It seems like a lifetime away, but it was less than three years – March 29, 2022. Prince Philip’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey.
A nation had gathered to give thanks for the life of a man who had served this country for decades, both as a naval officer and as the monarch’s consort.
And we all waited for the appearance of that monarch to join the huge crowd in the Abbey. The door at Poet’s Corner opened, and Queen Elizabeth entered, a frail old lady, who could not walk without some assistance.
Whose arm was she holding, at this symbolic moment of her reign? Not Prince Charles or Princess Anne, her two elder children. She chose to enter the Abbey on the arm of her third child, Andrew. There was quite understandable outrage.
This was a man so bone-headed, so conceited and morally thick, as to appear on Newsnight three years before and deny that he had any recollection of meeting Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, even though we had all seen the photograph of Andrew with Giuffre at the London house of Ghislaine Maxwell (it has now been authenticated by the Epstein papers).
A man so boorish and untroubled by public sensibility that, as The Mail on Sunday revealed yesterday, he allowed Jeffrey Epstein to bring a ‘very cute’ young Romanian model to a private dinner at Buckingham Palace, along with a Russian model and two other girls.
Thames Valley Police, meanwhile, have said they will review an allegation that Epstein sent a woman to have sex with Andrew at another royal residence, Royal Lodge, his former 30-room home in Windsor.
There was understandable outrage when Andrew, instead of one of his two older siblings, escorted his frail mother into Westminster Abbey for Prince Philip’s memorial service
He denies any wrongdoing, as we have become tired of hearing. But the relentless tide of squalid stories about his behaviour in royal mansions and palaces is becoming more and more degrading and shocking.
In the circumstances, the silence from senior royals is appalling. There is no excuse for it.
They should apologise to the country for Andrew’s behaviour as well as to Epstein’s victims.
Prince Edward’s grudging attempt to do so last week at a conference in Dubai in which he said, ‘I think it’s really important to remember the victims’, was not anything like enough.
These are perilous times for the monarchy. They may have taken away Andrew’s titles and his grand Windsor home, but more is needed to overcome the public’s revulsion.
The King’s and Prince William’s reluctance to address the issue, however, follows the pattern of the late Queen, who always let off her favourite, turning a blind eye to his excesses in the face of gruesome evidence.
Queen Elizabeth II was in Balmoral when Epstein turned up with models on his arm for Andrew at Buckingham Palace. And yet courtiers would have known what was going on in her home. She could have insisted on being informed but does not seem to have been keen to find out.
She went on to help pay Andrew’s £12million settlement in the civil case Giuffre brought against him, accusing him of sexually abusing her when she was 17 (which he denies). It was effectively hush money that prevented embarrassing revelations emerging in court during Her Majesty’s Jubilee Year.
This was a man so bone-headed, so conceited and morally thick, as to appear on Newsnight and deny that he had any recollection of meeting Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, even though we had all seen the photo of them at the London house of Ghislaine Maxwell
The appearance in the Abbey with Andrew had been a dreadful misjudgment, but the payment to Mrs Giuffre was worse – for it appeared to involve Andrew’s family in the sleazy business of cover-up.
As it happens it also had tragic consequences, with Mrs Giuffre committing suicide and her family all quarrelling over the sum. But apart from anything else, the payment made no sense – if he had not even met her, as he claimed, why would Andrew have wanted to give her such a colossal amount?
The truth is that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is his mother’s tragedy. He is her tragic flaw.
No reasonable person would question that Elizabeth II was a role model of how to be a head of state and, above all, a constitutional monarch.
When she died, world leaders of every political complexion were united in awe-struck admiration for a person who for 70 years had been at her country’s helm.
And during an historical era of quite spectacular change, she had been both wonderfully well-adapted to change, while at the same time remaining quietly, sensibly, unchangeable.
Yet, as the sordid story of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor unfolds, it is impossible to ignore the part she played in his story.
No one who observed the Royal Family over the years could fail to notice that although she had many, many virtues, the Queen was not a very warm mother to Prince Charles, for instance.
When little Charles was three, and the Queen had been away abroad for five weeks, he was waiting to be greeted by his mother on her return, and she just gave him a formal handshake, as if he were Lord Chamberlain or the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Eugenie and Beatrice were pulled into the paedophile’s vortex later, too, when Epstein wondered if they would show him and other guests round Buckingham Palace
Gracelessly, when he got into financial difficulties, Andrew sold it for £15million. Though it had been on the market for five years, with no one wanting this eyesore, it was somehow sold to the son-in-law of the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, whom Andrew had met when he was this country’s ‘trade envoy’.
Of course, we now know this was only one detail in a whole catalogue of sordid and dodgy actions by Andrew and his hellish ex-wife.
There is the fact that Fergie, with her begging-bowl, took their two daughters, Eugenie and Beatrice, to see Epstein just days after he had been released from prison for serious offences relating to forcing an under-age girl to have sex.
Eugenie and Beatrice were pulled into the paedophile’s vortex later, too, when Epstein wondered if they would show him and other guests round Buckingham Palace.
No one is suggesting that Queen Elizabeth II condoned these ridiculously inappropriate guests to the Palace. But she gave birth to Andrew, and the way in which she brought him up is a contributory factor in the whole sorry story.
As a naval wife, I am afraid, she took the attitude that ‘boys will be boys’. She spent the first two years of her marriage living in Malta with Prince Philip and the convention at that time, among many naval wives, was that they should turn a blind eye to what men got up to when their ship docked in foreign ports.
Andrew was a successful naval officer, and his mother probably decided that this was simply something which men did.
We are paying the price for her indulgence of him. We must not undervalue the late Queen’s memory, nor count her great achievements as a monarch for nothing.
But one of the disturbing things about the Andrew and Epstein saga is that it taints the whole of the monarchy.
And the late monarch herself, pen poised over a cheque-book, must bear some responsibility for that.
