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”. It’s boring being a spare – no wonder they want to party.īut 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).Īnother big difference between Andrew and spares of yore is who he hangs out with.
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”.Īnd 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. (For the record, Andrew and Courtney did not party.
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. 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. After all, this is a man who has spent his entire life ignoring signs. 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.īut will he take this sign? I think it’s fair to say he will not. 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. Because what you really are is the gift to republicans that keeps on giving. 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. 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. 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. But I think we can all agree that if God wanted us to have a royal family, he would not have invented Prince Andrew.
I am not, I must confess, a religious lady.