‘Royals enabled disgraced Andrew with blind eyes and deaf ears – however it will not wash’

“Everybody else long ago concluded that the eighth in line to the throne was a bad ’un, yet a privileged family continued housing and financing their son, brother and uncle”

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What did Charles, William and the hitherto respected Elizabeth II know about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s alleged sexploits, money-making, trading reports and dubious pals?

Everybody else long ago concluded that the eighth in line to the throne was a bad ’un, yet a privileged family continued housing and financing their son, brother and uncle. The current King and old Queen even loaned him £12million to keep him out of a US court.

The blind eyes and deaf ears were enabling him, which is why pretending he was not really one of them, stripping his titles and declaring that police must do whatever they think best, will not wash with anyone except the criminally gullible.

And it’s why the monarchy will never be the same again.

Andrew and those who indulged him have destroyed the antiquated institution from within. It’s a crisis greater than Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936, when the king was replaced by George VI, and it was pretty much business as usual. However, this is different – and it also presents a golden opportunity.

Democracy group Republic calculates that the hereditary firm costs us in excess of £510million a year in grants, subsidies, unpaid taxes, security, helicopters and jets. Heightened public scrutiny and accountability is, thanks to the files on Andrew’s paedophile benefactor Jeffrey Epstein’s, lifting veils that can never again be lowered.

The exorbitant price paid for self-serving royals is indefensible when fewer and fewer people would want to be represented by this lot. The inevitable result will be a marginalised Dutch-style monarchy or Britons finally voting for their head of state instead of inheriting an entitled family.

Current events make such outcomes no longer unimaginable in my lifetime. Tony Blair bailed out the Queen after Princess Diana’s death, advising an aloof monarch to fly a Buckingham Palace flag at half-mast to appease pearls-and-perms middle class ladies revolting at the gates, fuming that the dead People’s Princess was disrespected.

Keir Starmer privately advised Charles, I’m told, to distance himself from his since-arrested brother but the King was pushed reluctantly into doing the right thing far too late. Dodger William faces tough questions of his own and change at the top is no solution when the entire family is evading responsibility for institutional failure in a privileged institution exposed as institutionally rotten.

The public and Parliament have the bit between their teeth. There’s no option of returning to what’s gone. The debate is what comes next.

Reform target split decision in key poll

Mystic Mag’s crystal ball is cloudy, so predicting the result of this week’s genuinely pivotal Gorton and Denton by-election would be a mug’s game. I just don’t know, which is an uncomfortable and relatively rare predicament.

What I will confidently forecast is that the combined Labour and Green vote will top that of Reform, which is why decent folk will be calculating whether Angeliki Stogia or Hannah Spencer is the best chance of stopping odious Matt Goodwin.

For all our sakes, let’s hope tactical voters get it right. Splitting the centre and left is the hard right’s path to national power.

Labour defeat in a seat the party won with a 13,413 majority two years ago would be another nail in Keir Starmer’s political coffin, victory a remarkable crashing of Nigel Farage’s bandwagon. Never let it be said by-elections don’t matter.

Phillipson’s boost for 1.5million kids

Five former Education Secretaries backing plans by Bridget Phillipson to boost learning for England’s 1.5 million kids with special educational needs was unusually skilful preparation by the government.

Because David Blunkett, Estelle Morris, Charles Clarke, Ruth Kelly and Alan Johnson voicing support reinforces that this is not principally about money. The cost is obviously an issue yet the 68% increase over a decade in judgements meaning nearly one in five kids are recognised as requiring extra help is addressing hitherto ignored needs.

Most Send children are rightly taught in mainstream education and the real scandal is private schools backed byquick-buck speculators charging taxpayers an average £63,000 per place, with no discernible gains.

Ms Phillipson was instrumental in persuading Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to lift the Tory two-child benefit cap that plunged half a million kids into poverty. Unlike botched welfare cuts, she is not driven by cutting costs.

The free school meals girl genuinely wants to help disadvantaged people. That is worth cheering.

Go back to Clacton

Little England pub bore Nigel Farage’s cheap and backfiring Chagos Islands stunt proved once again he is just an unfunny Trump mini-me.

He would or should have known that outside visitors require permission to visit the archipelago housing the Diego Garcia military base.

“The island base,” noted former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, “is full of serious people doing serious things. So perhaps he should get back to Clacton.”

Returning the Chagos Islands to Mauritius may be a messy, unprincipled response to avoid international legal condemnation for a shameful colonial stitch-up in 1965 but it’s 6,000 miles better than clinging to the Indian Ocean territory.

Trump endorsing, opposing, endorsing then again opposing the deal over Starmer’s refusal to let him attack Iran from Diego Garcia earning plastic patriot Farage’s applause confirms this Reform dictator knows the price of everything and value of precisely nothing.