A year has passed since Prince Andrew’s disastrous BBC Newsnight interview – and time has done nothing to repair the damage. Now, the Queen’s third child’s future as a working royal remains even more doubtful.
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Royal author Nigel Cawthorne is of the belief that the Prince “shot himself in the foot” and his PR strategy to “march on” has not panned out.
Last November, the Duke of York sat down with the BBC to discuss his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking charges. But his intention to set the record straight far from succeeded.
“I have never seen anything so disastrous,” crisis consultant Mark Borowski told Britain’s Press Association at the time. “It was like watching a man in quicksand”.
Since then, any of Andrew’s attempts to salvage the train wreck have been clearly unsuccessful.
“The Prince has been his own worst enemy,” says Nigel Cawthorne, the author of Prince Andrew: Epstein, Maxwell and the Palace.
“Andrew is clinging on to his HRH title … it is by far a greater cliffhanger than Meghan and Harry’s, even if the backdrop couldn’t be more tawdry.”
But if the Prince is looking for familial support during this turbulent time, he will be hard pressed to find any from his mother, the Queen.
“She has already stripped Andrew of his public royal title, banned him from representing the crown, and drastically cut his allowance over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein”, a source told New Idea earlier this year.
What’s more, with Andrew’s daughter Princess Eugenie’s due date drawing ever closer, the Queen has reportedly even banned her son from the delivery room .
“(Her Majesty) felt it was her duty to ban Andrew from the delivery room officially,” a palace insider told OK! Magazine last month.
“The feeling at the palace is he doesn’t deserve the love of his family after his behaviour”.
If the disgraced Prince isn’t even allowed to be in the room for the birth of his own grandchild, there’s no telling how many royal engagements he will be excluded from.
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