It’s been nothing but chaos from Buckingham Palace since Friday. That’s when Prince Andrew was allowed to issue a particularly arrogant statement about how he was “giving up” his royal titles and honors, all while maintaining his innocence. From the reporting, it seems that Andrew was on the phone with King Charles (who was in Scotland) on-and-off throughout the day on Friday, and Andrew’s statement was part of the deal worked out by the brothers. Because this is all purely a PR exercise, royal sources quickly confirmed that Andrew would still be allowed to keep Royal Lodge and host shooting parties on royal estates, in addition to other royal perks.
The king has left the door open for Prince Andrew to keep some royal perks, despite forcing him to stop using his Duke of York title and honours. Charles III’s patience with his brother may have snapped after a wave of fresh revelations about his friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – but it does not extend to banning him from using royal estates to go shooting with his friends, or horse riding.
Andrew, 65, will still be able to use the taxpayer-funded royal estate at Windsor Castle and the monarch’s private residences at Sandringham and Balmoral for his favourite sports and pastimes, according to well-placed sources.
The disgraced prince cannot be moved from Royal Lodge, the 30-room mansion in Windsor Great Park he has leased from the independently managed crown estate until 2078, and on which he made a one-off payment of £1m in lieu of rent and spent £7.5m on repairs in 2003. The king is reported to have tried to pressure Andrew into moving out by cutting his £1m annual allowance and estimated £3m security, but has no control over the crown estate, an arms-length property empire that hands all its profits to the Treasury. His brother has insisted he has sufficient private income to stay there.
The shooting and riding privileges don’t surprise me – Andrew has had those privileges this whole time, and there are often photos of him riding on the Windsor estate. While I get the idea behind “there’s nothing Charles can do about Royal Lodge, Andrew has a valid lease,” I’d like to point out that there actually IS something Charles could do: he could buy out Andrew’s lease. That’s being left unsaid, because the royal calculation is that it would look worse for Charles to hand Andrew $10 million (or thereabouts) to get him out of his Royal Lodge lease. I’m not convinced that it looks better for the Windsors to still have Andrew in that huge mansion, riding around Windsor in full view of the peasants. Meanwhile, the Mail had more about the negotiations between brothers:
The King threatened to have Prince Andrew officially stripped of his titles unless he ‘saw sense’. Charles, 76, made clear he would not hesitate to take decisive ‘further action’ if his brother refused to give up his dukedom and other honours after he lied about cutting ties with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, it can be revealed.
The Daily Mail understands that despite the growing tsunami of evidence against him, the 65-year-old former Duke of York was digging his heels in with a ‘startling lack of contrition’. It was a situation the King deemed ‘intolerable’, sources said. The only way for Charles to legally strip Andrew of his titles would have been to take it through Parliament, and he has never wished to take up its valuable time and resources in dealing with the matter. But last week he privately made clear to Andrew that a raft of options were open to him if he did not fall on his sword.
Some have questioned whether the act of making Queen Elizabeth’s second son simply set aside his titles is adequate in the circumstances. But sources say that to involve Parliament when it is dealing with huge domestic and economic challenges, not to mention major global security issues, could have been seen as a waste of resources and taken months – or even a year – to conclude. Forcing Andrew’s hand would bring about the same result far more swiftly. And with a narrowing window of opportunity to grasp before the situation spun further out of its control, the Palace made its move on Friday.
The fact courtiers were even willing to consider taking the matter out of his hands – whether through Parliament or by other means – is believed to have ‘shocked’ Andrew into finally taking action. A royal source said yesterday: ‘The thought of him still continuing to use the titles and honours that had been conferred upon him for another day, month or year while other options were explored and enactioned was intolerable, for the sake of the wider family. And at last, for the wider good, Andrew saw sense.’
What’s crazy about this is that it’s a mess for the government and the British police no matter what, and there will likely be some kind of police probe, just as MPs are already starting to question whether they should strip Andrew of all of his titles formally. Once again, the larger problem is that the Windsors see this as purely a PR issue, not a criminal issue, not an issue involving the highest rungs of government and security services.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
