As Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the citizen formerly known as Prince, slouched in a vain, half-hearted attempt to avoid being photographed following his arrest, it was not just the remaining dignity of this odious symbol of privilege and aristocracy which disappeared, but any lasting justification for the lavish titles and admiration which are bestowed upon the so-called Royal Family. Predictably, the British establishment and its media sycophants (“kick Andrew out on the streets, what happens?”) rushed to defend the Family’s complicity in his corruption, in an attempt to prevent any chance that the people may indeed come to realise that their role in our society is not to its benefit. But, perhaps, if several hundreds years too late, the people are finally learning to see the Family for the profoundly sad, self-serving institution of generational wealth that it is, even if they are not yet ready to connect the dots and come to the inevitable conclusion of this realisation.
Let us not shy away from divulging the actions of this ugly caricature of excess who believed that he could abuse people and revel in his own pleasure, with no regard whatsoever for the trafficked young women and girls that Jeffrey Epstein supplied to him as if they were merely smuggled Cuban cigars. Not a latecomer by any means to sleaze and sexual depravity, Mountbatten-Windsor was nicknamed ‘Randy Andy’ and labelled a ‘professional playboy’ when he was barely an adult in 1978, before being shipped off to the Navy in the hope it would make him realise the importance of serving the people his Family rules over. There have been three known women of legal age in his life since then: Koo Stark, Sarah Ferguson, and Lady Hervey. All three have been rolled out by the Family at various points of Andrew’s downfall to provide him with a degree of credibility, no doubt aided by the immense wealth (and, in the case of Ferguson, the mother of his children, more housing than in anyone’s wildest dreams) that they provide each of his ex-lovers with.
Such is the influence and power of the Family, that everyone who enters from outside of it becomes disgraced, either through the Faustian bargain in which they trade their morals for a stake in the privilege or, for those unwilling to do so, relentless briefings until they are dead (Lady Spencer) or unwelcome in the country (Meghan Markle). One of the arguments made by proponents of the British monarchy was that it exists in a separate realm to politics. This was both a fundamental misunderstanding of the innately political nature of diplomacy and the Family’s obsession with the maintenance of every single inch of power it continues to possess. Five years after the finalising of Mountbatten-Windsor’s divorce to Ferguson and three years after he began to play with Epstein, he was ‘appointed’ (not that it would have been constitutionally possible to reject his candidacy) as the successor to Prince Edward as the Special Representative for International Trade and Investment.
The Parallel Lives of Mountbatten-Windsor
It is here where Mountbatten-Windsor’s parallel lives began: in his public life working on behalf of Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, President Ben Ali of Tunisia, President Aliyev of Azerbaijan, King Fahd and Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, and a long list of monarchies and dictatorships the Family has maintained close relations with; in his private life raping the 17 year old Guiffre as documented in her posthumous memoirs, having committed suicide just under one year ago after a long legal battle sanctioned and financed by Queen Elizabeth II, and maintaining a strong personal and financial relationship with Epstein many years after his first arrest in 2006, which the Epstein files have revealed included the illegal sharing of confidential information.
Clearly not satisfied with his wealth and privilege, Mountbatten-Windsor’s public and private lives began to merge together, as reported by the BBC News, through an association with gun smuggler Tarek Kaituni (revealed by Chris Bryant MP under Parliamentary privilege), the receiving of £15 million in funds proven to have been acquired through bribery for a property from Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, and continuing after his resignation in 2011 to lobby for the arms industry, being included in a British delegation to Bahrain in 2014. The full amount he claimed in expenses over ten years is unknown, but an investigation revealed it was £620,000 over the course of 2010. Given his long-standing interest in young women and girls, the obvious next step for the disgraced Trade Representative was to join the Women’s Interlink Foundation in 2012 and to launch his own Pitch@Palace Initiative in 2014.
Inviting entrepreneurs, including his reputable colleagues from the People’s Republic of China, to take part in the whitewashing of his crimes, this charade continued until Mountbatten-Windsor was forced to step down as Chief Executive in 2019 following his infamous interview with the BBC series Newsnight, where he denied having ever met Guiffre and claimed the images were doctored because he was incapable of sweating, said he did not regret meeting Epstein because his contacts had been useful, and apologised only for “letting the side down” by association because he had just been “too honourable”. So honourable, he continued to be involved and profit from his ties through from Pitch@Palace until it was dissolved following Guiffre’s suicide. And that is how we got to the 19th February 2026, with the newly 66-year old carried away from Sandringham Estate by unmarked police cars, not due to his association with Epstein, but because of his misconduct in public life.
Is that where the story ends? Can we now celebrate the triumph of the rule of law and the demise of a Prince who failed to meet the standards expected of him? If only it were so simple, but as the famous saying goes: one rotten apple spoils the whole barrel. The British monarchy is predicated on the delusion of benevolence, as if it were God’s representative on Earth, which King Charles III quite literally is under law, as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Yet, Mountbatten-Windsor is just the latest of a series of Royal children who failed to live up to the standards expected of them. Far from the City of God, it is more like Sodom and Gomorrah. With a matriarch who turned a blind eye to her wayward children, the monarchy which supposedly exists to ensure justice only did so as long as the justice in question served its own interests.
A Family History of Corruption and Abuse
King Edward VIII, the first child of King George V, caused the biggest existential threat to the British monarchy since Oliver Cromwell, when he started a constitutional crisis by attempting to marry the American socialite Wallis Simpson, who was in the process of a second divorce in order to marry him. A somewhat sympathetic case, given he was abused by his nanny, sent away by his father for crying too much, and had only just begun to enjoy his time in the Navy before his father forced him to go to the University of Oxford upon ascending to the throne. Unfortunately, he was also a white supremacist who wrote in his diaries of Indigenous Australians that “they are the lowest form of human beings and are the closest thing to monkeys”.
Edward VIII’s womanising, always a favourite pastime of royalty, began during his affair with the Parisian prostitute Marguerite Alibert in 1917, the same year he began to have a separate affair with Lady Leveson-Gower. Despite choosing the latter, his father did not see her as suitable and he continued a remarkable list of affairs until meeting Simpson in the early 1930s when Lady Furness, one of the many married women he had an affair with, was away on holiday. His reign began and ended in 1936 when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin informed him that the Government would resign if he married Simpson. Yet, instead of being disgraced by his abdication, the first act of King George VI was to make him the Duke of Windsor.
As the Duke of Windsor, his role involved a tour of Germany where both Simpson and himself gave the Nazi salute, an American radio broadcast calling for peace at the start of the Second World War, and the leaking of Allied war plans to defend Belgium to the Nazi regime, at which point he was made the Governor of the Bahamas, the rule of a people which was supposedly meant to be seen as a great demotion for the white supremacist. As late as December 1940, he continued to attempt to make President Roosevelt intervene on the side of the “right and logical leader of the German people”, Adolf Hitler, complaining well into his later life that the Government’s anti-Mussolini stance and the malign influence of the Jews had been the real cause of the war. He ‘served’ the country as the Duke of Windsor until his death in 1972, 19 years into Elizabeth II’s reign.
George VI is to be commended for his contribution to the war effort in maintaining morale, for supporting the creation of the United Nations, and for relinquishing his title of the Emperor of India, although many of his actions were motivated by the necessity of stability after the constitutional crisis of 1936 and he is well-known to have supported the pro-appeasement Lord Halifax over Winston Churchill in 1940. Elizabeth II is worthy of a degree of respect for putting herself at considerable personal risk in touring countries from Ghana to Canada to Yugoslavia to China at politically contentious moments. And she was a particularly astute political actor, navigating once-popular premierships under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair and surviving the crisis of 1992 when three of her four children separated from their partners and scrutiny over the royal finances forced her to accept reforms including the charging of income tax on herself, allowing her to rule until her death at the former Prince Charles’s dismay.
A Country and a Family Facing a Collective Trauma
The prevailing image of Elizabeth II is that of the old woman who allowed her image to be projected parachuting into the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games or having tea with Paddington Bear, and that is an image which is difficult to remove from one’s memory. But this is not the person who was at the head of the Family and it is nothing more than a false sense of nostalgia, one of a country which has no sense of its place and is clinging onto the last semblance of an Empire that once dominated the world. Just like her father and just like his father, she was a cold and calculated figure who neglected her children and meddled in their lives, not in their own interests, but in the interests of the maintenance of her power and nothing else. Mountbatten-Windsor was not an anomaly; he was a broken man who was broken by an institution which makes victims out of everyone who interacts with it. Despicable as his actions may be, he is still a victim who failed to break out of the cycle of abuse.
Yet, Prince Harry, who caused significant damage to the monarchy in 2005 when he followed the family tradition by dressing up as a Nazi, was treated with a severity not shown to him then nor to Mountbatten-Windsor even after all that has become known, simply because of a marriage to an independent-minded woman in Markle. To his credit, he at least tried to break out of the cycle of abuse, and for this, Elizabeth II sanctioned the same media attacks on Markle that made his mother’s final years a living hell. And, beyond the nostalgia, beyond the legitimate achievements of her reign, this is what her place in history will be: someone who left behind a family of broken people because she failed them. Much like Thatcher and Blair, the two best politicians of her reign, she was willing to throw anyone under the bus to rule as long as she could, and she was far better at it. But like both of them, her legacy is a country that, along with her children and grandchildren, are still trying to pick up the pieces of the trauma which she has inflicted.
And for what? The monarchy has lived for decades in limbo, exerting influence over politics while having to pretend that it is apolitical. Power did not bring Elizabeth II happiness. She was infamously emotionless upon Spencer’s death, pushed by Blair into a faux demonstration of remorse for a woman everyone knew she could not stand. Even the Crown itself is not enough to make all of this pomp and tradition worth it for the person who wears it, given the incredible level of jealousy that she held towards Spencer. In some ways, Mountbatten-Windsor is just the honest face of the monarchy: he got to enjoy the power while he had it with all of the money and sex that he could possibly desire. The most tragic part of this story is that it is about property and who is in possession of it more than anything else. A Freedom of Information Request in 2019 showed that more land is still owned by the aristocracy and the gentry than any other group in society: a total of 30%, compared to 18% by corporations, 17% by oligarchs and city bankers, 8.5% by the public sector, and just 5% by homeowners.
After the Second World War, the people were within sight of acquiring the same kind of power as the aristocracy and the gentry. This opportunity was allowed to slip under successive Labour governments. Still, the vast majority of Lords, who continue to block and exert influence over our democracy, most of which were privately educated and socialised with the land-owning aristocracy and gentry, are Conservatives. Still, the best jobs go to the children who went to the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, mediocre and entitled children like Boris Johnson, while youth unemployment reaches heights not seen in decades and a generation are facing the consequences of the lie that there is such a thing as social mobility. Still, even as we have the first Cabinet in the history of the United Kingdom that has more people who went to a comprehensive school than the general population, an ever-powerful civil service and decades of power being centralised in special advisors mean that they have no meaningful power.
King Charles III has the unenviable task of managing the Family that he inherited, many years after he would have wanted to, having spent years waiting in the shadows of a mother who refused to pass on the reins to him, and attempting to ensure that a Crown remains to pass on to Prince William. One cannot help but wonder if he is questioning whether he should have been careful what he wished for all along. There is a good chance he will pass it on before his death if he is able to do so without collapsing the monarchy. If he fails, William will become the Liz Truss of the British monarchy. If he succeeds, William will be perceived as a legitimate King. But a legitimacy derived from public opinion is not a real form of legitimacy. The people are growing up and realising the need for their self-determination, and no legitimate defence of monarchy, Lordship, or aristocracy exists in mainstream society anymore beyond a half-hearted conservatism that even its proponents do not truly believe. Either the monarchy and everything associated with it dies or Britain dies. Let us hope William will become the King who sacrificed his own power to save his own country.
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