Royals prepare for a frosty Christmas
AS THEY have traditionally celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve, in exactly one month’s time, the Royal Family will again be settling down for lunch and preparing to exchange gifts. However, any sense of festive cheer will be replaced with a distinct chill in the room, because the Prince Andrew scandal concerning his close friendship with the vile sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is arguably the biggest crisis the family has faced since the death of Princess Diana.
It is the story that has everything: a Duke, a billionaire paedophile, teenage girls, cash, power, sex, influence... and even a slice of pizza!
Make no mistake, these are ingredients that could mortally wound the institution of the monarchy and the leaden-footed and utterly amateurish way Buckingham Palace responded to the debacle has made the situation immeasurably worse.
Precisely a week ago, we were told the disgraced Duke had told the Queen the calamitous TV interview had gone well. Of one thing we can be sure – now that he finds himself out of work, one job he won’t be getting any time soon is as a television or theatre critic. within a few days, he confirmed he was standing down from all royal duties “for the foreseeable future”.
Spend even a small amount of time with a journalist, police officer or anyone who has been around the senior Royals and they are all as one when it comes to their opinions of Prince Andrew. They see him as arrogant, difficult and supercilious. While many of us might have expected that to be the case, we had really no idea – until he chose to open his mouth on that TV interview and remove any doubt.
If it wasn’t such a desperately serious and potentially even criminal matter, risible excuses about going to pizza restaurants and taking four days to end a friendship with a sex offender would be comical.
And as for that bizarre claim that, some years ago, he was unable to sweat due to a condition he picked up during the Falklands conflict, he’s sure to be sweating now as the backlash grows with more and more businesses and charities cutting their ties or reviewing their involvements with the disgraced Prince. To lose one high profile sponsor such as global accountancy firm KPMG might be regarded as a misfortune; to lose another such as BT looks like carelessness. To lose a raft of banks, businesses and charities is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.
Even in the middle of the week, Palace sources were defending the man we are constantly told is the Queen’s favourite child and were suggesting this was a “personality motivated witch-hunt”.
Realising his bigheadedness in thinking he could handle a long-form TV interview and bluff and bluster his way through any tricky areas was his ultimate undoing, Andrew finally bowed to the inevitable and decided to run and hide. One of the most telling age-old mantras employed by the Royals has always been: “Don’t complain, don’t explain.” To that, Andrew seemed to add “Don’t apologise,” as it took him days to realise – despite his protestations of innocence – that the fact he’d ignored the plight of women caught up in this scandal was truly appalling.
HOW SAD that the Queen, who has consistently put duty first and has steered her family through countless travails from divorces to the death of the nation’s sweetheart – as well as stories of a former royal wife having her toes sucked and the future king wishing he was a female sanitary product – is confronted by this. The monarch is 93 and the harsh reality is that she palpably cannot have the same grip on affairs as she did a couple of decades ago.
Is that what lies behind the tumultuous events of the past seven days? Are we also witnessing the fact that the 98-year-old Prince Philip is not as actively engaged in the running of “the firm” as he once was?
One thing is plain.the Queen only came to power as a result of the family being able to divine a path to lead them out of the Abdication crisis caused by her uncle 83 years ago next month.this modern day crisis is set to be just as acute.