Hadley
Freeman's Weekend column
‘Rebranding’ Prince Andrew? Now there’s a real mission
impossible
Hadley
Freeman
The task of making the prince even vaguely palatable
to the public has been called ‘the rebranding job from hell’. But I’ve got a
few ideas
Prince
Andrew
Being
forced to deny sexually assaulting a minor is not a great look for a prince.
Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA
Sat 28 Aug
2021 09.00 BST
History is
unfolding all around us. Tragedies are occurring every day. So I was very taken
with a recent article addressing the most urgent issue of our time: what can be
done to help Prince Andrew’s reputation? As even the staunchest royalist papers
have accepted, being forced to deny sexually assaulting a minor – Virginia
Giuffre, then 17 – is not a great look for a prince; an even worse one is a
prince who insists he “can’t remember” meeting her, despite the inconvenient
photograph of Andrew wrapping his mitt around Giuffre’s waist while Ghislaine
Maxwell – currently awaiting trial for sex trafficking, a charge she denies –
grins in the background, Aunt Lydia with a Cheshire cat smile. Andrew’s
“friends” (his what?) insist the photo is clearly faked because “the prince has
chubbier fingers”, which, as alibis go, is as ironclad as being at Pizza
Express in Woking. The task of making the prince even vaguely palatable to the
public is, according to the article, “the rebranding job from hell”, given
that, as one strategist beadily noted, he “has no accomplishments or public
admiration he can leverage, no day job he can go back to”. Treasonous talk
there from the PR industry, and yet not even the Queen could defend her favourite
child against any of it.
There is
another problem for Andrew’s PR, aside from sheer uselessness, personal
unlikability and general idiocy that have wafted off him for most of his adult
life. It’s that he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. This has been a
lifelong problem. When interviewed in 2017 , he was asked about his various
“gaffes”, which included allegedly giving Maxwell and – naturally! – Kevin
Spacey a tour of Buckingham Palace and allowing them to sit on thrones;
inviting Maxwell and later convicted sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and – but of
course! – Harvey Weinstein to his daughter Beatrice’s 18th birthday party;
selling his house to the Kazakh oligarch, Timur Kulibayev, for £3m over the
asking price, which seemed strangely generous of the buyer, given it had been
on the market for years. The prince, as per, denies he has done anything wrong.
How, the
journalist asked, did he keep getting himself into these little scrapes?
“Everybody should be given an opportunity. Sometimes you find that somebody’s
done something after the event, or you find that perhaps that wasn’t quite as
wise. You don’t get it right all the time. It doesn’t bother me, really. It’s
just part of life’s rich tapestry,” Andrew replied. Indeed. Although Andrew
increasingly seems to be re-enacting the Bayeux tapestry, specifically the
section depicting the royal flailing around with an arrow stuck in his eye.
Like
Andrew, former prime minister David Cameron was born blessed with only gilded
opportunities, and then, with almost impressive determination, plunged his
reputation through a shredder. Cameron has insisted he lobbied ministers during
the pandemic to prop up Greensill Capital because “he sincerely believed there
would be material benefits for UK businesses at a challenging time”. And “UK
businesses” appears to have meant “myself”, given he banked £7m, whereas
taxpayers are footing the bill for Greensill’s collapse of up to £320m. Good to
see Cameron’s judgment is just as sharp as when he gave the go-ahead to the
Brexit referendum.
What can be
done with such men? PR executives insist that Andrew must make “almost a full,
authentic and credible apology”, although either man doing anything “authentic
and credible” is as likely as the two of them growing matching quiffs and
becoming the new Jedward. One PR quoted in the article suggests that Andrew
“devote himself to good works and public service for the rest of his life”, but
that’s what he was already supposed to be doing before, and look how that
turned out. Eddie Murphy once wisely observed “the best way to hurt rich people
is by turning them into poor people”. But poverty, or even normality, is a
strange concept in Andrew and Cameron’s worlds, when it applies to themselves.
Prince Harry insists he moved to California because he wanted a “normal” life,
although his version of normal turned out to mean living in an £8m mansion,
hitting up his father for cash and flogging tales of his royal family. Well,
it’s all relative. Or in Harry’s case, all about the relatives. Meanwhile,
Cameron’s off living the humble life in his various £25,000 shepherd’s huts ,
which surely cost more than his book, which he famously wrote in them, has made
in profit.
There
really is only one solution. These men won’t change personally, so they need to
change geographically. One PR suggested Andrew should “devote himself to
charity work, perhaps in Africa”, but Britain has inflicted enough pain on
Africa already. Instead, both men should build a time machine and go back to
when useless posh politicians could be snout-deep in the trough and no one
would notice, and the royals could do anything they damn well pleased. So maybe
the 19th century for Cameron and the 16th century for Andrew? It’s for their
sake as much as ours; they’ll feel so much more at home there. Bon
voyage, guys.
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