Follow Tom Sykes’ royal reporting at The Royalist on Substack, and get exclusive insight on everything going down behind the palace gates.
Forgive me if I am a little skeptical in my compassion for Prince Andrew following news that emerged this week in both The Daily Mail and The Times. It is one of those suspicious exclusives that lands in two papers at once and immediately makes you think somebody at the Palace had to be involved. Both reports say Prince Edward paid Andrew an Easter visit because he was worried about his mental health.
Of course, this is a line the Palace has tried to wheel out before. Andrew Lownie, the Duke of York’s biographer, has previously expressed concern that this is all part of a softening-up exercise, getting everybody used to the idea that we are now meant to feel sorry for Andrew because he is having such a hard time and his sanity is supposedly at risk.
Back in February, amid the fallout from Andrew’s removal from Royal Lodge, there was a striking suggestion to the Sunday Times that the king feared Andrew might harm himself. Andrew was described as “unstable,” which felt to me like a very strange and very deliberate choice of language.
This time the presentation is slightly different, but the basic message is the same. The Mail says a source claimed Edward and Sophie had dinner with Andrew over the weekend, talked things through, and felt sorry for him, with concern about what was described as his “fragile” state of mind. The Times, meanwhile, framed Edward’s visit as a show of support for his older brother after his arrest, and also suggested Anne is concerned.
I do not for a moment think this is evidence of some dramatic conflict between King Charles and his siblings. Importantly, Edward and Anne’s media management is overseen by the king’s press operation. I simply do not believe stories like this would be put into circulation without Charles’s team’s consent. If they were, it would amount to an extraordinarily aggressive move, and I just do not buy that.
What I think this is, rather, is a weak political signal. In politics, the most valuable signals are always the weak ones, not the obvious ones (anybody can read a strong signal). To me, this looks like a weak signal that Charles is not ready to completely sever contact with Andrew, and that he is prepared to keep some kind of connection going through proxies, through his other siblings, through stories emphasizing pity, family concern, and emotional fragility.
That will annoy Prince William, who believes total amputation is the only solution.
Every time I read a story like this, I think the likelihood of Andrew ever facing serious consequences diminishes a little more. I would not be remotely surprised if the police investigation were one day to simply evaporate. Every sympathetic briefing makes that outcome feel more likely.
On February 3, when Edward was asked in Dubai how the family was coping with the Epstein fallout, he gave an incredibly strange answer: that it was important to remember the victims, and then asked, “Who are the victims in all this? A lot of victims in this.”
It was a super-weird thing to say, but it hints at what we are hearing more openly today: that Andrew himself is being positioned, however subtly, as one of the people we are supposed to see as damaged by all this.
Not guilty, not vindicated, not exonerated in any court of law, but broken and therefore deserving of our human sympathy.
Edward’s quote has been conveniently repunctuated by the British media in a way that slightly changes its meaning. For instance, in The Mail today, the paper quote it as: “I think it’s all really important, always, to remember the victims and who are the victims in all this.”
Once you remove the question mark (see the video above for proof) you change what he might have meant and make it sound more straightforwardly like a generic appeal to remember Epstein’s and Andrew’s victims.
But in its original form, it unambiguously suggested that there were other, perhaps unexpected, “victims” in this story too.
The news line is that Edward visited Andrew because he was concerned about his mental health. It’s a great story. But it also feels very like a coordinated attempt to prepare the ground for mercy.
That may be the road the Palace wants to go down. It is not a road that is going to win many friends.
The British public, like William, has long since made up its mind about Andrew. And asking people to see him now primarily through the lens of suffering, fragility, or family concern is not going to change that. It will only deepen suspicions that the institution is once again trying to protect its own.
Want more royal gossip, scoops, and scandal? Follow all Tom Sykes’ reporting at The Royalist on Substack or listen to The Royalist podcast on YouTube.
