RICHARD KAY: What REALLY went on during Prince Edward’s Andrew visit,
As a small boy deprived of his often-absent parents’ love and comfort, Prince Edward turned for security to his older brother Andrew. It was not the most equal of relationships – Andrew was noisier, bigger and four years Edward’s senior – but for Queen Elizabeth’s youngest child it was a reassuring one.
More than six decades on from those days in the Buckingham Palace nursery, it is the disgraced Andrew who has turned to his closest sibling for consolation.
Now it has emerged that Edward, 62, visited his brother during the Easter holiday – the first member of the Royal Family to do so since Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest on his 66th birthday in February on suspicion of misconduct in a public office.
There has been no such encounter between the King and the former Duke of York in the same period, and he pointedly did not invite him to join the rest of the Royal Family for the traditional Easter gathering at Windsor Castle.
Edward’s visit shows that Andrew does still have support from other family members. As I revealed earlier this year, Princess Anne has also made several ‘buck-up’ telephone calls to her brother.
But the physical presence of Edward at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk is significant. It was Edward, who succeeded his father as Duke of Edinburgh, remember, who was the first royal family member to speak publicly about the crisis as the tidal wave of revelations about Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein threatened to overwhelm the monarchy.
His intervention was timely. After formal statements on behalf of both Charles and Prince William failed to placate critics, Edward addressed the issue in-person and head-on.
Admittedly, he was ambushed at an official media event, but he responded coolly, insisting it was important to ‘remember the victims’ in the scandal – something Andrew famously failed to do in his disastrous Newsnight interview in 2019.
He then made this further point: ‘And who are the victims in all of this?’ Then, without answering his own question, he added ‘a lot of victims in this.’
Many wondered if this was an oblique reference to his brother, who has continued to deny all allegations against him, but whose reputation and name have been utterly destroyed.
Friends of Edward have told me that is not the case, that he was merely emphasising his sympathy for the young girls exploited by Epstein and his vile cronies.
Despite the damage Andrew has caused – and continues to cause – to the image of the House of Windsor, the duke and Anne were at one time urging restraint when other figures were demanding Charles strip their brother of all honours, titles and position – as well as booting him out of his home.
These days, I am told, Edward is more aligned with the general family view. ‘He shares their frustration at all the criticism – more often characterised as a four-letter word – that all of them are copping as a result of Andrew’s actions,’ says someone close to him.
‘It was there that day when he was trying to make a sensible speech on another subject and the first question he was asked was about his brother.’
So, what then are we to make of Edward’s decision to look in on Andrew, which came during a brief family holiday?
In recent years the Edinburghs have spent part of the Easter holiday – though not Easter itself – at Sandringham, staying at Wood Farm where Prince Philip lived out his last years.
But the farmhouse has been temporarily occupied by Andrew following his night-time flit from 30-room Royal Lodge at Windsor on February 2, while he waits for his new home, Marsh Farm, to be readied for his satisfaction.
It means Edward and Sophie were obliged to stay in Sandringham’s Gardens House for their stay, a property sometimes let to the public at £4,110 a week in the high season.
Reports that Edward was sent by the King to have ‘a quiet word’ with his brother because he was ‘dragging his feet’ over the move to Marsh Farm are, however, wide of the mark.
A figure familiar with the situation tells me that the friendly visit had more of a ‘pastoral nature’. Edward is ‘concerned about his brother’s mental welfare’. He feels that a lot of the visceral hatred, much of it online, that has been directed at the former prince has been deeply unpleasant.
It is a view held by other royal insiders. One told me that there was a sense within the family that some members of the public won’t be satisfied until Andrew is ‘on the dole and living in a council house’.
By striking coincidence, the visit came almost exactly 25 years to the week after the royals were reeling from another self-inflicted embarrassment, this one involving Edward and Sophie.
In April 2001 the so-called ‘fake sheikh’ controversy plunged the then Countess of Wessex into a personal crisis after it was revealed she had been duped into making indiscreet remarks about other members of the Royal Family and senior politicians to an undercover reporter.
The affair rumbled on for weeks until Sophie eventually quit her public relations company that she had continued to run since marrying Edward in 1999.
But the saga was far from over. Her husband had his own TV production company, Ardent, and he was accused of using official overseas visits, paid for by UK taxpayers, to drum up business for his commercial enterprise.
Then calamity struck. In September 2001 Prince William began four years at St Andrews University. After an official photocall, media companies agreed to leave the Scottish seaside town so the prince would be free to study without intrusion.
But one TV crew ignored this agreement – and its boss was Prince Edward, whose production company was making a film about his then 19-year old nephew. In the uproar that followed, St Andrews’ Rector, Andrew Neil, now a Daily Mail columnist, said he was almost lost for words. ‘We knew someone would transgress and break the spirit of the agreement we have brokered… but we thought it would be foreign paparazzi, or even a tabloid unable to resist the lure of William at university. We had no contingency plan for it being broken by a company owned by his own uncle.’
Public opprobrium was unrelenting as both Edward and Sophie were accused of trading on their royal status. By the end of the year and under intense pressure from the then-Prince Charles, the pair had ended all their commercial activities and were offered instead roles as junior working royals.
Andrew was then relinquishing his Naval career and was about to take up the post of trade ambassador. The crisis was felt to have been averted. So how incredible that a quarter of a century later, Edward and Sophie are among King Charles’s most trusted circle and Andrew is a pariah.
The story of how the late Queen’s youngest son and his wife, daughter of a tyre company executive, overhauled their image and helped rebuild the Windsor brand, is not only impressive but may, just, offer a redemptive route for Andrew.
There were missteps and uncertainties as they started their royal relaunch. ’They were unsure the public would ever accept them,’ one senior courtier from the time recalls. ‘But the Queen saw something in them both that she was sure would win over the doubters.’
Edward, so close to his father, had inherited Philip’s optimism rather than the gloomy introspection – and entitlement – of Andrew. And in Sophie the Queen saw a consort who would never deliberately seek the limelight or overshadow her husband.
To start with, their roles were closely monitored but as the years passed the Queen came to rely as much on Sophie as she did her own daughter Anne.
The arrival of two late-life grandchildren in Lady Louise and James, now Earl of Wessex, and at 18 fast becoming a Royal Family pin-up, brought added joy to Queen Elizabeth.
As Edward’s star increased, Andrew’s diminished.
When Charles became King, he was also won over by the brother and sister-in-law he had once been so critical of because of their private sector careers.
There were far more working royals when Edward and Sophie began undertaking duties full time for ‘the firm’ than there are today where, as far as the King is concerned, they rank just below William and Kate in their importance.
All in all, it’s a remarkable transformation. Are there any lessons for Andrew?
Despite the closeness of their early days together in the Buckingham Palace nursery and then at school, Andrew and Edward have never lived in each other’s pockets. They are too different for that.
Of the Queen’s four children – Charles and Anne, almost a generation older, were away at boarding school – it was natural for Edward and Andrew to be raised together.
But where Andrew was naughty, rowdy and difficult, Edward was quieter and undemanding. Andrew would bully his brother, steal food off his plate and egg him on to commit some forbidden prank.
Like brothers the world over, they would fight like cats and dogs, but it was never serious.
The nursery staff likened them to Laurel and Hardy, with Andrew always up to mischief and Edward as his foil. As he got older the younger prince became wiser and could make Andrew appear worse than he really was. If Andrew was late for breakfast, he would be certain to find a well-behaved Edward already sitting at the table tucking into his scrambled eggs, a picture of angelic innocence.
Both boys had different attitudes to horses as their experience with their shared a Shetland pony, Valkyrie, showed. Edward was blessed with a good ‘seat’, and a natural sense of balance; Andrew had a habit of falling off and developed an aversion to riding.
He did though enjoy grooming the pony and putting on the tack. So, when Edward was anxious to trot off, Andrew would petulantly try to lead the pony back to the stables.
At Gordonstoun, where Andrew was expected to keep an eye on his younger sibling, the gap between the two widened. Boastful and stand-offish Andrew made few friends whereas Edward kept his head down and made friendships he still has today. He also became head boy, or ‘Guardian’ as it is known at the Scottish school, an honour that was not given to his brother.
Despite their differences there has been an enduring bond between the two. As Andrew’s world has imploded it is his younger brother who is providing the solace of happier days.
