It was the sort of elaborate birthday surprise that Andrew – practical joker and fond of a fart gag – might have arranged to prank a friend. Six unmarked police cars roaring up to the farmhouse where he had been living on the Sandringham estate at the unseemly hour of 8 a.m yesterday. Only these cops were real and the ‘ex-UK prince’, as one international news network described him, was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office before being released under caution around 12 hours later.
‘I’m just glad the Queen didn’t see this day,’ wrote one commentator on X. ‘It would have broken her heart.’ Yet the root of Andrew’s downfall lies with the late Queen Elizabeth II – an unlikely early advocate of gentle parenting.
“Speak roughly to your little boy / And beat him when he sneezes,” exhorts the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. “He only does it to annoy / Because he knows it teases.” Would that the Queen had been in receipt of such frank counsel from her ladies-in-waiting when Andrew was in the cradle.
“The baby is adorable,” the Queen wrote to her cousin Lady Mary Cambridge, soon after his christening in 1960. “All in all, he’s going to be terribly spoiled by all of us, I’m sure.”
And indeed, the arrogant, tone-deaf oaf we know and loathe today was forged in the nursery. Conventional wisdom has it that, bar a wobble over Diana, the old Queen never put a foot wrong. But by indulging Andrew from an early age, she nurtured and shaped the sweating, bombastic buffoon that may yet bring the whole edifice crashing down.
Known as “Baby Grumpling” from an early age for his temper tantrums and bratty behavior, one imagines the young Andrew Albert Christian Edward Mountbatten-Windsor sitting on the nursery rug in his romper pulling the wings of corgis while his mother – who would babysit the child on the nanny’s day off – looked on adoringly.
He was, according to one member of palace staff quoted in Andrew Lownie’s Entitled, “a bloody nuisance.” Undisciplined by his doting mother, he ran amok, tying the laces of sentries together, hiding cutlery when footmen were setting the table, sliding downstairs on an expensive silver tray. “A tiresome little shit,” is how one childhood playmate recalls him, while contemporaries at his prep school, Heatherdown, remember him as, variously, “cocky,” not very bright and bumptious. On one occasion, after being caught stealing another boy’s collection of exotic stamps, he “simply shrugged it off.”
“Shrugging it off” aptly describes the Queen’s parenting style – if “parenting” was a “thing” in the 1960s and 1970s, which it wasn’t. But walloping children for misdemeanors certainly was. What a pity that his besotted yet distant mother never spanked the young prince. Would that she had, thereby sparing us the bizarre thought of her son’s alleged meltdown over the exile of his teddy bear collection from Royal Lodge.
The rod was spared at his public school, too, where he frequently missed the roll call at Gordonstoun, being at once a stickler for protocol and a “pompous git.” A younger female contemporary describes him in the Lownie book as “slimy… arrogant, pleased with himself.” I’m not sure where his father was throughout, but let’s not forget that Prince Philip was an appalling shagger himself: at one point his mistress was rumored to be Andrew’s future mother-in-law, Susan Barrantes.
The arrogant, tone-deaf oaf we know and loathe today was forged in the nursery
Most women will, at some point, have had the misfortune to date a man whose mother is slightly in love with him (see Nicola Peltz and Brooklyn Beckham). Not that I’m suggesting Her Majesty performed slut drops during Andrew and Fergie’s first dance. And yet, press coverage from the 1970s describing the Queen’s favorite son as “six feet of sex appeal” and comparing him to Robert Redford does conjure up an unwelcome image of the Queen in her sitting room at Windsor snipping out newspaper excerpts and pasting them proudly into a scrapbook. (I imagine she didn’t trouble with the many kiss-and-tell stories that models who encountered her son in the early 1980s sold to the tabloids.)
But it’s in more recent years that the Queen’s blind spot with Andrew saw her become a toxic enabler. In Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice: “Why sometimes I’ve believed as much as six impossible things before breakfast” – something that became a regular occurrence for Elizabeth II after the scandal involving Andrew’s good friend Jeffrey Epstein broke.
When that photo of the then prince with the then 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell was published in February 2011, Buckingham Palace lawyers issued a defamation warning. The Queen made her own blind faith in her son apparent when she appointed Andrew as a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order that same year. And after Epstein’s death in custody in July 2019, the Queen sat Andrew beside her as she was driven to church at Balmoral.
Then came the notorious Newsnight interview that November, which introduced the phrase “straightforward shooting weekend” into the lexicon and put Pizza Express in Woking on the map. The Queen responded with more dogged support for her third child. While most viewers saw Andrew condemn himself out of his own mouth, Her Majesty, apparently, had not – and made sure she was photographed riding with him at Windsor.
The Queen finally had to give way to public opinion after Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction for child sex trafficking in June 2022 and removed Andrew’s military roles. But Her Majesty is thought to have contributed to the £12 million settlement Andrew paid to Virginia Giuffre to settle her civil claim – a woman he still maintains he has never met – stumping up £2 million for a “substantial donation” to a charity.
And here I am castigating a much-loved woman for her foolishness, laying into the late grandmother of the British nation for enabling her monstrous, entitled son to believe that the rules governing the “little people” did not apply to him. But this is increasingly the way public opinion is moving. “I’m a Royalist, but… the Queen allowed this to happen,” says one of my neighbors in Norfolk, England. Another chips in that he “doesn’t want Randy Andy living in the same county as my granddaughters.”
There’s no dignified way out of this for Andrew, no tidy, convenient Lewis Carroll ending where he wakes up to find it was all a dream. What would the Queen have made of this latest installment in this sordid saga? Her Majesty might have gained some comfort from the fact her darling Andrew wasn’t alone yesterday, on his 66th birthday. For as Evelyn Waugh observed, anyone who has been to a British public school will always feel comparatively at home in jail.
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