Royal Biographer Reacts To Prince Andrew Escorting The Queen To & From Prince Philip's Service | GMB . / If you can’t see the problem with Andrew, ma’am, perhaps it’s time to hang up the crown

If you can’t see the problem with Andrew, ma’am, perhaps it’s time to hang up the crown

Catherine Bennett

Giving the prince centre stage at Philip’s memorial service was a foolish misstep

 

Sat 2 Apr 2022 19.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/02/naive-or-blinded-by-affection-either-way-time-queen-hung-up-her-crown

 

It’s six weeks since Prince Andrew settled out of court with his accuser, Virginia Giuffre, for a sum estimated at £12m. Cheap at the price, it was suggested, if the money (source unexplained) prevented sexual assault charges and a public trial ruining his mother’s platinum jubilee. Whatever’s left to be ruined, that is, after mixed results from the Cambridges’ vintage-inspired Caribbean visit in which only Kate’s elaborate wardrobe signalled that anything had changed since 1953.

 

Since Andrew testified in the settlement to a hitherto unsuspected concern for victims of sex trafficking, along with a newfound regret for knowing Jeffrey Epstein, the deal was also welcomed as a victory for Giuffre’s fellow survivors. A lawyer for Sarah Ransome, one of those abused by Epstein, called the settlement a “banner day”; survivors had “been heard and were no longer silenced”.

 

These women, probably unfamiliar with correct form concerning the titled associates of known sex offenders, could not have anticipated that Andrew’s discomfiture would be strictly temporary. A prince who is no longer HRH owing to some serious sexual allegations should still, as newly demonstrated by the UK’s foremost role models, be seen at formal events and addressed ducally as “your Grace”. Should one bow? A nod is usually acceptable where a prince has been unable to account, as with Andrew, for a photograph of him pawing a teenage girl, with Ghislaine Maxwell in the background. Following a period of reflection – a month is ample – current protocol requires a monarch’s son previously accused of sexual assault to take precedence in royal ceremonial over siblings who have never associated with a known sex offender (Charles’s favourites, Jimmy Savile and Laurens van der Post, were only posthumously unmasked).

 

As the Queen’s escort at Prince Philip’s memorial service, Andrew duly enjoyed a central role: received by reverential clerics and a trumpet fanfare, then serenaded to a front seat by less valued siblings and relations. If only a prior engagement in New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center had not obliged Ghislaine to send regrets it could have been just like old times.

 

As a massive public affront to Giuffre and the other women raped by Epstein, the event could hardly have been surpassed

As a massive public affront to Giuffre and the other women raped by Andrew’s friend Epstein, the event could hardly, however, have been surpassed. After being silenced for years by their abusers’ allies, the women last week saw the memorial to Prince Philip double, as dictated by Andrew’s leading role, as a further denial of their existence. Juliette Bryant, a survivor of Epstein’s abuse, said: “It’s not just an insult to the victims – it’s a complete insult towards humanity.”

 

The deep public respect and affection for the Queen, with an added tenderness that comes of seeing her look, often, tired, small and alone, meant that this perverse choreography was received, where she was concerned, less with disapproval than with incredulity. How could this dutiful woman, one of the UK’s dwindling emblems of national probity, have allowed her greedy, notoriously brutish son to reinvent her husband’s memorial service as a rehabilitation opportunity? She should have been one of the country’s last protections against epidemic Matt Hancock Syndrome: the pathological inability to feel shame.

 

It’s possible that the Queen never saw the seedy photo, is the one person who still believes Andrew’s Newsnight codswallop: that he can’t sweat, always wears ties, stayed at Epstein’s to “show leadership”. Maybe he was addressing Mummy all along? “My judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable, but that’s just the way it is.”

 

As much as her admirers would welcome any relief from the cognitive dissonance, this explanation, since it requires a credulity alarming in a head of state, obviously requires the Queen to step down. If she believes Andrew, what would she not believe from Boris Johnson?

 

More likely though, given her involvement in Andrew’s earlier demotion, the Queen was acquainted with the accusations and with Andrew’s reasons for not repeating in a courtroom his Newsnight line: “I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady.” His accelerated redemption came after she witnessed, like everyone else, Andrew dodging court papers, Andrew’s lawyers’, after they’d failed on technicalities, resorting to insinuations about his accuser’s greed, morals, false memory. Giuffre was even accused of being the harmful one, for somehow diverting attention from “those who have actually perpetrated sexual offences against minors”.

 

Only on reaching a settlement did Andrew say she’d “suffered as an established victim of abuse” and regret, as he’d previously refused to do, his association with Epstein.

 

The Queen presumably knew all this and, with a wide choice of children and grandchildren for memorial plus-ones, picked the son who once facilitated a loan for his ex-wife from a sex offender. The son who once sold a house for £3m above the asking price. Days after the memorial, the names of Andrew and his ex-wife would again come up, in a bewildering fraud case involving a £750,000 “wedding gift” and a Turkish woman’s passport.

 

To judge by last week, the family might have saved the £12m it spent rescuing the jubilee from Andrew. If he could be irreplaceable at Philip’s memorial, despite advice, then every jubilee event must still be at risk. Actually, if he’d defended himself in court then returned to non-royal obscurity it might have done less damage than his Westminster Abbey performance, acting as if open invitations to the massage-addicted Epstein households were the kind of things that could happen to any pious Anglican.

 

Whether the Queen is too blinded by her affections to recognise the impact of Andrew’s unbanishing or she knows and doesn’t care, they’re both reasons to retire before he causes her further trouble. It might seem a poor reward for the years of service, even a cruel and unusual punishment, but she has certainly earned the right, at 95, to spend more time with her favourite son, enjoying the conversation that made him such a treasured guest in any home owned by Jeffrey Epstein.

 

 Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist