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As gestures of maternal support go, riding to church with your son in a Rolls-Royce the day after his convicted pedophile friend has killed himself in jail is a big one.
But that was what the Queen did on Sunday morning, throwing a lifeline to her beleaguered (and favorite) son, Prince Andrew.
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Andrew knew how lucky he was. He grinned like a madman from the back seat, a smile which—perhaps not entirely convincingly—attempted to telegraph the message that he didn’t have a care in the world.
Andrew has denied the claims of Virginia Roberts (now Giuffre) that Epstein “trafficked” her to Andrew for sex. Johanna Sjoberg, then 21, has also alleged Andrew groped her at Epstein’s New York townhouse.
Andrew was allegedly introduced to Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell in the 1990s, and Epstein and Andrew were famously photographed walking in Central Park together in 2010.
As The Daily Beast previously reported, Prince Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, may also face renewed questions about accepting £15,000 from Epstein in 2010, when he was already a convicted pedophile on the sex offenders’ register.
She later apologized for what she termed “a gigantic error of judgment,” saying that she had been blinkered by financial desperation.
She has never, however, said if or when the money was paid back.
A quick trip to church with Her Majesty was by any stretch of the imagination a bizarre response to the news that Epstein had killed himself, but not quite as bizarre as Andrew’s next step.
News was carefully leaked on Wednesday that Andrew had subsequently cut short his trip to Balmoral and had gone on holiday to Spain with his ex-wife, (who had been forced to flee Balmoral, where she had also been a guest, after Prince Philip, who still refuses to breathe the same air as her, brought forward his arrival unexpectedly.)
In the old days, of course, any scandal in the Windsor family was followed by a well-rehearsed circling of wagons. The royals would retreat behind palace walls and remain there until the scandal blew over; the general impression was of a willingness to stay secluded forever, if necessary.
Andrew, instead, has reacted to the death of his former pal by indulging in a bizarre game of geographical hopscotch, well and truly living up to his nickname Airmiles Andy.
He hopped aboard a private jet at Aberdeen airport on Tuesday afternoon, popped home for the night, and then jumped back on the same aircraft, this time with his ex-wife, Sarah, also on board, and off they flew to Malaga in Spain.
On touchdown they were whisked by luxury cars to a secluded mansion in the hills. There was no attempt to keep the unusually timed vacation secret. A royal insider told The Sun: “The Duchess insisted she go on holiday with the Duke to look after him and show the world she stands by him.”
To seasoned royal hacks, the use of the words “Duchess” and “Duke” in the statement is a clear sign that the “source” is an authorized but off-the-record briefing to the media.
Going on holiday is by any measure an unusual response to the predicament in which Andrew finds himself, but aligning himself with Sarah, projecting the impression of a dutiful and very modern family man who makes it work with his ex, is par for the course.
Time and again, when the chips are down, failing royal men have sought to rehabilitate themselves by using the women in their life—mothers, girlfriends, ex-wives, children—to implicitly vouch for their character.
Andrew is a master of this conjuring trick and, having been comprehensively cut off by his brother Charles, he is fortunate indeed that the women in his life continue to stand by him.
Of course, they might have their reasons. This wasn’t exactly a great week to be Sarah Ferguson either. A cynic would say she also needs all the friends she can get right now.
The Daily Mail has spent the week drip-feeding a series of revelations about how she had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Hong Kong businessman for ill-defined “consultancy” purposes, which appear to have been little more than appearance and endorsement fees by another name.
The revelations may also have had something to do with Fergie’s panicked departure from Scotland on Sunday. Extravagance infuriates the queen at the best of times, but extravagance combined with trading on the family name and position? One can quite understand why Fergie my have decided the shrewdest course of action was to make a quick dash to Aberdeen airport.
In comparison with the allegations being made against Andrew, of course, Fergie’s opportunistic snaffling of a few hundred grand from a rich businessman is almost insignificant (the Queen’s grandchildren Zara and Peter Phillips also got money from the same source).
But all these different stories are being conflated into a bigger and much more dangerous story: that the Windsors, taken as a bunch, are elitist, pampered, extravagant, possibly corrupt, and definitely out of touch.
Even the fact that Meghan and Harry went on holiday to Ibiza for a week, hardly a tell-tale sign of being a feckless billionaire, has been used to feed what the press sees as a promising new super-narrative.
There, is, of course, when you look at it objectively, no equivalence, and, in time, we must hope, the media will move on from attacking Meghan every time she goes on holiday or Fergie or Zara every time they make a business deal.
Andrew’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, however, is another matter. It will haunt him forever and rightly so.
No matter how many times his mother offers up the trappings of state to make him appear respectable, no matter how many times his ex-wife tries to pretend they are just a normal family on a normal holiday, no matter how many times he attempts to use his business incubator charity to present himself as a serious man of business, another image of him that will endure is the one of him with his arm around Virginia Roberts Giuffre, then 17, Ghislaine Maxwell smiling to their side.
Andrew has denied he had sex with Roberts, but the many questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein persist—and presently he looks like a very privileged globe-trotter doing his best to avoid answering them.
