Stop kicking Andrew when he’s down

I’m an instinctive royalist, as I am a gut patriot. I revered the late Queen, and couldn’t imagine a better or more amiable head of state, but generally I had no strong feelings about her four children.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who followed his father into the Royal Navy, I respected for his perilous service as a helicopter pilot during the Falklands campaign: he served on the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible and flew Sea King helicopters which formed part of the anti-aircraft screen protecting the carriers. This was dangerous work, dropping metal foil to decoy incoming Exocet missiles whose target guidance systems might have locked on to his helicopter instead. The Government is said to have pressed for him to be transferred to desk work, but the Queen insisted he take his chances with the rest of his shipmates. And so he did, surviving to return in triumph to Portsmouth and be greeted by his doubtless proud and relieved mother. Four years ago Andrew wrote on his former wife’s Instagram page that he returned a changed man, having experienced real fear when being shot at.

He remained in the navy for 22 years, and experienced more danger as a helicopter pilot on the type 22 frigate HMS Brazen on the Armilla patrol in the Persian Gulf. He flew one of the two Lynx helicopters, known to the crew as the Brazen’s hussy – not inappropriate given Andrew’s growing reputation in the tabloid press as a Lothario. In 1986 he married Sarah Ferguson, the frisky red-haired daughter of a notoriously lustful cavalry major. It was a family out of a Jilly Cooper bonkbuster. The couple seemed well matched. Despite the tabloids’ best efforts, the British public still appeared to like and admire “Randy Andy”.

I was astonished that summer when my then-girlfriend’s aunt and two young cousins came down to London from Lancashire to help Andrew and Sarah celebrate. They were prepared to stay up all night on the Mall so they could cheer the carriage on its way to Westminster Abbey. The memory conjures a very different world of innocent deference, and profound patriotism. The Queen had just made Andrew Duke of York, which gave the crowd outside the Abbey the chance to cheerfully sing the “Grand Old Duke of York” as his carriage pulled up. The whole event was extraordinarily moving and impressive, especially the music and the wedding ceremony, according to the immortal words of the Book of Common Prayer.

The memory becomes melancholy in light of the subsequent course of Andrew and Sarah’s marriage: the toe-sucking, the money-grubbing, the unsuitable friends, the inevitable divorce. Evidently there is now nothing that either Andrew or Sarah could do which would redeem them in the eyes of the public. The release of thousands of documents by the US Department of Justice has highlighted Andrew’s ill-advised links to the late Jeffrey Epstein and flooded the British media with all sorts of juicy tidbits, both sexual and financial. Andrew has been stripped of titles, comfy residence and any remaining reputation, as politicians and, to be fair, his brother the King, scrambled to keep up with the British public “in one of its periodical fits of morality”, as Macaulay so memorably put it, when opinion turned against Lord Byron in about 1830.

The media have followed up with mostly anonymous accounts of Andrew’s arrogance and selfishness, even as a small child. These tales may be true: I have never met the man, so have nothing to add by way of personal testimony. I was in Doha about twenty years ago when he came through as a taxpayer-funded “trade envoy”, and I remember my Qatari friends laughing about his pomposity and perceived uselessness.

I have however met both his brothers, Charles and Edward. Both struck me as charming and reasonably modest for men in their position – products, I would guess, of a decent family.

I’m inclined to ask that we stop kicking this man when he’s down. If Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor never learned the correct lessons when he was young, he must be learning something now.

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