'Exiling Prince Andrew will not be enough to save the Royal Family'
Not for the first time, the Royal Family finds itself mired in sleaze thanks to Prince Andrew, says Fleet Street Fox. Sending him into exile is not enough to save them
It is a Fleet Street rule of thumb that if someone resigns on a Friday, a Sunday newspaper must have a zinger. For it is Friday you approach them for comment, and they do the rapid maths to weigh the likely headlines.
And so it was when Prince Andrew announced he was abandoning his titles late on Friday evening. It was just about in time to sweep everything else off the front pages, and provided no time for questions.
When it broke that he had instructed a police officer to dig up dirt on the young woman accusing him of partaking in her abuse - a potential criminal offence for both parties - it became quite clear why he'd "fallen on his sword". And that his big brother had wielded it.
By now, dear Reader, you are probably showing signs of Andrew Fatigue. You've little appetite for more, you're wondering who else was involved, and you feel vaguely unwashed.
The palace snakes will be delighted; after all, it is bored acceptance of Andrew's sins which has suited the Royal Family very well up to now. They hope that a graceful retreat from public view, a voluntary, allegedly-honourable sacrifice of titles, will serve to both protect the King and defang any future revelations.
Except this is his fourth so-called exile, and it's never worked yet.
In 2010, after he was photographed strolling through Central Park - later laughably claimed to be due to an excess of honourability - with a convicted sex offender, the Duke of York stepped down as UK trade envoy.
In 2019, after a disastrous Newsnight interview which made everyone else sweat on his behalf, he stopped being an oxymoronic "working Royal", and lost his patronages.
In 2020 he lost his taxpayer-funded security and became a "person of interest" in a US criminal investigation into sex trafficking. Two years later he lost his social media accounts, his page on the Royal website was deleted, and he stopped calling himself His Royal Highness, because by that point it was making people dry-heave. Two years later, it was re-reported he was losing his police officers and would no longer carry out the public duties he already wasn't doing.
And now here we are in 2025, 15 years after this river of sleaze began flowing, and Andrew has... voluntarily entered exile yet again. This time, insist the staff, the King has had enough, but oh, it's so difficult, they are brothers you know.
His main accuser, Virginia Giuffre, took her own life earlier this year. That she made it into her 40s and a mum of three showed great strength of character, despite a childhood marred by sex abuse long before she met billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and was handed around his friends like a pack of Pringles. But it is perhaps unsurprising she found it all too much, now we know Andrew responded to her accusations by conspiring with her abuser and ordering his mother's police officers to dig up dirt on her troubled origins.
There is no other family on Earth that would not have kicked out a brother even half as bad as this; keeping him close. So the second Fleet Street rule of thumb comes into play: why? Why is Epstein's pal, whose finances are as opaque as the dictators he cosies up to, whose radioactivity is such that plutonium would pretend it didn't know him, still swirled about with titles that he has oh-so-kindly decided not to use?
In part, because his being stripped of them would also strip royalty from his daughters, who've committed no sins. But by reportedly advising Andrew to do the Newsnight interview, advising his ex-wife on how to non-apologise for knowing a paedophile, they've not exactly been an adornment to the Royal Family. And stripping Andrew of his title would mean his ex is no longer a duchess, which she's made such a stonking job of.
In 2019 Andrew offered to help the FBI's investigation. He was never interviewed. He paid someone he says he never met an estimated £12million for something he says he never did, and he's stepped down from public life so many times he should be running an aerobics class.
The Royal Family seems pathologically incapable of seeing the utter unacceptability of both Andrew and his behaviour on a range of dodgy dealings. Perhaps he has been so toxic, in so many ways, for so long, that they can't see how poisonous he is; an anti-homeopathic remedy for anyone who still thinks these people are a tourist attraction.
Fleet Street Fox
But it is the same sort of protection the Royals have given Andrew that Epstein bought and paid for from others. It is the same sort of institutional failure which meant the Met closed its case into Virginia's allegations with no further action. And it is the same closing of the ranks which meant that, eventually, Virginia couldn't carry on.
By protecting Andrew the Royal Family has made itself part of what happened to her. It has excused and sheltered a man who, at best, was friends with one of the most appalling sex offenders the world has ever seen. And the fact that sentence is not about King Charles and Jimmy Savile shows just how inured we have become to this particular disease of the high-and-mighty: the unwillingness of any of their own rank to hold them to account.
Innocent or not, the royals have accepted what none of us peasants could. And as a result, there are victims worldwide who, today, think there's no point in speaking up. This scandal has festered while the blue bloods have dithered and covered their flanks. Unless Charles finds a way to amputate his brother once and for all, then the swamp Andrew once frolicked in will drag down the monarchy itself.