We all probably felt we had reached rock bottom, looking at that photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on all fours, hovering over some unfortunate young person on the floor.
Whether it is in Ghislaine Maxwell’s house in London, or in Jeffrey Epstein’s New York home, or even in Buckingham Palace to which the former prince invited the unsavoury pair, it does not really matter.
Wherever it took place, the picture contained in the latest tranche of Epstein files has brought us to a new low. And the famous phrase of Victorian journalist Walter Bagehot about the British monarchy – ‘We must not let daylight in upon the magic’ – has never sounded more relevant or ominous.
For this is not merely daylight, it is the blinding, glaring arc-light of publicity. The light of FBI investigators. Accompanied by the demand of the US Congress for answers from our Royal Family. This is the light of attention such as the Royals would never have dreamed in their worst nightmares.
Understandably enough, there are renewed calls for King Charles III to do something. But what can he do?
He has already stripped his brother of all his titles, booted him out of his grace and favour mansion, Royal Lodge in Windsor, and done more or less everything humanly possible to distance himself and the rest of his family and the whole Royal Brand from the taint of Andrew, Fergie, the paedophile Epstein and his ‘madame’ Maxwell.
There is even talk of excluding Andrew from the line of succession. I am no constitutional expert, but I do not actually see how this could be done. And in any case, it would surely just be gesture-politics since, unless there were the most monumental calamity in which the Prince of Wales and all his family were wiped out, there is no likelihood of Andrew getting anywhere near becoming the King.
Yet even to mention the chance of such an outcome is to realise that a monumental calamity has already taken place and that the demolition ball is already crashing against the royal ramparts.
The revelations about Andrew, Fergie and Epstein are among the most devastating to happen not just to the Royal Family, but the monarchy itself. I believe it could be in grave jeopardy as a result.
Let us look at the implications of this. Our monarchy is a fact of our constitution, but if you try to examine quite what it is, and has been, over the centuries you come to realise it is something much more than an anachronistic by-product of history or political convenience.
There are moments in national life – of rejoicing and of grief – where the monarch’s role is irreplaceable. Think of Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph without the royal presence. How bleak it would be if the only non-military figures laying wreaths were dud politicians. Think of the sheer joy bestowed by royal visits to schools, hospitals, factories, and compare this with the boredom, or embarrassment, or rank indifference of being visited by a Cabinet minister.
With a monarch who, crucially, has no political power as head of state, there is continuity and stability without fear of dictatorship. It is no accident that during the terrible years of the 1930s, people looked across to our shores at our constitutional monarchy and wistfully saw how superior it was to the dictatorships of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.
We cherished the illusion that our Royal Family were different, that our King or Queen was a special person, someone we could look up to.
We deliberately drew a veil over their faults. We journalists never reported their illnesses in any detail. Their love lives were simply not mentioned.
Throughout the long marriage of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, although gossips might occasionally murmur that the duke was something of a playboy with an eye for the ladies, barely a breath of scandal ever got into print. The outpouring of grief for Queen Elizabeth II was in part the mourning of a nation who felt they could look to her as a figure of purity and decency, an emblem of what we want the monarchy to be.
It was a very different matter when Queen Elizabeth’s children came to marry, however. Charles, Anne and Andrew all saw their marriages unravel, and the Press conventions of protecting the Royal Family from scandal, rather than exposing them, began to change.
The end of Charles’s marriage to Diana did great damage to the idea of Royalty as magic. It has taken decades for Charles and Camilla to repair it. Now they are older and more frail, the solidity of their relationship has made them very popular in the nation as a whole, and only the most churlish would deny them their happiness together.
But Fergie and Andrew’s greedy, coarse way of life – mercilessly exposed by the Epstein scandal – has done untold damage once again, and this time it could be mortal. Not because of any one particular example of their greed, or corruption, but because the whole story reveals their sense of entitlement.
King Charles, despite having cancer, is doing his utmost to keep the show on the road. The seriousness with which he prepared for his Coronation was a sign of how much he wants us all to believe in the ‘magic’ still, for he knows that the monarchy’s survival depends on it.
Everyone understands there can be no logical or prosaic justification for having a hereditary head of state, and that it would be much more sensible to elect a President.
Only the ‘magic’ prevents us from continuing such thoughts to their logical conclusion. But Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, his appalling ex-wife and their disgusting late friend Epstein are making it impossible to believe in it any longer.
Of course, the decent members of the Royal Family were not actually friends with Epstein; probably, most of them had no idea of his existence.
But they have all been tainted by the Epstein scandal. And it is an ongoing scandal, thanks to its political implications in the US, which will not go away. Indeed, things can get only worse.
