It was always going to come to this. Prince Andrew’s American lawyer’s statement in New York this afternoon announcing the agreed settlement with Virginia Giuffre sets the seal on the prince’s humiliation over his association with the convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein and his friend, the woman who procured girls for him, Ghislaine Maxwell.
It has cost the prince his much-prized royal position on palace balconies, his perks – all those helicopter flights to golf matches at public expense, all those private flights across the world to shake hands with sheikhs – and all his military ranks, titles and honorifics. No more 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 Army Logistic Regiment and the Princess Louise Fusiliers of Canada. All gone. Strangely, he remains a vice-admiral, but the full admiral title will now for ever elude him. He may be a duke, but he is no longer an HRH. The retreat is complete.
Perhaps the mystery is why it has taken so long. But Andrew has always been cloth-eared about public opinion. The tales of his private boorishness are common, but his insouciance and disdain for what others thought, most obviously on display in his disastrous television interview with Emily Maitlis in November 2019 – which he characteristically thought he’d handled rather well – meant that he has been slow to wake up not only to what was happening to his own reputation, but to its disastrous effect on the monarchy itself. No wonder they’ve cut him off and he’s left dependent at the age of 61 on Mummy’s largesse. She’ll be doubtless paying for the settlement too.
It was perhaps unwise to rely on famously aggressive lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic too, but who knows the extent to which he followed their advice. Perhaps they were cowed by his princely majesty, though that seems a trifle unlikely given their hard-faced New York reputation. Only yesterday they were demanding the original of the photograph of Andrew with his arm around the teenaged Giuffre’s waist while Maxwell grinned wolfishly in the background, so that they could apparently test its authenticity. Now, fortunately, Andrew will not have his day in court. He’s run out of road.
Someone must finally have seen sense. Prince Andrew – for all his denials, and with no admission of liability – was nevertheless bunkered. He was never going to win. And now his stupidity and arrogance have cost him almost everything he values.
His mother could have told him that a sense of duty and public service – the monarchy’s not-so secret weapon – has kept the family publicly respected and on the throne for generations. She has a jubilee year to mark, which may still be blighted by his very public disgrace, but perhaps now less so. For him, the future will be anything but celebratory. A stain on his reputation, and that of the institution. A stain that may never go away.
• Stephen Bates is an author and former religious affairs and royal correspondent of the Guardian
