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Prince Andrew: scandal magnet
Earlier in the week, he positioned himself front and center as the queen’s favored support at Prince Philip’s memorial service, leading to “dismay” from senior royals. Now Prince Andrew finds himself in a more familiar position: the subject of a financial scandal, after reportedly receiving £1 million ($1.31 million) from an alleged fraudster. His wife, Sarah Ferguson, also reportedly received payments from former banker Selman Turk. Princess Eugenie also allegedly received payments, although she and her mother have pleaded ignorance about Turk’s alleged activities.
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“The timing has not been good for him,” a royal source told the Sunday Times. “On Tuesday, Mum gives her seal of approval: ‘I think you’re innocent, son. You’re with me.’ By this weekend, his unsavory friends are coming out of the cupboard again. For that reason alone, I’m sure the duke regrets it.”
“Unsavory” is perhaps a diplomatic way of putting it—the Telegraph reports that Andrew was introduced to Turk by a convicted Libyan gun smuggler.
One palace source was even more blunt with the Times: “The duke is delusional if he thinks what happened on Tuesday means he has any chance of resuming a public role. He doesn’t.”
“Everyone expected to see him, but didn’t expect to see him play front and center,” a royal aide said of his publicity-hogging hijack of Philip’s memorial. “Where there are official events with family attending in an official capacity, different rules will apply.”
His behavior “cast a shadow over the service which nobody wanted, and hopefully a certain someone [Andrew] has noticed that”, a senior royal source told the Sunday Times. “Nobody thought how that would play out optically was going to be a good idea. The point had been made, but if there’s one person in the family who never listens to advice ... He might have hoped it would become mission creep to being more visible, but that’s not the will of everybody else. He can’t just turn up to things and play an unexpected role. The family track record shows there’s tolerance but there’s not a blind eye. Most of the family are not as deaf to the issue created as the Duke of York might be.”
Sources close to Prince Charles told the Sunday Times they didn’t think Andrew taking center stage was a sound idea, but added, “if that is Her Majesty’s wish, the Prince of Wales is not in the business of having a fight with his mother.”
Andrew’s Instagram post shows he has no intention of going quietly
With the rest of the royal family’s attempts to disown Prince Andrew ruined by the monarch herself, Andrew seems quite ready to re-enter public life. On Saturday, he took to Instagram (via his wife Sarah’s account) to publish a 700-word account of his experiences in the Falklands War on the 40th anniversary of its outbreak.
The arrogance on the part of whoever posted the 700-word missive to Sarah’s account was highlighted by the fact they wrote underneath it that it had been “written by HRH The Duke of York,” despite Andrew having been asked to stop using his HRH honorific in the wake of the Virginia Roberts Giuffre scandal. Andrew reportedly paid millions of dollars to Giuffre to settle a case alleging that Andrew sexually assaulted her when she was 17.
The HRH reference was removed fairly swiftly but the rest of the post remained live for a further two hours on Saturday before also being deleted.
Happily it has been screen-grabbed for posterity by royal journalist and author Omid Scobie.
In the first post, Sarah wrote that she had asked Andrew “for his reflections” on the anniversary of the conflict.
Andrew begins his reflections thus: “As I sit here at my desk on this cold crisp spring morning thinking back to April 1982 I’ve tried to think what was going through my mind as we sailed out of Portsmouth lining the flight deck of HMS INVINCIBLE.”
He said that the experience of war rendered him a “changed man” adding, “the historical perspective my short war has taught me is this—war is failure to keep peace; war is failure of human judgement; war is failure to recognize we need to seek permission to understand another persons perspective or reality, whether or not we agree or disagree with that perspective or reality.”
Attentive students of royal history might recall that Andrew claimed in his infamous Newsnight interview, from which much of his downfall stems, that as a result of being “shot at” in the Falklands conflict he was unable to sweat.
Lo and behold, Andrew was keen in the post to once again tell us a story of how he came under fire.
He states: “My lasting memory is of 99% boredom, training and routine and that horrendous 1% of sheer terror as missiles and bombs and shells were thrown around.
“I provide you with just one lasting memory that is seared into my mind, and still to this day I can see the event in my mind as clearly as if it happened yesterday.
“I did get shot at, but it was not intended for me, at the time Atlantic Conveyor was hit, I was airborne in the anti-submarine screen and told to climb to height and drop chaff (to confuse the enemy radar into believing there were many more targets than they thought and make their targeting solution more difficult and then to confuse the missiles into choosing the wrong target).
“I was flying and saw a chaff shell fired from one of our ships that passed not that far in front of us. The terror that that was going to be that, just for a moment, has had a lasting and permanent effect on me. We then had to put that to one side and get on with the search and rescue mission to recover and find men in the water after Conveyor was hit and burning.”
Few of course could fault Andrew’s sentiments on the invasion of Ukraine: “I can sympathize with those fighting today in the knowledge that we thought we were going to do the right thing in 1982—eject an invader—but only those who experience war can tell you, whatever those sitting in warm cozy television studios tell you, war is a dreadful thing and EVERY effort should be made to avoid it, however ‘just’ someone on either side thinks it is.”
But few would also fail to detect the stench of opportunism in his post. Less than two months after he paid a sex accuser he claimed to have never met a multi-million dollar settlement, it exposes the limitations of briefings (largely from Charles’ camp) saying that Andrew would never be seen again.
Andrew has no intention of going quietly, that much is clear. Everyone—bar Andrew and his mother—seems to have been caught by surprise by that, but as long as his mother is alive, there is now every reason to expect that Andrew will continue to pop up at the highest levels of royal life.
Queuing up another disaster
Some nervousness surrounds the forthcoming royal tour of Prince Edward and Sophie to Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines, in the wake of William and Kate’s visit to the Caribbean that was widely criticized for being tone deaf.
Should we expect more of the same? One potential flashpoint, the Telegraph says, is the use of “offensive” iconography in the official garb of Grenada’s governor-general Dame Cécile La Grenade, namely the “insignia of the Order of St Michael and St George, which depicts the white archangel St Michael trampling the neck of Satan, illustrated as a Black man.”
Racing certainty
Settling with Virginia Roberts Giuffre was widely perceived at the time it happened to be an attempt to remove the distracting issue of Prince Andrew from the public mind so that attention could be focused on the monarch’s platinum jubilee, marking her 70 years on the throne. Could it also be that the queen, who is understood to have facilitated the payment, actually wanted the case settled so that Andrew could play a role in the celebrations?
It’s one theory that has been doing the rounds this week, and is given credence by a report in today’s Sun On Sunday that Andrew will be the inscrutable queen’s chaperone to famous horse race, the Derby.
A source told the paper: “He was meant to stay invisible during the Platinum Jubilee so there is no way he will be at events like Trooping the Color. But the queen needs a chaperone on all occasions at the moment due to her mobility issues and Andrew has earmarked the Derby as the one he will accompany her at. He just doesn’t seem to understand the public outcry.”
Nor, arguably, does someone else.
Beckoned
What do Meghan Markle and Prince Harry do for a social life? They are almost never seen out and about, but that may change if rumors in the Sun that they plan to attend Brooklyn Beckham’s wedding next weekend turn out to be true. Brooklyn is marrying actor Nicola Peltz, 27, in Florida. David and Victoria Beckham are known to be friends of the couple and attended their royal wedding at Windsor in 2018.
Happy together
The Daily Mail carries a bunch of photographs of Autumn Phillips on the arms of her new beau, construction company boss Donal Mulryan. Autumn is the ex-wife of Peter Phillips, Princess Anne’s son, last seen at Prince Philip’s memorial service earlier this week with the couple’s daughters, Isla and Savannah.
Isla and Savannah were pictured with Autumn and Mulryan, the happy unit captured by a snapper at Cirencester horse trials on U.K. Mother’s Day last weekend. Also in one frame was Zara Phillips’ daughter Mia (Zara was competing at the trials). Autumn still lives at Gatcombe Park estate, the Mail says, so she can continue co-parenting alongside Peter, who also has a new partner in Lindsay Wallace.
This week in royal history
April 9 is a big royal date, marking Prince Charles and Camilla’s wedding anniversary (on this day in 2005; so happy 17th anniversary to them), and also the death of Prince Philip at Windsor Castle exactly a year before.
Unanswered questions
Prince Andrew’s return to the limelight, front and center at Philip’s memorial service, was a humiliation for Charles, who has long wanted him completely out of the picture. So just how simpatico are relations between the monarch and her heir these days?
