It was at all times going to return to this. Prince Andrew’s American lawyer’s assertion in New York this afternoon saying the agreed settlement with Virginia Giuffre units the seal on the prince’s humiliation over his affiliation with the convicted intercourse abuser Jeffrey Epstein and his pal, the lady who procured women for him, Ghislaine Maxwell.
It has value the prince his much-prized royal place on palace balconies, his perks – all these helicopter flights to golf matches at public expense, all these personal flights the world over to shake arms with sheikhs – and all his navy ranks, titles and honorifics. No extra honorary colonelcies: colonel of the Grenadier Guards, commodore-in-chief of the Fleet Air Arm, to say nothing of the colonelcy of the New Zealand Military Logistic Regiment and the Princess Louise Fusiliers of Canada. All gone. Surprisingly, he stays a vice-admiral, however the full admiral title will now for ever elude him. He could also be a duke, however he's now not an HRH. The retreat is full.
Maybe the thriller is why it has taken so lengthy. However Andrew has at all times been cloth-eared about public opinion. The tales of his personal boorishness are widespread, however his insouciance and disdain for what others thought, most clearly on show in his disastrous tv interview with Emily Maitlis in November 2019 – which he characteristically thought he’d dealt with reasonably properly – meant that he has been sluggish to get up not solely to what was occurring to his personal popularity, however to its disastrous impact on the monarchy itself. No marvel they’ve reduce him off and he’s left dependent on the age of 61 on Mummy’s largesse. She’ll be probably paying for the settlement too.
It was maybe unwise to depend on famously aggressive legal professionals on either side of the Atlantic too, however who is aware of the extent to which he adopted their recommendation. Maybe they had been cowed by his princely majesty, although that appears a trifle unlikely given their hard-faced New York popularity. Solely yesterday they had been demanding the unique of the photograph of Andrew together with his arm across the teenaged Giuffre’s waist whereas Maxwell grinned wolfishly within the background, in order that they might apparently take a look at its authenticity. Now, luckily, Andrew is not going to have his day in courtroom. He’s run out of street.
Somebody should lastly have seen sense. Prince Andrew – for all his denials, and with no admission of legal responsibility – was nonetheless bunkered. He was by no means going to win. And now his stupidity and conceitedness have value him nearly every thing he values.
His mom might have advised him that a sense of obligation and public service – the monarchy’s not-so secret weapon – has stored the household publicly revered and on the throne for generations. She has a jubilee 12 months to mark, which can nonetheless be blighted by his very public shame, however maybe now much less so. For him, the longer term might be something however celebratory. A stain on his popularity, and that of the establishment. A stain that will by no means go away.
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