I think the average person dips into royal gossip every so often, and they’re familiar with the broad strokes. For someone like me, covering the royals on a daily basis is like a lobster slowly being boiled – I lose the forest for the trees, and I sometimes forget how appalling this Prince Andrew situation is to the casual viewer who only pays attention to the royal sh-tshow every few months. When Prince Andrew turned up in a car with Prince William and Kate in Balmoral over the weekend, it ended up getting international headlines and international condemnation. The casual viewer might not know the ins and outs of Peg and Buttons’ laziness, but they know that Andrew is a human-trafficking pervert and that the Windsors would walk a mile to cover up Andrew’s crimes but they wouldn’t walk three feet to show compassion to Harry and Meghan. The cruelty, as always, is the point with this family. Well, the Royalist had an exclusive about just what it means that the Windsors are bending over backwards to rehabilitate Andrew.
A friend of the king says Andrew is coming back in some way: “Andrew won’t ever have the same ceremonial role within the family, he is no longer and never will be a working royal. That is clear,” a friend of the king told The Daily Beast. “But he is part of the family. He is the king’s brother. He has not been found guilty of any crime and I think it’s fair to say that the king is making it clear that he won’t turn his back on his brother.”
A carefully choreographed move: The historian and writer Andrew Lownie, who is currently working on what many expect will be the definitive biography of Andrew, told The Daily Beast that Sunday’s trip to church was particularly interesting because “the relationship between William and Andrew has never been good.” He said that suggested this was a carefully choreographed move. “The family have been using the Prince and Princess of Wales to get them out of trouble a lot lately, and once again, they are doing the heavy lifting here, fixing problems not of their creation. This was clearly a very important event, and William’s had to put aside his objections… to agree to be in a car with him when they knew it was going to be filmed is an extraordinary development.”
An entirely new public relations plan to try and re-integrate Andrew. “Until now, the family have been trying to distance themselves from Andrew, but Sunday’s ballet suggests that there’s been a change of strategy. The question is, why? Andrew is still very toxic. I mean, if I was advising them on PR, I would have him locked up in Balmoral and out of sight. So, why have they apparently decided they need to be showing some sort of support for him and that they’re all in this together?”
Lownie believes Andrew is lobbying a lot behind the scenes: “There’s a lot going on behind the scenes in terms of his lobbying. Sunday’s car ride shows that he has clearly been quite successful,” Lownie said.
Andrew’s presence overshadowed the re-emergence of Lady Susan Hussey. Hussey, who was a lady-in-waiting for the queen and is Prince William’s godmother, resigned after Black British charity director Ngozi Fulani said Hussey had repeatedly asked her, “Where are you from?” at a Buckingham Palace reception. On Sunday, she was back at the heart of the family at the Balmoral service.
[From The Daily Beast]
My take is different from Lownie’s, obviously. My thoughts are the same as they were on Monday – that this “choreography” with Andrew was entirely designed as a “message” to and about Prince Harry. It was a message to Harry saying “look, we’ve got the whole family here, even the rapist, look at us, snubbing you and refusing to invite you to Balmoral, aren’t you jealous.” I think that’s why William and Kate went along with it too, because they understood that it was all about their “snub” of Harry. Plus, never forget that these people are drama queens staggering from one self-created soap opera to the next. There might not have even been some larger plan, it might have been simply “hey, this will get us some headlines!”
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— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) August 28, 2023
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
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