“Lost yer chance!” It was 1981 and I was fast asleep in my student room but Daisy the bedder (as cleaners were patronisingly known at Cambridge) was determined to wake me up – impatient to tell me the bad news. Prince Andrew was no longer on the market! He had a girlfriend called Koo, an “Amerrikin”. “You lost yer chance, dincha?” she concluded triumphantly as if I might actually have been in the running for the affections of the Queen’s second son.
Hard though it is to believe now, 40 years ago Andrew was the most eligible bachelor in the world. The handsome, strapping middle Royal brother was still second in line to the throne. Back then, Randy Andy was an admiring “Get in there, Sir!” tabloid nickname not an excruciating allegation in a New York court.
The following year, the prince, still only 22, won rapturous headlines for his service in the Falklands War, flying his helicopter as a decoy target, trying to divert Exocet missiles away from British ships. This week, his lawyers were engaged in a less noble mission; trying to divert missiles launched by Virginia Roberts Giuffre in a New York court. She alleges that Prince Andrew, the Duke of York accepted sexual services which she was forced as a minor (aged 17) to offer by the Duke and his friends the late billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The Duke has categorically denied having sex with Giuffre.
Andrew’s lawyers pounced eagerly on a $500,000 settlement agreement of 2009 by Epstein for abusing Giuffre which contained an expansive release clause shielding “other potential defendants” from civil liability. In court, however, Judge Lewis Kaplan appeared sceptical of the Duke’s attempt to dismiss the suit – but his verdict doesn’t really matter. There is no appeal in the Court of Public Opinion and the Duke of York has already been found guilty of being a massive prat at best and a heartless, arrogant aristocrat at worst.
A Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter does not refuse to co-operate with the FBI in a criminal investigation or fail to give a full version of what he knows under oath. Nor does he scuttle about the country, playing an embarrassing game of hide and seek, to avoid having legal papers served on him.
It is all causing the most enormous stench in the very year in which the Duke’s mother will celebrate her magnificent Platinum Jubilee. All our sympathies belong with the Queen who has lost her husband and must now bear the public disgrace of her son. It also makes life difficult for other members of the family who are trying to fashion a more relatable, less aloof kind of royalty. The Duchess of Cambridge, descended from Geordie coalminers, gives a far better example of nobility than her husband’s uncle.
I’m afraid we have reached the point where the Duke of York must give up his titles to protect his mother. It may be a sleazy joke on social media for some. For the monarchy it could not be more serious.
