Punish Prince Andrew? We don’t elect the royal family.

Reading an excerpt from Virginia Giuffre’s tragic memoir in The Guardian these days, I was struck again by the fate of each of the people in that infamous photograph taken in Gillian Maxwell’s house in London.

The teenager in the center of the photo is dead – she took her own life on a remote Australian country estate earlier this year, unable to escape her trauma. The person who took the photo is also dead – she killed herself in a New York prison, awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The smiling woman in the background is in prison, extolling Donald Trump’s impeccable chastity in the hope of being transferred to a better prison, or even pardoned. And the smiling slob with his arm around the teenager with whom he claims he did not have sex that night – lives in a 30-room mansion on a 98-acre estate (which, supposedly, not even his brother, the king, knows how to pay for), jokes at family funerals and somehow… just waits for it all to pass, every time his new lie about the story comes out. Now, that’s the royal bonus. He’s not out of favor – his “doghouse” is actually a doghouse.

Incredibly, even as I was typing that paragraph, news broke that Andrew had met at least three times with the senior Chinese Communist Party official at the center of a botched spy case in Beijing. Recall that the Duke is already under fire for allegedly unwittingly hiring a suspected spy as his representative in China. Is there anywhere he doesn’t appear? He’s like the Forrest Gump of disastrous decisions.

Now, again, we have reached the point where so-called “royal watchers” are speculating about what can possibly be done about the endless, slow-motion disaster under the golden glow called the Duke of York – about the supposed sanctions that the royal family can supposedly still impose on him. Wait, could Andrew be stripped of his privilege of attending the annual Order of the Garter lunch? Oh no! Get kicked out of the lunch?! And he might no longer be allowed to be a royal advisor – one of the family members over the age of 21 who would, in the event of the king’s incapacity, take over his duties. That line-up currently includes Camilla, Princess Anne, William, Harry, Andrew, Prince Edward and Princess Beatrice. (Can I just say – what a sitcom line-up, I’d watch it right away.) But again: Oh no! Get his advisory role taken away?!

If you already have a royal family, and you believe they are unique and different, then I guess you have to accept them for who they are? After all, the whole system is deliberately anti-meritocracy.

All these punishments are so absurd that they seem like deliberate satires on the institution of monarchy itself. Perhaps that’s how it should be. After all, it would be good to be realistic about what it actually means to “love the royal family,” philosophically speaking.

But let’s get back to that later, because there are still plenty of Andrew denials ahead, and even more that aren’t. We know that the Duke remained friends with Jeffrey Epstein after he was jailed for pimping a minor for sex. We also know that Andrew, after Epstein’s release, flew to New York to spend time with this sex offender of the highest order. We know that everyone else knew that he was a sex offender of the highest order, because when the two were photographed walking in Central Park, the celebrity.land ran the photo on its front page with a caption that even Andrew could understand: “PRINCIPENT AND PERVERT.”

We know that several years passed and that Epstein’s unfortunate suicide had to happen before Andrew gave an interview in which he stated that the paparazzi photo and the four-day stay at his house were the last time he ever saw the man.

And now we know he’s still lying about it, after an email Andrew sent Epstein, dated well after the event, around the time the aforementioned photo of him holding his arm around Giuffre was released, surfaced. “I’m worried about you too!” Andrew wrote. “Don’t worry about me! Looks like we’re in this together” – well, you said it yourself – “and we’re going to have to rise above it.” Well… that didn’t quite work out for you. “Anyway, let’s keep in touch,” Andy concluded, “and we’ll be playing again soon!!!!” Signed: “Ah, HRH The Duke of York, KG.” Probably the silliest email signature in the world, even if you count that LinkedIn crew with titles like “Founder/Futurist/Father.”

Today, however, we end by confronting a big philosophical question. If you already have a royal family, and you believe they are unique and different, then you must accept them as they are, I suppose? After all, the whole system is deliberately anti-meritocracy. If you start applying semi-managerial ideas about hiring and firing, it all starts to sound like any other small business. And who cares? Britain is full of small businesses, despite the efforts of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the royal family is supposed to be something different and special.

Besides, business is probably the one thing that – we all know – these high-ranking members of the court have absolutely no substantive knowledge about. This “reduced royal family” that we keep hearing about from Charles and William’s courtiers really does sound like a task from the fourth week of The Apprentice.

Could Andrew pack himself into a black taxi, with a rolling suitcase, to declare to the cameras that King Sugar made a huge mistake in firing him? In the practical and philosophical sense of the monarchy, it is not at all clear that this would be possible. And yet it is quite clear that there could be all sorts of more unpleasant revelations in a number of areas. Lots of known unknowns – and lots of those unknown unknowns. Quite an awkward situation for Charles and William. However deserved it may be, I suspect some of them fear that kicking Andrew out of the tent could be a slippery slope towards no tent at all.

Translation: A.Š.

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