Forty-five members of the Royal Family will sit down for Christmas lunch at Sandringham this year – and 44 of them will be looking daggers at the Duke of York.
‘You are the man who is putting our future at risk,’ they will be thinking.
‘A few more blunders from you, and we’ll just be the Mountbatten-Windsor family, sitting around in Norfolk without much to do, and the King will be, like so many of the kings in history, an ex-king.’
Why? Because Prince Andrew’s fatal combination of stunning arrogance and mind-boggling stupidity has brought about yet another cringe-making catastrophe.
The man who saw nothing wrong with being friends with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein – even after he had been found guilty of sexual misconduct with under-age girls – has, yet again, landed his family, and the monarchy, in the soup.
And this latest scandal has come about because of a third quality in his make-up which does nothing to help his image: Greed.
Over the years, this trait has led him to consort with any number of shady characters, from the son-in-law of the former president of Kazakhstan to the son-in-law of the now deposed Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. (He appears to have a thing for sons-in-law of billionaires – I wonder why.)
Now we learn he has been hanging out with a Chinese businessman – a member of the Communist Party to boot – who has since been banned from entering this country because he is considered a security risk.
Prince Andrew with the alleged Chinese spy who has been banned from the UK
The Duke of York (pictured) has said he ‘ceased all contact’ with the businessman accused of being a Chinese spy when concerns were first raised about him
Prince Andrew is seen horse riding near Windsor Castle in Berkshire
The individual, who can be identified only as H6 for legal reasons, was stopped ‘at a UK border’ in a counter-terrorism operation in 2021 and his mobile phone was confiscated.
On the device was found a letter from Dominic Hampshire, a senior adviser to Prince Andrew, dated March 2021.
The alleged spy’s phone revealed Hampshire as saying, quite accurately, that Andrew was ‘in a desperate situation and will grab on to anything’. He added: ‘You sit at the very top of a tree that many people would like to be on.’
Indeed, the relationship between Andrew and his Chinese associate – he has known the man for ten years – grew so close that H6 has been described as a ‘close confidant’ and was even invited to Randy Andy’s 60th birthday party.
It has to be said that this is not as coveted an invitation as you might think. Andrew really does have no friends, which is one of the reasons he has become an online planespotter.
In August, the Mail revealed he has taken to watching a live flight tracker on his home computer, which projects air traffic landing and taking off at airports all over the globe on to a large screen.
Meanwhile, his entourage of paid lackeys have to arrange for his social life to be filled up with people he does not really know.
Even I was once invited to have dinner with the nearest thing the royals have to a social pariah, never having met him before – or since – in my life.
The occasion was decades ago, when he had just left the Navy and one of his aides said to me – a humble journalist – that it would be a great kindness if I came along to make up the numbers at a dinner in Buckingham Palace.
Britain’s Prince Andrew, Duke of York attends the Royal Family’s Christmas Day service at St. Mary Magdalene’s church in 2023
King Charles (right) has reportedly been briefed by British intelligence over a major security breach linking the Duke (left) to the alleged Chinese spy
‘The man who saw nothing wrong with being friends with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein (pictured) – even after he had been found guilty of sexual misconduct with under-age girls – has, yet again, landed his family, and the monarchy, in the soup’, writes A.N. Wilson
It was a pathetic occasion, at which, I should guess, absolutely no one – apart from those paid to do so – actually knew the prince. We ate in splendour off gold plates!
I was reminded of this grotesque, extravagant and really sad occasion, when I watched his now notorious Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis.
The hapless duke considered that the encounter went ‘rather well’ but every single person who saw it reckoned he had made a complete fool of himself with his implausible denials and cock-and-bull excuses.
His lumpen awkwardness socially has been described by virtually everyone who has ever met him; together with his inability to read a room.
He is the prey of every spiv or trickster. If a ‘model’ comes up to him and says ‘Andy, DARLING!’ and sits on his lap – a practice that has memorably been described by one such young woman – he does not push them away. He is flattered.
On the other side of the coin, he is boorish and rude and expects to be treated like high royalty. The US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Tatiana Gfoeller, once described his behaviour at a brunch for Canadian and British business people when he was a special trade envoy, a non-job invented for him by Tony Blair.
It was ‘cocky . . . verging on rude’. When someone raised the subject of anti-corruption investigators trying to uncover the truth about a Saudi royal who had allegedly been paid a backhander to expedite a lucrative BAE Systems contract, Andrew used navvy language to denounce people ‘poking their noses in everywhere’.
You might have thought that part of the job of a trade envoy would be to smooth the wheels, but his clumsiness simply reinforced the idea that rude, foul-mouthed, privately educated boors were in charge of the British establishment and that, if necessary, they turned a blind eye to corruption. As a PR exercise, his time as an envoy was a disaster.
Dominic Hampshire (pictured) was described in court documents as Prince Andrew’s ‘advisor’ in dealings with the Chinese civil servant banned from entering the UK
Mr Hampshire has long acted as a ‘fixer’ for members of the Royal Family and other ‘high net-worth individuals’
So why did he expose himself to such pitfalls? One can only imagine he saw in the role an opportunity to feather his own nest.
The King – growing increasingly weary of footing the enormous bills for his younger brother’s extravagant lifestyle – has long been keen to oust Andrew from Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, the enormous grace-and-favour house where he lives with his accident-prone ex-wife Sarah Ferguson.
They can’t possibly afford to live there and they do not need such a huge pad. Why not go to Frogmore Cottage, which has been vacated by Meghan and Harry? But, no, Andrew insisted he stayed put in Royal Lodge, and – when Charles eventually turned off the money taps – he somehow came up with the cash to cover the millions required.
Does the latest scandal help to explain his sudden ability to finance a way of life that, on the face of it, is far beyond his means?
Now, following the Chinese ‘spy’ revelation, we are all faced with yet another dreadful Prince Andrew-shaped embarrassment for the Royal Family.
Just as the Chinese Communist Party, and all this country’s enemies, will be laughing at this latest episode, so will republicans in Britain.
If the King and his family, staring down the table at Christmas dinner, think – ‘That man is going to bring us all down with him!’ – they might well be right.
Follow A.N. Wilson on anwilson@substack.com