I am not, I must confess, a religious lady. But I think we can all agree that if God wanted us to have a royal family, he would not have invented Prince Andrew. Oh Andrew, dear Andrew – you come with many names: Prince Andrew Albert Christian Edward, Duke of York, Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Personal Aide de Camp, Lord of the Rings, Leader of the Order of the Phoenix, Saruman the White, and Knight Who Says Ni.

Some might say that all these titles merely act as jazz-hands obfuscation for the fact that you don’t actually do anything, but you know and I know that is simply not true. Because you, actually, have been working tirelessly pretty much your entire life to fulfil the function you were born into, and you have been doing it, if you don’t mind a little bowing and scraping, your most royal highness, brilliantly. Because what you really are is the gift to republicans that keeps on giving.

Whatever Andrew did or didn’t do with Virginia Roberts, the young woman who claims she had sex when she was a minor with Andrew (sorry, I appreciate this goes against media convention but I simply cannot refer to him as “the prince”; Andrew is nothing like the prince I was promised in Disney cartoons) is, for our purposes today, beside the point.

Life tip to Andrew: when you find yourself having to make a statement that you did not commit statutory rape while hanging out with your sex offender mate, it’s a sign you need to take a cold, hard look at your life.

But will he take this sign? I think it’s fair to say he will not. After all, this is a man who has spent his entire life ignoring signs. Leaving aside, for the moment, his various dates with despots, dodgy billionaires and other assorted villains from a James Bond movie, I can’t help but feel that the most telling detail about dear Andrew is his friendship with Courtney Love. Yes, that Courtney Love. One really is spoilt for choice when it comes to looking for embarrassing anecdotes about Andrew, but I think the story of him turning up to Courtney Love’s house in the middle of the night “looking to party”, as recounted in Love’s 2006 book Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love, is the clue to this man’s Rosebud. (For the record, Andrew and Courtney did not party. They had a cup of tea instead.)

Poor old Andrew doesn’t mean to hang out with some of the most morally dubious people on this planet – from Muammar Gaddafi to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – he just wants to find the party! This is a notably common problem suffered by many royal spares, such as Princess Margaret and her ridiculous circle of flatterers and sycophants in the Caribbean island of Mustique – where, according to Colin Tennant’s book about the late princess, parties would be thrown where “local boys would be persuaded to oil their bodies and wear nothing but gold tinsel cloaks and codpieces made from gold coconut shells”.

And then there’s Harry, dear Harry, who proved his spare credentials par excellence when he was photographed bare-ass naked playing “strip billiards” in Vegas. It’s boring being a spare – no wonder they want to party.

But whereas Margaret was always at the centre of the party, poor old Andrew has to go chasing after it, flying around the world at a massive cost to taxpayers, just looking for someone to party with him (or, in the case of the Kazakh billionaire Timur Kulibayev, someone to hand him huge amounts of money to purchase the Yorks’ former homestead, Sunninghill Park or Southyork).

Another big difference between Andrew and spares of yore is who he hangs out with. Sure, Margaret’s circle was pretty terrible – author Caroline Blackwood recalled one party where Margaret insisted on singing Cole Porter songs, which she did, terribly, and yet her friends “shouted and roared and asked for more”. Margaret might well still be singing today, had it not been for Francis Bacon, who stood at the back of the room and loudly booed Margaret until she fled the floor in tears. But she didn’t go out of her way to hang out with people who can justly be described as evil – crashing bores and snobs, to be sure, but not, you know, Colonel Gaddafi’s family.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal is the perfect case in point . In Andrew’s sad, petty, narrow little mind, he equates extreme wealth with excitement and fun, just as many of these billionaires see Andrew’s royal status as proof he is interesting. It’s hard to know which party here is more deluded. Whereas wealthy people want to live like royalty – decking out their stately homes with faux thrones and family heraldic emblems – the royals want to live like the wealthy.

Epstein was wealthy, phenomenally so, and this gave him access to people such as Bill Clinton (Epstein reportedly had 21 different phone numbers for the former US president in his notorious little black book) and sway, perhaps, with editors such as Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter. Carter is said to have removed unflattering references to Epstein from a 2002 Vanity Fair profile of him . Andrew is not alone in being dumb enough to follow the money, but he is almost unique in being so stupid as to be photographed in public with Epstein after his conviction for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution.

Few serve as a greater riposte to Darwinism than the existence of the second generation of royals: Charles and his blundering attempts to meddle and muzzle; Edward, who I strongly suspect cannot tie his own shoelaces; and, most of all, Andrew. How any of these little dopey goslings will endure when they are no longer sheltered under the protective umbrella of the much-loved mother’s reign, I cannot possibly fathom. But I do know this: Andrew deserves all the titles he has. For services to republicanism, few have done better.





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