The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

In this context, talk of the royals acting decisively to cut Andrew off are wide of the mark. This scandal has gone on for the best part of 15 years since that photograph, and another of Andrew walking amiably in Central Park with Epstein, came to light. Arguably it was longer still: how long ago did his siblings, perhaps even his parents, know that Andrew was so self-entitled?

They must have realised, if his staff and the police were doing their jobs, that he had some deeply disreputable friends given he openly invited them to Buckingham Palace, or Balmoral, or even Royal Lodge, another of his perks.

If the family did not know about his sexual proclivities, they certainly knew about his extravagance with public money, because the trips were printed in the royal annual reports: the taking of a helicopter from the palace to an Oxfordshire golf course and back again in time for lunch, the private flights instead of scheduled services, all for the convenience of “Airmiles Andy”. Then there was the entitlement which demanded deference when he entered a room (“Let’s try that again, shall we?” when people did not notice his arrival, according to his recent biographer Andrew Lownie) or the supreme consciousness about his royal titles used on his letterheads in correspondence to his personal acquaintances.

He could get away with it while his mother, who inexplicably indulged him, was still alive. Queen Elizabeth did at least strip him of public duties and honorary colonelcies in the wake of his disastrous and, we now know, mendacious Newsnight interview six years ago, which he thought had gone rather well. But his behaviour has scarcely changed since, sidling into the limelight at public events, most recently at the Duchess of Kent’s funeral in September, vainly trying to make conversation with an all too evidently discomfited Prince William. And clinging on desperately to his grace and favour residence at the 30 room Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, even into this week reluctant to give it up in the face of pressure from the king.

The public (and the media) were far ahead of the royals. There was no one of any consequence to speak up for him, a result of all those years of arrogance, and the gravity of the looming institutional damage was finally clear. The more intelligent royals realised that. The one imperative is to pass on the monarchy, if not as heretofore at least intact and untarnished. They have spent the last 190 years trying to undo the reputation of the Georgians, proving they are useful, responsible and responsive to their subjects; if not exactly like them, then role models for respectability and good behaviour. Andrew was putting all that in danger in an age when deference and discretion is no longer enough.

Finally, the famously indecisive king was prodded further. There was no alternative. The palace had lost control of the narrative. The days when the indiscretions of princes could be overlooked or hidden – think Edward VII and his predilection for chorus girls and mistresses, Edward VIII and his half-secret relationships with Freda Dudley Ward and Wallis Simpson, or even the Belgian Leopold II, who had sex with underage children (not as bad as his treatment of the people of the Congo, his private fiefdom, but bad enough) – were over.

Now it is the loss of titles and the continued and life-long public humiliation that will hurt Andrew, demoted to just Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, the most. As will the fact that he is the first royal to lose his titles in modern times; the last to do so was the Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, who sided with Germany in the first world war, while Japan’s Emperor Hirohito was stripped of his knighthood of the garter after the second. Since one of Andrew’s few claims to fame is his service in the Falklands war, this will particularly sting. He is still a counsellor of state, theoretically able to stand in for the king, and he is still eighth in line to the throne, but neither of these will ever come to pass.