Viva la República?

As a lifelong advocate of my home country, Britain, becoming a republic, there’s a mixture of relief and disgust at the stunning arrest of the erstwhile Prince Andrew, not to mention amazement at how the world is watching the drama so closely.

The relief is born out of seeing Britain finally look at its monarchy in the eye, warts and all, sensing in Andrew’s ashen face after his arrest and bail the shock of being treated like just anyone else, instead of demanding (as he famously did) that we all touch forelock with time-honoured reverence. By the way, I recall hearing from a colleague who covered the royal family that Andrew insisted fellow officers salute him in his car (yes, salute his car) during his military days. No more need be said about the arrogance of the man.

The disgust lies in how long it has taken for this seismic shift in the age-old relationship between the plebs and the monarchy – and how cannily the royal household has worked to ensure this day of comeuppance never came. For years, as a journalist working for Britain’s most-watched TV news station, I would gasp at the way the mainstream media – and hence the public – were fed a constant diet of stories that suggested the royals were doing so much for us all by cutting a ribbon, hosting a banquet, deigning to walk an occasional rope line and talk to us.

There were exceptions, of course. I worked with Princess Anne on a couple of occasions, when she was head of the Save the Children NGO and I was a correspondent covering famines in Uganda and Ethiopia. She was committed to the cause, seeking advice, raising questions about how her organisation might do its job more effectively, while being disarmingly normal in the give-and-take of ideas. Years later, while in Moscow, she visited the Russian capital and she was refreshingly still true to herself.

Yet consider the way Charles and Diana separated, trashing each other in the media, using material collected by security guards employed by the taxpayers. Think of Prince Philip driving on the wrong side of the road, crashing and injuring others, never even spoken to by the police. Don’t even get me started on Andrew and wife Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, with the images of him and Virginia Giuffre, let alone Fergie cavorting with an US lover, their two small children at her side. All of this, lest we forget, subsidised by the plebs.

The questions abound and it’s so revealing to glimpse the front pages now of the British tabloids, for so long so loyal to the notion of the untouchable monarchy. My favourite was The Daily Mail, which has peddled royal mistruths and propaganda virtually all my life. “The royal mugshot,” was their headline the morning after, honing in on the image of the man’s ghostly appearance as he left custody. “How Andrew was treated like a common criminal.” They were at pains to stress how he was photographed, fingerprinted and had DNA swabs taken.

We now enter the land of the unknown. Maybe there will be a criminal case against Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Maybe the King will be obliged to watch as the Crown takes his brother to court. The monarch himself is insisting: “The law must take its course.”

But how long will it be before the dock of public opinion begins to ask the questions that lie behind this tumultuous moment for the old country. Did Charles help Andrew, financially and otherwise, spend those years in such abject denial of his relationship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein’s sex slaves? 

Did the Queen, a figure so revered in my country for so long, help her errant son to cover up his disgraceful lifestyle – we are told that Her Majesty allegedly helped Andrew with millions to finance his settlement with Virginia Giuffre, before her suicide? Think about it. The Queen allegedly bailed out the lad and he’s now investigated for betraying his country by passing on classified material to the man who provided him with underage girls.

Will the monarchy survive? Much as the bevy of royal-watchers now raise that question, my own instinct is yes, the family will come through this. But the King is in frail health, son William is to inherit the role and control of an institution so seriously damaged. And the next generation of Brits, unlike mine, clearly wonders why. Why the monarchy? What is the point? And who pays for it? 

For the first time, you can think the unthinkable and wonder whether the clock is ticking on the House of Windsor.