Every Christmas I remember a ticking-off from my late mother-in-law, an observant Roman Catholic, after I’d jeered at some celebrity for being as thick as brandy butter.
‘It’s not a sin to be stupid,’ she said.
Her point was that people like me attach too much weight to intelligence, treating it as a virtue akin to goodness when we ought to see it as a mere accident of birth. Those born a sausage or two short of a full English were to be pitied, not mocked.
Well, I can’t pretend that I’ve always abided by my mother-in-law’s stricture in newspaper columns I’ve written over the years.
But bearing her lesson in mind, and in the spirit of Christmas peace and goodwill, I feel moved today to make what may be a most unpopular suggestion: shouldn’t we try to be a bit kinder to Prince Andrew – or, failing that, at least a little fairer?
I don’t know about you but I find something ugly about the lynch mob gleefully descending on him, yet again, this time over his embarrassing association with a man now suspected of being a Chinese spy. It looks like bullying to me.
Much to my surprise, I felt a pang of sympathy for him over his withdrawal from yesterday’s traditional Christmas lunch at the Palace for the extended Royal Family, apparently after pressure from on high and a quiet word from his ex-wife, Fergie.
Indeed, I find myself in the same difficulty as Emily Maitlis, the interviewer whose grilling precipitated his fall into the abyss. Where this latest episode is concerned, at least, she and I both find it hard to see exactly what Andrew has done wrong.
Prince Andrew and ex-wife Sarah Ferguson at the Christmas morning church service in Sandringham, Norfolk, last year
As she said in a podcast: ‘I don’t understand why this is laid at the door of the Prince, with so much castigation and so much blame.
‘If Andrew didn’t know this man was a spy, and there is nothing to suggest he did, then why is he being blamed?’
Of course, it’s possible that evidence may one day emerge of shady financial dealings with the Chinese, or some other impropriety (I’d be most interested to know, for example, where Andrew found the money to stay on at Royal Lodge, Windsor, after his brother the King cut off his handsome annual allowance).
But unless and until such evidence comes to light, I can’t see why his association with Yang Tengbo should warrant his exclusion from the bosom of his family at Christmas.
After all, he is by no means the only public figure played for a fool by Yang (I’m assuming that he may indeed be a spy, which – unsurprisingly, perhaps – he hotly denies). To judge by the photographs, he appears to have got on swimmingly with all sorts of other British VIPs, including a couple of former prime ministers.
Leave aside how unlikely it is that Prince Andrew is privy to any secrets that might interest the Chinese. Why single him out for vilification? As far as I can see, on the evidence so far, the only fault of which he may be guilty in this case is being a lousy judge of character. This is hardly an offence deserving total ostracism.
If you ask me, the trouble with Andrew is that he appears to suffer from a mixture of stupidity, arrogance and a phenomenal lack of self-awareness – a most unattractive combination, which makes him very hard to love and all too easy to despise.
But then in fairness, I don’t think we can altogether blame him even for his arrogance or his inability to see himself as others see him. For hasn’t he been conditioned to arrogance from his earliest childhood, by the extraordinary circumstances of his upbringing?
On the evidence so far, the only fault of which he may be guilty in this case is being a lousy judge of character. This is hardly an offence deserving total ostracism, writes Tom Utley
Consider. For the first few decades of his life, before the Jeffrey Epstein/Virginia Giuffre scandal, he was always surrounded by sycophants. They indulged his every whim, laughed uproariously at his feeblest jokes and never stopped telling him what an honour it was to be admitted to his presence.
If we were all as dim as he seems to be, how many of us could survive such sustained royal treatment without feeling a vastly inflated sense of our own wit, wisdom and worth?
As for his shortage of a brain cell or two, this was never more evident than in his immediate reaction to that car-crash of an interview with Ms Maitlis about the shocking allegations arising from his friendship with Epstein.
Unbelievably, he is reported to have thought it went ‘rather well’.
In short, he was too blinkered to see how implausible most viewers would find his bluster about his inability to sweat, and his claim that he couldn’t have had sex with the 17-year-old Virginia Roberts (now Giuffre) in London because he distinctly remembered he took his daughters to Pizza Express in Woking on the day in question.
Nor did he seem to realise how he’d be mocked for his insistence that he didn’t throw a birthday party for the convicted sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell at Sandringham. She had merely come along to a ‘straightforward shooting weekend’.
I reckon Sam McAlister, who wrote a book about the programme on which the Netflix docudrama Scoop was based, put it well in an interview she gave to Town & Country magazine.
‘Prince Andrew is in a really invidious position because effectively what he’s been told all his life is that he’s amazing, he’s brilliant,’ she said.
‘He’s never had a job interview. He’s never had a 360 [an employee evaluation procedure] – you know, he’s not been knocked back in life. So he has an extraordinary capacity for misunderstanding his own capabilities. I call it royal delusion.’
That strikes me as just the right phrase for his condition. Indeed, I read the other day of another member of his family who suffered badly from royal delusion.
I’m thinking of his great-great-aunt Alexandra, the ill-fated last Tsarina of Russia. In the 1890s, she wrote a poignant letter to her grandmother, Queen Victoria, quoted in my friend Frances Welch’s eye-opening, harrowing new book, The Lives & Deaths Of
The Princesses Of Hesse (hurry, hurry, hurry, with only five days left to Christmas).
In it, Alexandra seeks to allay the old Queen’s fears about the perils of marrying into the Russian royal family: ‘You are mistaken, my dear grandmama. Here we do not need to earn the love of the people. The Russian people revere their Tsars as divine beings.’
How she must have wished, on that grim morning in 1918 when she, her husband and children were murdered by Russian revolutionaries in that cellar in Ekaterinburg, that she had listened to her wise old grandmama.
I wonder if her great-great-nephew sometimes wishes he himself had followed his own wise mother’s example, by earning the love of the British people through selfless service.
But come on, it’s Christmas. After all these years of his utter humiliation, is it stupid and wet of me to ask: ‘Can’t we give the poor guy a break’?
On second thoughts, don’t answer that. Just have a very happy one yourselves!