Is Prince Andrew Really That Sleazy?
For those of us who normally listen to Radio 4 with half an ear, it was confusing. Just hours after its sublime day-long dramatisation of War and Peace on New Year’s Day, it started to speak of Prince Andrew’s troubles. Prince Andrew is perhaps the most attractive male character in Tolstoy’s great novel – a brave soldier who lay on the field of Austerlitz, wounded, staring at the sky, contemplating the mystery of things. Suddenly, it seemed, by some surreal leap, Prince Andrew had become a character in the news bulletins, and was behaving wildly out of character. Our man, who had once stood on a ferry-boat with Pierre wondering if there is life after death, would surely not have been spending his holidays in Thailand with his billionaire friend Jeffrey Epstein…
Then we blinked, and realised that the purity of the New Year’s Day broadcast was over. Great art had been hooted off the stage by slapstick. Tolstoy’s real people had been replaced by two-dimensional naughty seaside postcard characters: the Duchess Fergiana (“vulgar, vulgar, vulgar!” said Lord Charteris), and her unfortunate daughters. Lawyers from across the Herring Pond told us of their mysterious clients – all called Jane Doe, apparently. Miss Roberts, one of the Jane Does, then cropped up to give new meaning to the troubling word “slave”. She claimed she had been given £10,000 – more, in some versions of the tale – to visit our Prince, in London, New York and on some Isle of Sleaze. Strenuous denials from the Palace, which seemed almost the most demeaning thing of all. Whatever happened to the dignified silence?
Dear, oh dear, oh dear. And everything had been going so swimmingly well for the monarchy. Everyone adored Kate Middleton. Prince George was the most popular toddler in the world. The Queen’s long and admirable reign, it appeared, had been going to enter a golden twilight, in which most of the British public, surveying the republican alternatives (M. Hollande clutching precariously to the back of his mistress’s motor-scooter; horrible bodybuilder Putin… ), believed they would prefer to stick to the monarchy.
Whatever Prince Andrew did or did not do with Miss Roberts, he certainly seems, in the course of his life, to have befriended some truly unlovely people. The newspapers have been full, for days, of photographs of his solid body, often clad in nothing but swimming drawers, lolling in the kind of sun-soaked holiday settings from which discerning travellers would run a mile. Ghislaine Maxwell, for it is she, seems to be present in some of the photographs in such luxury hell-holes as the Mar-a-Lago Club, Palm Beach, or the absurdly named resort of Phuket.
For those of us who enjoy the scourings of the gutter press, and who are unkind enough to laugh at other people’s misfortunes, it was a glorious week. But the serious commentators among us have allowed ourselves worrying reflections. A month ago, the monarchy was secure, saved by the family virtues of the Middletons and by those infallible feet of Her Majesty that have never been put wrong. All of a sudden, the monarchy is once more where pundits like it – under threat.
It must be said that, so far, the Duke of York has not done anything that could threaten the constitutional monarchy. He may be somewhat foolish in enjoying mixing with dubious company. But, by the standards of the House of Hanover, from whom he stems, his vulgarities and follies seem mild.
People used to criticise Sir John Conroy and the Duchess of Kent during the 1820s for being too protective of the young princess in their care – the future Queen Victoria. Why, the Duchess did not even allow her to go up and down the stairs by herself. But there was good reason for that. If little Victoria had tripped on the stairs and broken her neck, then her uncle Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, would have become the King. Duel-scarred Ernest, who attended the House of Lords night after night and made anti-Catholic, anti-Liberal speeches of a kind that embarrassed all but the diehard, was widely believed to have murdered his valet and fathered a child by his sister, Princess Sophie. The thought of him succeeding his fat sailor brother William IV (who had 10 illegitimate children) made even convinced monarchists see the virtue in republicanism.
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