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Fallout from the Prince Andrew sex scandal has again erupted in a major crisis for the British ruling class. The royal family have been forced to all but disown him, pushing him to relinquish titles, evicting him from his virtually rent-free mansion and contemplating exiling him to a remote Scottish castle.
Andrew has lived a playboy life that led him into friendship with the billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein’s pimping for the super-rich involved everyone from Donald Trump in the US to the British monarchy.
The royal family is now trying to disentangle themselves from a paedophile sex scandal, but the crisis is not containable. Andrew is only the most nakedly venal of the parasitic royal family.
The monarchy has long been cultivated as a pillar of bourgeois hegemony.
The overthrow and execution of Charles I in 1649 marked the birth of bourgeois rule out of feudalism. The Restoration in 1660 created a constitutional monarchy to safeguard that rule through a political compromise between the old feudal aristocracy and the new capitalist class, solidified by the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and the passing of the Bill of Rights the next year.
Over the centuries, the monarchy served the bourgeois state well. It offered a nominally unpolitical and unifying head of state, shrouded and sanctified by “history” and “tradition”, during the bloody growth of the British Empire. Later it provided a tool of global realpolitik in relations with US and other imperialisms, and newly independent Commonwealth states, as the Empire and Britain’s economic supremacy waned.
The monarchy, particularly in the person of Elizabeth II, gave bourgeois rule an appearance of stability under conditions of economic and political crisis. But the fall of the British bourgeoisie’s international position saw a reckless embrace of the naked speculation of financial parasitism. The royals themselves courted this layer.
At the same time, the royal family as an institution has tried to cut its coat to suit the cloth of social and economic decline. Elizabeth exemplified this. Her heir, the already aged and ill Charles III, is widely seen as a caretaker king, with the monarchy’s hopes pinned on his son, William.
But the very notion of a royal family operates against any such “streamlining” or “rationalisation.” Royals like Andrew—far enough outside succession to the throne to have their public funding shrunk as a gesture towards economy—have turned ever more avariciously to elites who far outstrip them in wealth to sustain their privilege.
Charles’s other son, Harry, and his wife Meghan Markle, left the monarchy to link their fortunes with that world.
His former wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, led the way in courting yuppie layers of the super-rich during the speculative boom of the 1980s. From her, the monarchy learned ways of combining dutiful traditionalism with a “popular touch”. William, groomed by Diana as the future King rather than Charles, embodies this.
Andrew, the least restrained of these leeches, has been the most assiduous in gratifying his personal and financial desires wherever and however he can—to the point of becoming an embarrassment to the Windsors.
It is not that he has gone too far. It is that everyone knows how far he has gone.
The latest trigger was the posthumous publication of Nobody’s Girl, the memoirs of Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre, who committed suicide in April, was procured by Epstein when she was 17 and working at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort.
Epstein pandered her to clients for sex. Giuffre said he paid her $15,000 for servicing Andrew. She called Andrew “friendly enough but still entitled—as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright.”
Giuffre was photographed with Andrew in 2001, when she was 17. He denied the allegations made, but every effort to defuse the situation only made it worse. A 2019 interview with BBC journalist Emily Maitlis, intended to clear his name, was a car crash. Giuffre wrote that it would help her legal team “build an ironclad case” against Andrew.
Andrew told Maitlis, “If push came to shove and the legal advice was to do so, then I would be duty bound” to testify or give a statement under oath. Realising he might actually have to make such a statement, he agreed an out-of-court settlement in 2022.
Andrew paid Giuffre $12 million—reportedly with bridging loans from other royals including his mother—in 2022, hoping to draw a line under his connection with Epstein. He admitted no liability but donated $2 million to Giuffre’s charity for the victims of sex trafficking.
This kept him off the stand over details of his interactions with Giuffre at Epstein’s properties in 2000-2001.
During the Maitlis interview, Andrew claimed to have broken contact with Epstein in 2010, after the trafficker’s initial conviction. He did so, however, in person, claiming this was “coloured by my tendency to be too honourable.” Or to say whatever he hoped would sound good.
However, a 2011 email, now identified as being from Andrew, reassured Epstein they were “in this together,” and concluded, “We’ll play some more soon!!!!”
Giuffre knew the settlement was “designed to avoid” any confession but saw it as “acknowledgement that I and many other women had been victimised and a tacit pledge to never deny it again.” But she agreed only to a year’s silence, so Elizabeth’s platinum jubilee celebrations would not be “tarnished” further. Her book has now reignited the scandal.
According to emails released by US Congress, Andrew told a Buckingham Palace press officer he had passed Giuffre’s personal details to his private protection officer, having reportedly received the details from Epstein’s procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell. With the press about to publish the 2001 photograph, he hoped to launch a smear campaign against Giuffre.
Giuffre said Andrew’s assistants went “so far as to try to hire internet trolls to hassle me.” This was while he was hiding in Balmoral Castle to avoid being served court papers.
Andrew has continued to peddle himself commercially, exploiting the privileges of monarchy.
As part of a 2018 governmental trade delegation to China, hustling an initiative to Chinese businesses, Andrew met President Xi Jinping’s chief of staff Cai Qi. This too has now become politically awkward to the British ruling class, following the collapse of a spying case against two men accused of supplying Cai with information—in the context of an escalating US war drive against China.
To stave off the crisis, the royal family has moved to cut Andrew’s titles further. He has not been “stripped” of them, but under pressure from William above all he voluntarily relinquished his dukedoms. The only person stripped of a title is his estranged ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, who is no longer Duchess of York.
Andrew presented this as an effort “to put my duty to my family and the country first.” He remains a prince.
His daughters also remain princesses, but threatening removal of their titles seems to have been the final lever by the royal family required to force Andrew and Ferguson out of Royal Lodge in Windsor.
That 30-bedroom mansion attracted further public outrage. Andrew paid £1 million for a 75-year “cast iron” lease from the Crown Estate in 2003. Ferguson has been living in a wing of the mansion since 2008, in what has been described as a “mutually advantageous’ arrangement.
Andrew and his ex-wife share a freeloading outlook and benefactors. Ferguson was bankrolled by her “supreme friend” Epstein for 15 years. One royal commentator has now written that “what made them perfect for each other… was that they were both greedy and entitled.”
There had been questions around how Andrew could afford to stay on in the Lodge, with no significant inheritances and receiving no personal allowance from the king. The lease requires him only to pay “one peppercorn” of rent annually, “if demanded.” He has lived virtually rent-free.
He and Ferguson were understandably reluctant to leave. It has been estimated that under the terms of the lease, the Crown Estate will have to pay £558,000 for them to give it up. The concern for both is to maintain their lifestyle, with suggestions that they are each eyeing smaller crown properties.
There was even speculation Andrew could be exiled to the Castle of Mey, on the farthest north coast of Scotland.
The recognition and attempted management of Andrew’s greed and lifestyle is an effort to preserve the monarchy without making things even worse. Likely future Conservative Party leader Robert Jenrick took time out from posing with far-right thugs to say Andrew should not be publicly funded because he had “embarrassed the royal family time and again.”
But formally stripping Andrew of his titles would require an act of parliament, which might stir up another hornet’s nest. This was last done in 1917, against royals fighting for their German relatives in World War One. These included the Duke of Albany, who stayed in Germany and became a prominent Nazi supporter—one of many in the royal family.
Governing Labour politicians have carefully deferred to the monarchy.
When Andrew announced he would not use his titles, a Downing Street spokesman said, “We support the judgement made by the royal family.” Senior Labour figure Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said, “I think the royal family have said that they didn’t want to take up parliamentary time with this. There are lots of other things that Parliament is discussing.”
Andrew embodies the toxic decay of bourgeois rule and its institutions. The revulsion he arouses is natural and welcome—a YouGov poll reported 80 percent support for stripping him of his titles—but this crisis cannot be swept aside by cosmetic airbrushing of titles and stately homes. It is systemic.
Millions of American workers and youth have demonstrated against the authoritarian regime of Trump under the slogan “No Kings.” That is a slogan that must be embraced by the working class in Britain, still confronted by an actual monarchy.
The entire ruling class—pursuing an agenda of social plunder, eviscerating democratic rights and waging trade and military war on a global scale—must be tackled. The monarchy must be overthrown by the working class as part of the struggle for socialism.
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