To the Malmsey butt

Herald on Sunday, Sunday National, 19th October 2025.

I thought exile, the Tower, or the Malmsey butt were more traditional ways for English kings to dispose of unwanted royal brothers – but this week we’ve seen a new innovation. If you worry the foundations of your royal house are shaking, that public mistrust is growing, that criticism is rising and the whole edifice might be in trouble – the modern solution is not to imprison the offender, or banish him, or seize his property – but to knock a couple more magic names off the long, long list of unearned titles he has to choose from.

In a palace statement published on Friday night, Prince Andrew told us that “in discussion with the King, and my immediate and wider family, we have concluded the continued accusations about me distract from the work of His Majesty and the Royal Family.” 

In a heartwarming tribute to himself, the press release continued, “I have decided, as I always have, to put my duty to my family and country first.”

They’ve left him with what I suppose they think of as his dignity. He hasn’t been cashiered and degraded by order of the king. Instead, this Disgraced Former has been allowed to present himself as nobly forgoing his birthright in the national interest. This is a retreat, not a banishment. And that’s the scandal.

Duty and honour are a wearisome feature of Andrew’s self-image. It’s remarkable the lengths these virtues have driven him to. In his now notorious BBC Newsnight interview, you may remember Andrew admitted to visiting and staying over with Jeffrey Epstein at his mansion after his host’s conviction for child sex offences. He visited New York, he claimed, to tell Epstein it was over, mano a mano. This too was apparently the “honourable thing to do.”

Quite why this took three languorous days in Epstein’s company is not clear. And if you think it demonstrated a serious lack of judgement? Then that too just shows how honourable Andrew’s instincts are. As the prince explained to a sceptical Emily Maitlis, “I admit fully my judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable but that’s just the way it is.”

It is a very British absurdity, that you can release a press statement saying you are “no longer using your titles,” and simultaneously sign the missive “Prince Andrew.” As a treat to myself, I tried to find a full list of the unearned gongs that the King’s bumptious brother has dutifully decided to forego in the family and national interest.

No more will he be styling himself Duke of York, the Earl of Inverness, or dressing up as a Knight of the Garter. He’s been stripped of the dignity of Chief Ratcatcher of the Royal Burgh of Swanage, has nobly submitted to his unfrocking as Rear Admiral of the Pink, Bishop of Osnabrück, Laird of Bonkle and all the other badge and ribbon collecting which senior royals and their courtiers seem to fill their empty lives with.

If you see Prince Andrew enjoying an affordable pizza lunch somewhere in central London and try to greet him – he’ll savagely interrupt you and say “no formality, please, just call me Prince Andrew,” like the salt of the earth geezer he is. He wouldn’t want to “let the side down” after all. At least he now has a range of exciting surnames to choose from. Will it be Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor? Or maybe Saxe, or Coburg, or Gotha he goes by?  

Royal historians – a self-selecting bunch whose speciality is pretending they have close personal relationships with senior members of the royal family and leaky courtiers – have been murmuring anxiously that unless the King ruthlessly rids himself of his turbulent brother, the future of the monarchy itself was in peril. You can only hope.

The palace gossips are crediting Charles and the son and heir for this tokenistic act of savagery towards Andrew, justifying the feeble and cosmetic nature of this exile on the basis that the palace needed to be seen to be acting swiftly in the face of further revelations published last weekend that Andrew had been in email contact with Jeffrey Epstein in 2011 shortly after the image of the royal with his arm around the teenaged Virginia Giuffre hit the newsstands.

In an email of February 2011, Andrew reassured Epstein that “we are in this together,” told him to “keep in close touch,” and expressed the desire to “play more soon.” In his car crash Newsnight interview, Andrew claimed he had cut off all contact with the American financier and child sex offender in December 2010. Another lie, it seems, and not the kind of whopper which can easily be written off as fragile memory and faulty recall. The whole yarn in the BBC interview was that his trip to New York to end things with Epstein was to draw that “honourable” line under their longstanding personal association. What exactly is the innocent interpretation of “we’ll play more soon” in this context?

Against this backdrop, the idea that peeling off a couple more of Andrew’s sashes and cummerbunds will draw a line under this story is make-believe. Is anyone seriously animated by whether this unperspiring princeling wears his status as Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order lightly in everyday conversation?

Remember it was Andrew’s old mum who first banished him from the status of “working royal” to the ranks of the idlers, depriving him of his military costumes and his ability to force people around him to call him “His Royal Highness” in public.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but notice that this first wave of entirely cosmetic changes to the little puke’s bells and whistles hasn’t exactly caused the Epstein scandal to disappear, or saved Andrew or the rest of his family from the constant acid-drip of disclosures about just how close Queen Elizabeth’s best boy was with his American bestie before and after Epstein’s conviction for sexual offences involving minors.

Quite why you’d imagine that losing a few more titles now – shedding a dukedom here and an earldom there – would put the scandal to bed is beyond me. It is also gradually dawning on the media that this banishment is entirely voluntary.

Although the “banned old duke of York” is a grand tabloid headline, the reality in law is that Andrew will retain his duchal coronet and attachment to the unlucky city of York unless and until parliament votes to deprive him of these baubles, whether or not he’s getting his business cards reprinted or updating his Wikipedia entry this weekend.

If the royal family actually wanted to draw a line under this long running saga – they might consider taking a leaf out of George V’s book. During World War I, he famously converted the Firm’s surname from the unfashionably Germanic Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the solidly British Windsor in the hopes of allaying anxieties about where precisely the suspiciously Germanic royal house’s loyalties lay.

The same year, Westminster passed the Titles Deprivation Act to strip “enemy peers and princes of British dignities and titles.” The legislation targeted any person “enjoying any dignity or title as a peer or British prince who have, during the present war, borne arms against His Majesty or His Allies, or who have adhered to His Majesty’s enemies.” Adhering to international sex traffickers may not be quite the same as fighting for the Kaiser – but George V recognised that the future of the monarchy required this reckoning with his extended German family, whatever private difficulties this caused.

There’s no legal reason why Andrew’s princely status should be uniquely protected. King Charles has the authority to strip his brother to the bone. Curiously, who gets to call themselves a prince is regulated by Letters Patent issued by the reigning monarch under the Great Seal. The latest version of these also go back to 1917, when King George V directed that the legitimate children of the reigning monarch are all to be treated as little princelings.

Calling yourself prince is no more makey-uppy than marquis, duke and a’ that. There’s no right to call yourself prince just because your mammy wore the jaggy bunnet. All titles can be revoked. Like all insubstantial things, princes can be made and unmade with the stroke of the royal pen.

Squeamishness or sentiment seems to be holding Charles III back. But look at it this way: if the royal family reckon the public won’t wear Andrew as Duke of York, why imagine anyone will be content with him as a prince?

Maybe King Charles thinks there is something suspiciously Jacobin about bringing the guillotine down on the honour of even a single royal sibling.

Give Andrew a wee flat, his military pension, elevate him to the status of a commoner, and then some of the clamour may die down. But until then? Greater love has no king than this: to lay down his brother’s life for his crown.