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“I could have worse tags than ‘Air Miles Andy’,” the then Prince Andrew once reflected. “Although I don’t know what they are!” I think it’s safe to say he does now.
Almost all senior members of the royal family are biologically capable of sweating, and what really brought them out in a cold one four years ago was the thought of this honking liability testifying in a New York courtroom. So they paid millions upon millions to make sure it didn’t happen. The late Virginia Giuffre’s civil case alleging that the former prince abused her on three occasions in London, New York and the US Virgin Islands was never heard, because the late queen seems to have decided that it shouldn’t be at almost any cost. (Andrew denied all claims of wrongdoing.) And yet, as many of us predicted at the time, this would never be the end of it, and the royal family are now playing a failing game of catch-up with the institution’s own actions. Andrew’s de-princing – an attempt to keep it all in-house – already hasn’t worked.
The Windsors are incredibly tight with their own money and have spent generations in arguments and internecine sulks about how it is spread around. Before the Duke and Duchess of Sussex stepped away from their roles, money rows were a big part of Harry’s but also William’s friction with their father, now king. The idea that this bunch would fork over a reported $12m, plus seven figures of Andrew’s legal costs, without some fairly frank family discussions is just bollocks. Yet they clung to their public silence. They shielded him from what lesser mortals would know as the consequences of their alleged actions. This is proving to be extremely consequential for them.
Whose were the millions? As of yesterday, the king is letting it be known via courtiers that he didn’t chip in, with the money coming mostly from the late queen and the estate of the Duke of Edinburgh. It is often assumed the late queen paid from her secretive private funds, but others suggest it came from the Duchy of Lancaster, the earnings of which are public money. It would be good to know. In fact, it’s one of many Andrew-related questions that senior royals would surely have got the answer to behind closed doors many, many years ago. It would be good to know, for instance, how come in 2007 a Kazakh oligarch paid our former trade envoy £3m more than the asking price for a mansion the late queen had given Andrew as a wedding present – and an estimated £7m more than the market value – and then was happy to let it go to ruin. Please don’t tell me they never asked the question.
This week, the Windsors’ approach to the gathering peril has shifted. Now, say Charles and William and Kate in statements issued on their behalf, the king and queen “stand ready to support [Thames Valley police] as you would expect”, while the Waleses “remain focused on the victims”.
And yet, some victims are very specifically asking the royal family to focus on how they could help in more active ways than thoughts and prayers. It would, for instance, be a lot more helpful if they focused on security logs at Buckingham Palace and Balmoral, as well as internal household emails, and all the other documentation that could be dredged up. A leaked email last year suggested that in 2011 Andrew had asked one of his taxpayer-funded royal protection officers to dig up dirt on Giuffre. The officer in question reportedly couldn’t remember the events in question, and the Met closed its investigation into the matter. Have police ever even so much as spoken to Andrew about any aspect of this case? We don’t know. We should.
The general approach of the monarchy and the establishment or whatever you want to call it has always been to imply that no one knows whether Andrew, who had 24-hour top-level protection, was where he said he was at any given time. But every now and then, someone refuses to play ball. Take the late Thomas Harris, former British consul general in New York, with whom Andrew claimed to have been staying, meaning he couldn’t have had “activity” with Giuffre at Epstein’s Manhattan house. “It doesn’t sound like he stayed with me,” Harris stated in 2019, saying he had no recollection of the visit and it hadn’t featured in the Court Circular, which would have been standard. What a puzzle. One for Buckingham Palace’s remorselessly dogged internal affairs department, perhaps.
Andrew himself spent years playing a two-faced game, suggesting to Emily Maitlis that he’d certainly help US investigators with their Epstein inquiries if asked. Yet soon after, the then US attorney for the southern district of New York stated for the record that Andrew had offered “zero” cooperation up till that point. A few months later, the situation remained unchanged. “If Prince Andrew is, in fact, serious about cooperating with the ongoing federal investigation,” the attorney declared, “our doors remain open, and we await word of when we should expect him.”
The trouble comes when that two-faced game is perceived by the public to have spread to those at the top of the institution, who certainly have no part in alleged crimes, but have not dispelled the increasingly noxious impression of the institution having been adjacent to a cover-up.
Statements this week indicate senior royals are still playing this dangerous game of publicly really, really wanting to help, while not revealing anything useful of substance. No doubt they think this is the only game they can play. They are not brilliant strategists – the royal family is, somewhat famously, not a meritocracy. They eventually worked out that doing nothing was not an option; I wonder how soon they’ll clock that doing a bit less than nothing isn’t either?
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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