The royal family is supposed to have divested itself of Prince Andrew. But it hasn’t finished the job. It’s exactly two years since he was stripped, with great ceremony, of his public duties, his two dozen military titles, what charity patronages remained, and – sort of – the abbreviation HRH, which he can apparently still use, just not “officially”, whatever that means.
The prince remains on royal property but in a kind of internal exile, kept away from balconies and windows. He has been partly digested but not fully expelled.
Yet Andrew’s unofficial status – royal liability – is unchanged. The unsealing of 900 pages of court documents in the US last week exposed new details of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, further weakening his case that he hadn’t the foggiest idea what the paedophile financier was up to with all those young girls. And further harming the reputation of the royals at large.
The new revelations are damning rather than incriminating, but they have put the prince back in the headlines. So, probably, will continued legal proceedings in the US against Epstein’s associates. And so will an forthcoming Netflix film, Scoop, a dramatisation of the landmark Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis.
Whenever these reminders surface, there are calls for King Charles to “do something” about his younger brother. But the palace is running out of things from which Andrew can resign in disgrace. The next idea, rumour has it, is for Charles to throw him out of the Royal Lodge, and from there into Frogmore Cottage, an admittedly smaller grace-and-favour residence, on the basis that he should fund his own security. But the plan seems to have fallen through. As an “associate” of Andrew told the Times last week: “It’s a very unattractive proposition to withdraw security to kick out your brother” and “in that family, blood is thicker than water”.
How do you solve a problem like Andrew? Charles’s solution lies in his ambition to “slim down” the monarchy; relieving aunts, siblings and cousins of public titles, duties and money. There are two aims here: first, to make the family cheaper and therefore more popular; and second, to reduce the surface area from which troublesome relatives can spring. The first is fine but the second will fail. Indeed, it is already failing.
Does it need spelling out? A hereditary monarchy can’t pick and choose its members. A close relative of the monarch will always be seen as royal. No matter how much officialdom you strip away, or how carefully you rework their titles, Prince Andrew – like the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – will continue to be a member of the family, and so will always be capable of bringing it into disrepute. When it comes to Andrew, the liability is not his title but his fame, and that isn’t going to go away. The family like to call themselves “the firm”, as if they are a business. But it’s the sort of business where you can’t sack anyone, no matter how many 17-year-old sexual assault victims complain to HR.
In fact, the plan to pare the royal fat may backfire. Removing royal duties and protections from badly behaved relatives rather takes the shackles off – giving them time, freedom and, more importantly, the financial incentive to make their way in the world by other means. Harry and Meghan would not need to build embarrassing broadcasting careers if their time were taken up with visiting jam factories and opening provincial shopping centres. Is allowing minor royals to live as rich celebrities (even without public stipends their inherited wealth is enormous) really the solution? Since Andrew is always going to be rich, famous and disgraced, perhaps a more fitting punishment would be to stuff his calendar with dull but worthy activities – the equivalent of a long stint of community service, which indeed royal life is supposed to be. Litter picking, perhaps. Or attending royal variety shows.
If Charles were really committed to tradition, he’d have another sort of answer to the Andrew problem. In the last couple of hundred years, the monarchy has gone rather soft: think of George VI, who allowed his Nazi-sympathising elder brother, the Duke of Windsor, to spend the Second World War as governor of the Bahamas. How to get rid of troublesome siblings? In the long history for which the family now serves as a nostalgic talisman, the answer was often more straightforward.
There are too many examples to mention them all. Richard III put his nephews in prison, where they were murdered; Henry VII bumped off more than one cousin. Elizabeth I had her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots executed. Edward IV killed his little brother. Like the mafia, the royals have time-honoured ways of “reducing headcount” in a family business. Perhaps it would be best, at this point, for Charles to have Andrew quietly dispatched. For the good of the firm. Hereditary nonsense meets Darwinian logic.
Of course, “the Andrew problem” is really “the royal family problem”. Each generation of royals has its black sheep as well as its saints – who knows where the next Andrew might pop up? Next time he may be a firstborn. It’s a modern convention to talk of the royals as if they have in some way earned their status – they work hard, they do their duty – but they haven’t. They may not have much power these days, but they do still represent us. We like to think of the royals as a comfort, a reassuring symbol of times past, but they’re a risk.
• This article was amended on 14 January 2024. Elizabeth I had her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots executed, not “her sister Mary” as an earlier version said.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
