<\/p>\n
O<\/span>n his 66th birthday, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor faced total humiliation<\/a> when police cars drew up at his Norfolk bolthole. This wasn\u2019t the security cavalcade he has been accustomed to since childhood: instead, the officers had come to issue an arrest warrant and search his property.<\/p>\n The stern and swift reaction<\/a> from his brother, King Charles, was that justice must take its course. All assistance would be made available to allow for a \u201cfull, fair and proper process\u201d to be carried out.<\/p>\n That in itself is remarkable. In both tone and gravitas, the palace quickly aligned with Keir Starmer\u2019s assertion<\/a> that \u201cno one is above the law\u201d and that legal protocol \u201chas to apply in this case in the same way it would in any other case\u201d. The translation is that there should be no divergence in how parliament and the monarchy handle the former prince.<\/p>\n The royal family is often on the ropes. The clash between the demands of the public role and an internal culture that prefers intense privacy has led to implosions, notably the tensions that followed the death of Diana. But it is also an institution built for survival \u2013 and one in which the heavy head that wears the crown is the principal figure to be defended. This, in turn, has produced a rapid professionalisation of \u201ccomms\u201d and advice streams across both Charles\u2019s and William\u2019s operations.<\/p>\n But the unwinding of the story of a giddy prince, now re-established as a royal outcast and potentially facing charges<\/a> relating to the grave abuse of public office in his financial networking with the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, does cause new (and still unpredictable) difficulties in the fraught relationship between the palace and the public.<\/p>\n The problem is that today\u2019s arrest will inexorably lead to the next level of inquiry about the sordid allegations that the then Prince Andrew was reliant on Epstein in a trade of favours \u2013 from sharing market-sensitive information on British banks and companies to Epstein\u2019s provision of sexual partners, after the prince\u2019s divorce from Sarah Ferguson in 1996.<\/p>\n Factually, the most damaging allegations remain those that were made by the late Virginia Giuffre<\/a> \u2013 one of the women who, as teenagers, were groomed for sex and trafficked by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell \u2013 who took her own life in April last year after a gradual collapse in her mental health.<\/p>\n Mountbatten-Windsor has issued multiple denials over allegations that he had sexual encounters with Giuffre. He settled out of court with her<\/a> in a civil claim, alleged to have cost several million, but he did not admit liability: he argued that this settlement had been demanded of him by the late Queen and her key advisers in a clumsy attempt to clear up the matter in his mother\u2019s later years. The funds, around \u00a312m,<\/a> were reportedly provided as a \u201cloan\u201d to the then prince.<\/p>\n Some very awkward questions remain for today\u2019s royals, even as they have issued statements remembering Epstein\u2019s victims. One suspects that the \u201clessons learnt\u201d period will shortly be upon us. The family has started to talk more (albeit belatedly) about the impact on the real victims of all this \u2013 countless abused girls and women. Queen Camilla has a long history of working to end violence against women and girls, and has spoken candidly<\/a> about her own and her friends\u2019 experience of abuse in an effort to raise awareness of a dark and often hidden subject.<\/p>\n The professionalisation of the royal family\u2019s communications is another reason why the information disseminated to trusted sources, and the tone of these statements, changed so sharply once the scale of the revelations contained in the Epstein files became clear. <\/p>\n The mood has shifted from painting Mountbatten-Windsor simply as a \u201cdifficult brother\u201d whose health is fragile and who requires protection as part of a code of loyalty in the inner family. When senior courtiers now allow it to be understood that the King \u2013 and Prince William \u2013 have tried unsuccessfully to advise the former prince on wiser courses of action, from the disastrous Emily Maitlis interview<\/a> onwards, the message is clear. No more so than when he was sent to Norfolk, avoiding the association of Windsor with any arrest scene.<\/p>\n I suspect that Mountbatten-Windsor is now the figure on whom the palace believes any public reckoning, and subsequent disgrace, will fall. A \u201cwicked uncle\u201d figure, in royal history down the centuries, has often caused public embarrassment but never inflicted fatal damage on the central royal brand. And many ordinary families know what it is to have a foolish, wanton or downright repulsive relative \u2013 and have faced the problem of knowing when to cut them off<\/a>.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, by delivering a guarantee \u2013 unusually quickly by palace standards \u2013 that the King is determined that the monarchy play its constitutional role as the \u201cfountain of justice\u201d on which the law and due process rests, despite his personal sorrow at the development, he has also made clear that his brother\u2019s actions are now a matter for the police and the courts, with no special protection due to him by dint of birth.<\/p>\n However bad the details might be that emerge from the Pandora\u2019s box of misdoings, placing the former prince in the category of outcast will insulate the King \u2013 and his heirs \u2013 from the fallout and allow the succession and reinvention of the crown to continue. That, at any rate, is the calculation. So, at least according to the theory, the damage control has been minutely planned.<\/p>\n