Not in
this together: King Charles cuts Andrew loose to save royal family’s repute
Robert
Booth
Jettisoning
of ex-prince became unavoidable when king’s loyalty to his brother collided
with task of keeping public on side
Prince Andrew to be stripped of titles and
move out of Royal Lodge
Thu 30
Oct 2025 22.06 GMT
To strip
his brother of his titles and to evict him from his home is the most
consequential action King Charles has taken since he ascended the throne in
2022.
The
defenestration of Prince Andrew, now to be known only as Andrew Mountbatten
Windsor, and the removal of his cherished privilege of royal status is an act
of utmost ruthlessness by a king. Ascending the throne at 73, Charles always
knew he would play a caretaker role for the monarchy and so could not allow rot
to set into an institution that lives and dies by public consent.
The
damage that Andrew’s association with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell
continued to inflict on the reputation of the royal family was simply too much
for the king not to act as he did on Thursday evening. Charles has been
described by his biographer Catherine Mayer as “loyal to a fault. Sometimes to
the point of fault,” but this was too much.
The
queen’s longevity always meant that Charles’s reign would be relatively short
and therefore one of his most important tasks would be to bequeath the
institution to Prince William in reasonable repair. William is relatively
popular with the public and for Charles to leave him with a festering crisis
for the sake of the feelings of his younger brother, recently caught lying
about his continued association with Epstein, made no sense.
It
emerged this month that Andrew had emailed Epstein in 2011 after a picture of
him with his arm around the teenager Virginia Giuffre, who he is accused of
having sex with when she was 17, was published in 2011. He previously claimed
he had cut off contact with the sex offender by this point, but instead he is
alleged to have told Epstein that “we are in this together”.
Then when
the BBC this week reminded the world of a picture taken in the garden of Royal
Lodge, the Windsor home Andrew is being turfed out of, which featured not only
Epstein and Maxwell, both convicted child sex offenders, but also the convicted
rapist Harvey Weinstein, it cannot have been difficult to decide to deliver the
final blow. Charles decided that neither he nor the institution of the royal
family could be “in this together” ever again with Andrew.
But this
was not just the action of the chief executive of an institution sometimes
called “the firm”. This was a family matter and therefore emotionally charged.
The queen is said to have doted on Andrew, and his astonishing self-assurance
has been attributed by some to that mothering by the queen, who is said to not
have offered the same indulgences to her older children. Charles would no doubt
have had his late mother’s views in mind when he signed off Thursday night’s
statement announcing the “formal process to remove the Style, Titles and
Honours of Prince Andrew”, that “notice has now been served to surrender the
lease” on Royal Lodge and that “these censures are deemed necessary,
notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against
him”.
In the
simplest terms the issue also seemed to boil down to a question of whose side
are you on.
As the
final line of the statement from Buckingham Palace read: “Their Majesties wish
to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will
remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.”
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