Indulged by his mother, and ignored for too long by his siblings, it is behaviour like Andrew’s that could ultimately kill the monarchy
It started with a simple photograph, probably the most consequential ever taken of a member of the royal family.
There was Prince Andrew, Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, Baron Killyleagh and Knight of the Garter, with his arm around a young woman, while Ghislaine Maxwell stood wolfishly grinning in the background.
Without that snap, taken at a party at Maxwell’s London mews home in 2001, who would ever have believed Virginia Giuffre when she said she had been trafficked across the Atlantic as a teenager and obliged to have perfunctory sex with a prince of the blood royal? As it was, the story could not be convincingly denied, however much friends of Andrew tried to suggest the picture was a fake. Or that Andrew would seek to blacken her name much later by instructing his royal protection officer to seek out derogatory details about her, even providing her birth date and social security number, which can only have come from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein or his minions?
An odd, giveaway gesture by someone who had publicly pretended to have never heard of her, said he could never have had sex with her and yet paid her $12m of his mother’s money to fend off a long prevaricated lawsuit.
