One Of The Few Events At Which We Will See Him: Princess Anne, Princess Royal, Princess Beatrice, ... [+]
The terse, grammatically-challenged statement from HRH The Duke of York declaring his decision to withdraw from public life late on November 20 – more specifically, his retreat from some 200 charities and attendant royal duties – was a curiously revealing Royal Family bombshell in several ways. At a bit over a hundred words, it carried all the minor scars of great haste, a singular verb in the first sentence instead of the correct plural, a split infinitive in the third sentence, that sort of thing. And in fact, Andrew would have been acting in haste as he and what remains of his staff presumably composed it. The Queen's beleaguered third child had just been called down from Windsor to Buckingham Palace by his super-sturdy mother, who, though celebrating her 72nd wedding anniversary yesterday, took the time to tell him to pack up and get the heck out of the family office, fast. So, he did.
Chest Full Of Medals, Not Much Of A Job: Prince Andrew with his mother last June, during Trooping ... [+]
Reportedly, the move was discussed by the Queen and her regent-in-effect, Charles, currently on royal duties in New Zealand and the Pacific, before she invited Andrew onto the carpet for the genteel, but firm, maternal edict. Although it's certain that both the Queen, Charles, and arguably Andrew would vastly prefer not to have had it happen as a tactic of crisis management, the axing of Andrew dovetails neatly with Charles' stated plans to form a 'leaner' royal firm going forward.
In fact, Charles' slow-mo constriction of the larger Court of St. James necessarily diminishes the royal roles played by Andrew and his daughters, and that is the dragon that the somewhat flat-footed Andrew has spent the last few years fighting. The razor-sharp irony in the current retreat is that Andrew has now written himself out of the picture, leaving his daughters undefended from the winds of change at court. Classically, he, Andrew, was shown the mercy of being allowed to compose the statement himself, citing the whole-hog withdrawal as his own decision. Courtiers and Royals-beat journalists alike are under zero illusions as to whom was really making the call.
Regarded through a longer lens, Andrew's position as a heavy-hitter in the Court of St. James has been weakening for years, if not decades, an inexorable process for which there are several reasons. There are now two tiers of heirs to the throne laid adroitly in the line behind Charles, namely, an increasingly regal William and young master George, and even master George now has a couple of lively back-ups at hand down on his generational rung. The grander focus of the court has shifted and will continue to shift to all of the above actors and their roles in assuming the orb and scepter from Granny. While getting eased down the ladder is never without its frictions, Andrew's petulance and stridency when he perceives himself or his daughters to have been slighted in the pecking order has become increasingly visible – to his great detriment, since the one inviolable Windsor rule and general British specialty is that of the stiff upper lip. In the fishmonger's parlance, Andrew seems to be a bit of a whinger.
No less important, the Duke of York faces a tremendous social and professional liability, to which he is apparently blind, in his continued close relationship with his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, whose excruciating history of desperate, ill-advised moves, such as attempting to sell access to Andrew in a newspaper sting for $650,000 in 2010, is legendary in Britain. The rule of thumb is, when Ms. Ferguson deems that she needs an infusion of cash, it's the devil take the hindmost.
Mutual Assured Destruction: Prince Andrew, Duke of York and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York on day ... [+]
It's thought that Ms. Ferguson remains a close confidant of Andrew's, especially as the flames of the white-hot Epstein conflagration have been licking at his feet, and further, that she was instrumental in urging him to agree to do last weekend's disastrous BBC interview about his friendship with the American felon. The Queen, incidentally, was reported to have been informed last minute of that career-ending broadcast, but only as it was too late to interdict.
Andrew's recently-hired communications secretary, the formidable Jason Stein, who had come to the palace after a stint working for former Cabinet minister Amber Rudd, argued strenuously against doing the interview. Stein knew the BBC journalist who was to do it. His sound advice was not taken, whereupon Mr. Stein proved a savvy enough courtier to lay down his sword and retire from his post before the interview aired. Apparently he hadn't been on duty long enough even to get paid. It would be fair to say that the Palace wishes that Mr. Stein's warnings had been heeded.
Hasty as Andrew's royal missive was on the surface, and as revealing as it was of his personal, specific, and combative concerns, the urgency and force of this resignation raise more questions than the letter, such as it was, could or should answer. By contrast, Edward VIII's abdication of throne in December 1936 so that he could marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson looks positively graceful, decent, and above all final.
The business end of the Firm, as the Royal Family is familiarly called, is in patronages. The patronages can be as simple and straightforward as Harry's Sentebale charity, which benefits HIV-affected children in Lesotho and Botswana and which the prince admirably created in 2004 after a gap year in Lesotho. Or, they can be as complex and multifaceted as the business-mentoring scheme from which Andrew has just withdrawn, Pitch@Palace, several of whose big-time corporate sponsors, such as the Queen's own accountants, KPMG, were also busily jumping ship in the volcanic wake of the prince's disastrous interview. Ten global firms resigned from the initiative within 72 hours of the BBC broadcast, an attrition rate that even Buckingham Palace cannot afford.
Seen this way, Andrew, beloved son, erstwhile fighter pilot and Falklands War combat veteran, had become a crippling liability for the Crown's central business, which is to use the patented thousand-year Windsor glamour, if you will, to attract money to causes. Andrew's years-long association with Jeffery Epstein was not simply endangering the reputation of his family, it was causing a rupture in that ever-so-delicate, tacit, patriotic "agreement" that the Windsors have with their subjects, with their corporate sponsors and with the British government. Paraphrased bluntly, if it were set down, the unwritten law of being a full-time working British royal would look something like this: If you cannot dress, show up and keep it together to remain a money magnet for charity, then what's the use? Andrew never had a problem dressing and showing up. It was that last requirement that snagged him.
Andrew will be stripped of his Palace office and his approximately $300,000 annual salary with brio. Less clear and in some cases wholly undecided is what will happen to his causes. In cases such as that of the English National Ballet, one senses that the organizations have the brawn and the social depth of bench so that they can soldier on. It's the dozens of smaller causes in Andrew's 200 that deserve care and consideration now.
Given the criminal substance of the scandal, pedophilia and trafficking, the schools' and children's charities who have benefited from the prince's fundraising skills are very keenly motivated to remove his name. The administration of the University of Huddersfield, in Yorkshire, had been pleased to have Andrew assuming the role of Chancellor, but this week, post-BBC interview, the Huddersfield student body has understandably erupted in protest, which at this writing continues. As of today in Britain, it doesn't seem that the tsunami of momentum away from Andrew will stop anytime soon. He repels now, rather than attracts, and the force of that seems only to increase across industries and through the great swaths of British society in which he once moved.
In retreat, he will continue to be harried. The interview did the opposite of drawing a line under his involvement in Mr. Epstein's carefully woven web, rather, it whetted the appetite to know more, especially across the pond, among the victims' attorneys as well as any interested investigators or prosecutors. It's not as if, now, the Duke of York could pull back to Windsor and quietly engage in a bit of charity on the long march back to rehabilitation. Andrew's is the Sackler-family model of disaster – it keeps on ballooning as the universities and museums queue up to have the stonemasons sandblast the names off the grand marble lintels. Ergo, the redemptive option of charity work has dried up for him – that's the smouldering wreckage of his chunk in the family business from which he's now stumbling.
In swiftly distancing him, the Queen and his brother Charles are defending the castle from collateral damage. Because: Andrew's odyssey through the maelstrom is as unfinished as the lawsuits of the many victims arrayed against the Epstein heirs and assigns. Some officers of an American court may yet desire a conversation with the Duke of York, and, if it happens, that won't be a court that bears any resemblance to the one from which he just retired.
The Duke doesn't seem to have gotten his arms around the magnitude of it yet. Booked to fly to Bahrain to be honored at a Pitch@Palace program the day after his retreat from public life, he reportedly had to be advised by the Queen/Charles/and-or their senior courtiers that it wasn't "a good idea" before he cancelled.
Put differently, if the Queen and her court at the time thought that 1992, the year that Charles and Diana's marriage woes erupted, was, in her famous Latin usage, an annus horribilis, a terrible year, then Prince Andrew's entanglements now surfacing for proper dissection will make 1992 seem like a cakewalk.
