The Spare

The thing about Prince Andrew – His Royal Hubris – is that he’s not especially unusual. Not for a royal. Not even for an aristocrat. In fact, he’s almost exactly what you’d expect if you took a man of average ability, insulated him from consequence, handed him a chestful of unearned medals – and one he actually did earn – and then acted shocked when he turned out to be a liability.

Most families have a black sheep. Someone who hoards margarine tubs, or married into crypto. But in aristocratic families, the odds of producing a full-blown walking scandal aren’t just higher – they’re practically guaranteed. When your family tree looks like a coat stand and your childhood is spent being raised by nannies in castles, the result is rarely a well-adjusted adult. What you get instead is someone like Andrew – a man who thinks it’s normal to be on first-name terms with sex traffickers and who still insists he’s the victim in all this.

To be fair – and it’s worth the line – he did serve in the Falklands. As a Royal Navy helicopter pilot aboard HMS Invincible, he flew real missions under real threat, and by all accounts acquitted himself well. For that, credit is due. Unfortunately, it’s just about the only thing on his CV that wasn’t ceremonial, indulgent, or ill-advised.

The rest reads like a work of satire. Trade envoy – until that awkward business with Epstein made the government quietly sideline him like an embarrassing uncle at a wedding. Patron of various golf clubs and yachting societies – naturally. Now stripped of duties, but still rattling around Windsor like a ghost in uniform. The real joke is that none of this is new. The aristocracy has always produced its fair share of dysfunction. The royal version simply happens under brighter lights and with fewer consequences.

There’s a kind of cultivated uselessness that only hereditary privilege can produce. When you’ve never had to find a job, pay rent, or be told you’re wrong, you end up believing you’re infallible. Ordinary people have mates who say, “Don’t be a prat.” Royals have courtiers who say, “Very good, sir,” while watching you stumble into scandals that would finish anyone else. Andrew didn’t fall far from the family standard – he simply got caught in an age where the press can’t be silenced with a stern glance and a hunting party.

It’s not just him, of course. Spare royals have a tendency to unravel. The heir gets the throne. The spare gets resentment, a few baubles, and a life of trying to matter. See also: Edward. See also: Harry. See also: Margaret, if you like your royal dysfunction laced with cigarette smoke and whispered bitterness. Andrew is just the current holder of the flaming baton in a relay of regal embarrassment. And still, we pay for it. Not just with dignity, but with money. Lots of it. He lives rent-free in Windsor, protected and pampered, while the rest of us are told to tighten our belts. His one job – staying quietly out of sight – and even that’s too much.

What makes this more farcical is the fact that the aristocracy already has a solution. Whenever a title is one dodgy cousin away from disgrace, they dig up someone obscure – a cattleman from Queensland or a retired bank clerk in British Columbia – and quietly install them as the 9th Duke of Hypocrisia. The peerage is full of accidental inheritors who were doing just fine baling hay or managing a hardware store when the call came. There’s no reason the same can’t be done with surplus Windsors. Just pick someone untainted, give them the sash and the sword, and quietly keep the rest of the clan in mothballs.

Because at some point, the question isn’t whether Andrew’s a disgrace – it’s why we ever allowed him to be a public figure at all. If he’d been born Andrew Windsor of Guildford, he’d be lucky to manage a garden centre. But he wasn’t. He was born into the national soap opera – and like all soap operas, the plotlines have grown tired, the characters absurd, and the sense of consequence completely vanished.

If we must have a Royal Family – and apparently we must – then the solution is simple. Hide everyone but the monarch and let the rest get a job. No palaces. No honours. No gold-braided nonsense. Just proper CVs, job interviews, and the slow dawning horror of office life. Let Andrew explain to a recruiter that his key skill is not sweating under pressure. Let Beatrice and Eugenie work out how to fund their flats without a family trust. Let the lot of them discover the joys of HR, deadlines, and the sandwich queue at Pret. It’s time they joined the country they claim to represent – the one that lives in the real world.