. clothing tycoon who had been Epstein’s mentor and principal patron. To Britain’s shame, Andrew clung on.
Love of money certainly seems to be at the root of the Prince’s downfall.
In the ten years he served the nation as a trade envoy, diplomats noticed that he was using the role as a means
Aides talk of ‘his pompous level of self-importance’
of ‘ploughing his own furrow’. As one distinguished former diplomat told us, everyone was ‘reluctant to point this out for fear of putting their own careers on the line’.
As for Andrew’s personal diplomacy, even WikiLeaks revealed that a U.S. ambassador described the Prince in the trade role as ‘cocky’ and ‘rude’.
But it was the company Andrew kept that was the most troubling aspect of his decade an unpaid ambassador for Britain.
His friendship with the family of the murderous Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi strayed well over the official line expected at a time when the aged dictator was forming alliances with the West.
One of his new friends was Saif, Gaddafi’s son, who was studying and being honoured with a phony degree at the London School of Economics.
‘He and Saif became incredibly close,’ recalled a mutual friend. ‘They had fun together. Andrew could open doors with his royal status and Saif could open other doors with his family’s money.’
On his many trips to Libya and on visits to other capitals and states around the world, Prince Andrew never let his royal status drop. He travelled with a team of six, including equerries, private secretaries and protection officers, as well as a valet bringing his own 6ftlong ironing board to ensure the Prince’s trousers were pressed as he liked.
To some close observers, this studied arrogance could well have been a conscious reaction to being diminished in the royal hierarchy by elder brother Prince Charles.
For the first 22 years of his life, until Prince William was born, Andrew was heir in line to the throne after Charles.
But, as the years passed, and William and then Harry had children, Andrew slipped down the royal pecking order. To make things worse, Charles, increasingly taking a more executive role in royal affairs, had begun ‘slimming’ down the monarchy.
As long ago as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, Andrew was angrily telling friends that he and others in the family were being pushed to the margins of royal life. These ‘others’ included his daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.
He saw it as an insult that they were being dissuaded from carrying out royal duties even though — as he always fervently pointed out — they were the only ‘blood princesses’ of their generation.
While maintaining a considerable number of patronages — from all of which he has now stood back — he expanded his other life among the superrich.
Some will say, especially now, that Prince Andrew was never cut out for royal life anyway.
People still talk about the glee with which, as a 16yearold on a visit to Los Angeles, he sprayed photographers and journalists with white paint from a spray gun he was being shown. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he said, before the British consul began shelling out money to pay for damage to valuable equipment.
Certainly, Andrew’s life has always been full of surprises. None more so than the trajectory of his marriage. Who but Prince Andrew would have the exwife who publicly humiliated him, and from whom he was divorced 23 years ago, still living under his roof?
After photographs were published of Fergie’s lover John Bryan kissing her toes while on holiday with the Duchess and her two daughters, you would have thought Andrew would have nothing more to do with her.
Yet, not only has Fergie lived with her former husband at Windsor for many years, but their £13million chalet in the Swiss ski resort of Verbier was bought in both their names.
As for the Queen, at a time in life when, like any greatgrandmother, she should be gazing down on her family with pleasure and satisfaction, she finds herself facing yet another major family crisis — one that is different from anything she has faced before.
Andrew has always been the son who pointedly bows and kisses her hand whenever he visits her at Buckingham Palace, and he is the son who, in her eyes, saved the treasures of Windsor Castle when 100ft flames were licking across it in 1992.
The Prince was at the castle when the fire broke out, on leave from the Navy, and he organised staff into a human chain to rescue its priceless paintings, furniture and artefacts. To the Queen, Andrew could do no wrong.
Rarely chastised as a child, he grew up, says one courtier, ‘with a pompous level of selfimportance based on being second in line to the throne. He felt it when he was pushed down in the line of succession’.
The Queen has always tried to help in this respect, by making sure he has a ‘role’, not always, as we know, with success.
Diplomacy has never been one of his strong points. When Pan Am Flight 103 and its passengers were blown up over the Dumfriesshire town of Lockerbie a few days before Christmas 1988, the Queen’s then deputy private secretary Robert Fellowes urged her to go there.
But, fearing she would be a distraction from the desperate recovery work, she decided Andrew should go instead.
He was not a good choice. He upset local people, where 11 residents had been killed on the ground, by declaring it was ‘much worse for the Americans’ (259 passengers and crew were on the U.S. airliner). And he added it had been ‘only matter of time’ before a plane fell out of the sky.
Andrew is still the only one of the Queen’s children to have accommodation and an office at Buckingham Palace.
At weekends in Windsor, she often joins him for a prelunch drinks at Royal Lodge, the home he inherited from the Queen Mother and on which he spent £7.5million in refurbishment.
It’s just a short drive from the piece of land on which his marital home, Sunninghill Park, used to stand. A Kazakh billionaire paid £15million for it, £3million more than the asking price.
As for his office at the Palace, for the foreseeable future he won’t be using it all that much.
He does at least have his daughter Beatrice’s wedding to look forward to some time in the New Year. Poor Beatrice. The timing couldn’t have been worse…