🔗 Share this article

This episode commenced with a isolated photograph, possibly the most consequential ever captured of a individual from the royal household.

In the frame appeared the Earl of Inverness, with his arm around a female youth, while another individual grinned suggestively in the rear.

Without that photograph, shot at a party in 2001, it would have been difficult to accept the assertions of a young woman who stated she was moved across the sea and compelled to have cursory sexual encounters with a individual of the monarchy?

A curious, indicative action by someone who had openly claimed to have not known about her, claimed he could no have had intimate contact with her, and yet paid millions of family resources to settle a long-delayed court action.

A Long Period of Disgrace

In this context, discussions of the royal family acting firmly to cut Andrew off are wide of the mark. This scandal has endured for the majority of 15 years since that image, and an additional image of Andrew walking amiably with a convicted sex offender surfaced.

• Self-importance: How long did his siblings, perhaps even his relatives, realize that Andrew was so self-entitled?
• Questionable Associations: They must have understood, if his aides and the authorities were performing their duties, that he had some highly questionable associates given he openly hosted them to royal residences.
• Financial Extravagance: If the household did not know about his intimate behaviors, they certainly knew about his overspending with public money.

Trips were printed in royal annual reports: helicopter travel from the estate to a golf course and back again in time for midday meal, private flights instead of commercial flights, all for the convenience of "Airmiles Andy".

Existence of Entitlement

Then there was the entitlement which demanded subservience when he entered a space or the extreme consciousness about his honorifics used on his letterheads in messages to his personal acquaintances.

He could get away with it while his matriarch, who strangely pampered him, was still surviving. The monarch did at least remove him of public duties and military positions in the aftermath of his ill-fated and, it is now clear, untruthful public statement six years ago.

Recent Developments

Merely in the last 14 days that events sped up, following the issuance of accounts giving more troubling information of his conduct and that of his companions.

Further disclosures have again exposed Andrew's thinking that he could avoid lying about his contact with a convicted criminal.

The public (and the journalists) were far ahead of the royals. There was nobody of any significance to speak up for him, a outcome of all those years of hubris.

Royal Worries

The wiser royals realized that. The key objective is to hand down the monarchy, if not as previously at least complete and unblemished.

Over time the last 190 years trying to reverse the legacy of past sovereigns, proving they are valuable, accountable and reactive to their citizens.

His actions endangered all that in peril in an age when submission and discretion is no longer enough.

Consequences

Finally, the well-known indecisive king was prodded further. There was no alternative. The institution had surrendered command of the story.

Presently the stripping of honorifics and the continued and permanent social disgrace that will pain Andrew most deeply.

• Demotion: Lowered to just a commoner
• Historical Precedent: The first member to lose his designations in modern times
• Military Service: Notably painful given his service in the conflict

He is still a constitutional officer, theoretically able to act for the monarch, and he is still in the lineage to the monarchy, but not any of these will truly happen.

Coming Developments

Do individuals he meets still defer to him? Might they still forget themselves and call him Your Highness? Would they say Mr,

Naturally, he is not withdrawing to a common area, but to the sovereign's large grounds at a monarchical property.

There, he will be furnished by the sovereign with one of the estate properties and given some form of private allowance.

This differs from his former home, where he paid a token lease for more than 20 years, and the county is a bit distant, but even so it may not be sufficiently removed.

Unresolved Issues

The situation continues. There are still files in the possession of US Congress to be made public.

• Governmental Scrutiny: Could legislators demand more
• Monetary Probe: Or scrutinize the waste of state resources
• Criminal Investigation: There may even be a police investigation into his actions

Possibly for the present the harm to the monarchy to the institution is contained. The message from the royal household was clearly that the stripping of designations was what the monarch, and particularly other senior family members, wanted.

Altered Approach

An end to illusion that Andrew was doing it voluntarily. And, remarkably, the short announcement showed evidently that the royals were siding with the accuser's version of occurrences.

Even more, for the first time they eventually showed regard for the affected individuals: "The censures are considered essential, regardless of the truth that he persists in refuting the allegations against him."

Finally it is presumption, selfishness and indolence that will undermine the monarchy. In his folly, personal excess and greed, Andrew appears never to have learned that reality.