30.10.2025
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Not just one rotten apple
Disgraced Prince Andrew’s antics are bad enough - the real scandal is the continued existence of the monarchy. Roll on the red republic, says Paul Demarty
There is a long-running, good-natured dispute at Weekly Worker towers, between myself and Jack Conrad, about the intellectual seriousness of the present king.
For my part, I find that Charles Windsor is a well-read individual, who has thereby come to a genuinely distinctive worldview: a high-Tory, patrician ruralism, inflected by eastern orthodox Christianity and particular reactionary currents of the green movement. He is the only British monarch, in the last two centuries or so at least, who one could realistically imagine writing a manifesto - or having one ghostwritten. (For the full effect, I think, it would have to be mimeographed, from a handwritten manuscript in that famously spidery script of his.) Jack disagrees, and finds him a bore.
It is difficult to imagine any such dispute arising over the faculties of his younger brother, Andrew, however. There is the old joke: what do you call the useless lump of fat at the end of the penis? A man. It was never truer of anyone but Andrew, a perfect singularity of insatiable priapism: as a young man he was so remorseless in his habit of bonking his way from one end of high society to the other that he obtained the enduring soubriquet, ‘Randy Andy’. His penis has been getting him into trouble ever since.
The steady leak of information about the life and times of Jeffrey Epstein - the notorious New York money-man and paedophile - continues to make trouble for Andy, who was an associate of Epstein’s and (we learn now) continued to back him in private communications even after Epstein’s initial conviction for child sex trafficking in 2011. The latest revelations flatly contradict Andrew’s own assurances in previous eruptions of this scandal, so there is now another one.
Pleasant life
Andrew has already partially renounced his royal titles and privileges, presumably under pressure from Buckingham Palace. I say ‘partially’ since these still belong to him by law, and nobody except parliament can take them from him in this fundamental sense. As a gesture to the good name of the British monarchy, he merely declines ever to use them.
Yet, despite his ruined reputation, he continues to live an exceptionally privileged life. Foremost among the privileges at issue today is his occupancy of Royal Lodge, a substantial pile in Windsor, on which he pays no rent in return for financing the upkeep himself (his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, lives there too). There is some scuttlebutt that he has been failing on his end of the bargain, dark chatter in the royal journalism lobby about black mould; nonetheless he has ploughed a lot of his ‘own’ money into the house, which in turn begs the question: What money? Where has it come from?
If one has on one’s hands a royal of such stupendously narrow interests, there is only one thing for it: make him a trade envoy. Such was the decision of the Tony Blair-Gordon Brown Labour government in the 2000s, and indeed Andrew took to the job like a duck to water - in essence, putting on a sociable face in crowds of equally vulgar plutocrats. He was already, by that point, pally with Epstein, whose rather enigmatic professional life was very dependent on cultivating relationships with the great and the good - relationships alleged to have involved procuring young sexual partners for these friends. A British prince was a good addition to any such stable of international influencers.
Little is known for sure about the sources of Andrew’s ‘private’ income, but it cannot seriously be doubted that much of it comes from the transactional relationships formed on this circuit. The millions spent on repairs to Royal Lodge, and the acquisition of many other grand houses here and there, could not have been covered by the generous stipends handed out by the crown, though particular gifts may still be a factor (the late Elizabeth II was known to be especially fond of her second son).
Apart from that, there is merely the generosity of his various friends, which include Kazakh dictators, Libyan gun-runners and Turkish fraudsters. Some payments are on record, others are merely conjectured; and the government has (probably illegally) stonewalled freedom of information requests concerning his financial arrangements.
While the endless Epstein saga has had some deleterious effects - spreading an ultimately crude view of the nature of power in modern society as essentially a matter of paedophile cabals - it is all to the good that it is, at least, shining a light on the matter of the royal family’s finances. The government is keen to avoid parliamentary scrutiny, but the stink of Epstein makes it difficult. If this is not the occasion for it, then what is? What would a member of the royal family have to do to provoke the other arms of the state to take an interest?
Corruption
The focus on Andrew as an individual, in any case, makes it all too easy for the wider establishment. The story becomes one of an individual’s moral and perhaps financial corruption, and so quite fervent monarchists feel free to join in, on the theory that keeping the grand old oak tree of the royal family in good health entails, from time to time, pruning the odd rotten branch. Andrew is an obvious candidate, as is, retrospectively, Edward VIII, who threw the whole institution into crisis by way of his abdication, and continued to be a source of embarrassment through his Nazi sympathies.
Yet it is the whole point of hereditary monarchy that there is no choice in the matter: the crown flows down the patrilineal succession, the other top titles get shuffled around, and the whole thing is left to chance. (GK Chesterton quipped that monarchy is the most democratic form of government, since it is the only one in which a complete imbecile can end up in charge.) The tree bears rotten fruit. No wayward royal of recent years, after all, can compete with the Normans, who united the English crown - essentially a tribe of Viking slavers who settled in France and adopted a few local customs - for venality, or with the Tudors for violent tyrannical pride.
The monarchy today is wholly integrated with the wider system of capitalist power and culture, albeit not wholly without friction. Much of their property is held privately and exploited in just the same ways that a regular capitalist landlord would. The role of the monarch in public life does not entail that we poor oiks have any right to know about it: we should be grateful that we have the opportunity to enrich these curious people further with generous subsidies.
The recent history of the institution, in particular under Elizabeth II, is one of attempts to shape that public role. After World War II, as a piece of nation-building pablum, the decision was made to make more use of the royal family, and indeed to make use of more of the royal family. The focus remained on the monarch herself, but roles in the spotlight were found for her close relatives. The royals were sold as a family: rich and powerful, but ‘just like us’.
That had the effect of making celebrities out of them in the modern sense, however, and, with the rise of the tabloid media to pre-eminence, tended to produce destabilising scandals. The collapse of Charles’s marriage to Diana Spencer in 1992 was played out as a soap opera, and Diana’s death in 1997 became a mass-formation psychosis event.
Perhaps mindful of this weakness, and also the vulnerability of the Firm to matters arising from Andrew’s murky affairs, Charles attempted to move to a leaner operation when he finally took the throne in 2022. He, Camilla, heir William and daughter-in-law Kate would form this smaller circle. Yet that has its own risks, as became clear when Charles and Kate fell ill with cancer within months of each other. Whether thanks to this or mere poor judgment, the severing of ties with Andrew was not accomplished cleanly, and so he remains an ongoing source of further scandals.
Short circuit
As a lifelong republican, I find it difficult to divine what a stout-hearted British royalist really wants from a king nowadays (never mind a Duke of York). Periodically, at times of broad political scandal, one hears the call for the monarch to dissolve parliament (there was a lot of this during the 2009 expenses scandal), but this does not seem to reflect a serious belief that we should de-constitutionalise the monarchy and go back to personal rule. There is, today, a lot of nostalgia for Elizabeth’s extreme reserve, her commitment to carrying out her duties with icy resolve and surgical precision. Yet it was precisely that which made Diana’s death such a disaster for the Firm.
As political celebrities par excellence, the royals create a short circuit between political consciousness and national mass psychology. In so doing, they grant legitimacy to a centralised and largely unaccountable state structure. MPs, soldiers and civil servants are all officially loyal to them, and their reward is a certain amount of impunity to be exercised in the name of the crown.
In good times - for the country and the Firm - this is a virtuous circle, so far as the ruling class is concerned. In bad times, as we said, it can be destabilising - and today we are in bad times. There is a widespread formless anxiety about the perfidy of elites in general that can take on left or rightwing forms, and presently the rightwing form predominates. Andrew’s crime in this view is to be just like the rest of ‘them’ - the vaguely defined elite - a rich pervert who gets away with everything. He joins the list of people supposed to be protected from the consequences of their actions, including immigrant criminals, corrupt politicians and unsackable civil servants.
On the socialist left, we have no need for such peculiar ideological alchemy as is performed by the monarchy, nor do we seek any underhand methods for arbitrary rule. Indeed, the presence of such instruments directly contradicts our interests, by further disempowering the broad masses. It is all very well to pile in on poor Andrew - but what about Charles, and the line of people due to succeed him? The abolition of the monarchy is not a task for some far-off future, but something we need to prepare people for now.