As the Prince Andrew saga grows more sordid by the day, we have to ask the question: how long will his nearest and dearest stick by him?
While the Yorks have long been a famously close-knit family, regularly holidaying together, even after Andrew and Sarah Ferguson’s divorce in 1996, the first cracks in their relationship are starting to appear.
There are reports that Fergie is spending less time at Royal Lodge, the home she shares with her ex-husband, while daughters Beatrice and Eugenie are showing signs of a growing independence from their disgraced parents.
And who can blame them? It has been an especially traumatic week for the family, from the Mail on Sunday’s publication last week of a leaked email that threw fresh light on the closeness of the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and the Duke of York, to the revelation that the Duke had met a senior Chinese Communist Party official with close ties to the ongoing spy case on three occasions.
This bombshell, of course, led on Friday to the King putting his younger brother’s titles into abeyance, while Fergie was told she could no longer call herself Duchess of York.
The ex-duchess has shown a remarkable capacity for loyalty to her ghastly ex-husband over the years but if – as is increasingly expected – Andrew is forced to give up his lease on the Royal Lodge at Windsor – the 30-room pile where the divorced couple live in separate wings to this day – I doubt she will be quite so keen to co-habit.
And certainly not if – as the Mail on Sunday suggested at the weekend – the prince is persuaded to relocate to the Castle of Mey, the late Queen Mother’s 16th-century fastness in the far north of Scotland.
The nearest village of any size is six miles away and John o’ Groats, which consists of little more than drab council housing, a sports park and a shop, is nothing to write home about.
How long will Prince Andrew’s nearest and dearest stick by him while his saga grows more sordid by the day, Andrew Lownie asks
Prince Andrew is pictured embracing a 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre at Ghislaine Maxwell’s house in London in 2001
Indeed, it’s so grim that in 2010 it received a ‘Carbuncle Award’ from Urban Realm magazine for being ‘Scotland’s most dismal town’.
For a woman used to the tropical delights of Caribbean islands and the upmarket ski resort of Verbier, living there would be an unspeakably grim prospect.
Andrew would have trouble coping, too. He has very few friends these days and can spend hours amusing himself by watching Terminator 3 for the umpteenth time or, as the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay revealed last year, tracking planes landing and taking off from airports such as Heathrow via an online app.
Rather than the Castle of Mey, to my mind, it’s more likely that Air Miles Andy would end up somewhere like Abu Dhabi where he has a standing offer of the use of a salubrious palace courtesy of the ruling house of Nahyan.
It’s also a place where he could rely on being able to book one of those massages that he’s become so fond of over the years.
But if Fergie does cut ties with her former husband, in the event that he is unable to keep her in the style to which she has become accustomed, how will she cope?
The 66-year-old has shown herself to be a formidable and shameless grifter over the years, sending gushing emails to her most generous paymaster, the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, even as she condemned him publicly.
But Ms Ferguson – as we must now call her – is not known as the Houdini of the Royal Family for nothing.
Ms Giuffre holds a photo of herself at 16 – when she first met Jeffrey Epstein. She took her own life in April, aged 41
Beatrice (left) and Eugenie have had counselling to deal with the various scandals their parents have been involved in and there are rumours they are having much less contact with their father than they once did
Just as she kept on using the title HRH after her divorce – in naked contravention of the rules – it would be only too predictable if she refused to stop referring to herself as a duchess.
Indeed, it was only yesterday that Fergie, who has 204,000 followers on X, got round to changing her Twitter handle from @SarahTheDuchess to @SarahMFergie15.
As sure as night follows day, she is almost bound to make a face-saving appearance on Oprah, the US chat show on which she has appeared on no fewer than three previous occasions: once after her divorce in 1996, then in 2010 after she’d been caught attempting to sell access to Andrew for £500,000 and finally in 2011 when she was not invited to William and Kate’s wedding.
By 2011, her relationship with Epstein was so close that he even gave her a script to help her get his case across as effectively as possible.
If Fergie were granted a fourth audience with Oprah Winfrey, who now airs her interviews on her own cable TV network, she would almost certainly blame her latest fall from grace on the usual suspects: the men in grey suits, those powerful but anonymous figures who enforce royal protocol.
While respectable institutions in this country, such as the more reputable charities and blue-chip brands, wouldn’t be taken in, other – less scrupulous – entities are likely to have no such qualms.
Apart from her contacts in the Middle East, who are sufficiently still so blinded by her royal associations not to concern themselves with the fact that she has been stripped of her title, she may well continue to be supported by individuals such as the shadowy Chinese tycoon Johnny Hon.
She was first introduced to him in 2019, and it was subsequently reported that a company he chaired paid Ferguson £375,000 to – as Hon himself put it – ‘introduce a few people to me in Hong Kong’.
Her daughters may be less sanguine about the recent turn of events, however.
Beatrice and Eugenie are now 37 and 35 respectively, with young families of their own.
The first sign that there might be trouble in familial paradise came last Christmas, when Andrew and Fergie were confined to the Royal Lodge after Charles feared the rest of the family would be tainted by the controversy surrounding the exposure of the payment from Johnny Hon.
Instead of making a show of solidarity by sitting down to turkey with her parents in Windsor, Beatrice travelled to Norfolk to join Charles, William et al at Sandringham.
And only last Wednesday, Eugenie failed to post an online birthday message for her mother – a devastating millennial snub.
I know that both women have had counselling to deal with the various scandals their parents have been involved in and there are rumours they are having much less contact with their father than they once did.
But they are still very much part of the Royal Family, with the King himself making it clear that – despite their father’s loss of his dukedom – both will retain their royal titles and remain in the line of succession.
In May, Beatrice joined King Charles and Queen Camilla at Kew Gardens for an official event but, in the light of her parents’ disgrace, she is thought to have abandoned any hope of joining the Firm as a full-time working royal.
In the long run, her and Beatrice’s prospects do not look good. It is known that Prince William favours a more ‘European-style’ monarchy focused on good deeds rather than pomp and ceremony, with only those in the direct line of succession enrolled as working royals.
And the sisters have already been touched by controversy. Through their mother’s social connections they have been unfortunate enough to be introduced to a series of sexual predators, from the rapper P Diddy to fashion magnate Peter Nygard – both of whom are serving lengthy jail sentences for sex offences.
And questions remain about an unexplained payment of £25,000 that emerged in the 2022 High Court trial of Selman Turk, a winner of Pitch@Palace – Andrew’s Dragons’ Den-style project – that found its way into Eugenie’s bank account.
There have also been concerns that the daughters may be exploiting business contacts forged through their parents.
Meanwhile, Eugenie’s sex-trafficking charity, the Anti-Slavery Collective – a preposterously inappropriate cause for her to get involved in given her father’s proclivities – has raised large sums of money but distributed very little.
A key test of where their loyalties lie will come this Christmas when we will see whether they choose the hospitality of the wider Royal Family over their parents’.
If Beatrice and Eugenie both choose the wider Royal Family, it will show that Andrew and Fergie have been disowned by the only two people they could once rely on for unconditional support. And that will be a black day for them both.
