After the disgraced Andrew and, by association, Fergie gave up their royal titles over links to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein last week, the King and Prince William both made it clear that their daughters Beatrice and Eugenie will continue to be princesses – with all the trappings that royal blood brings.
I – and I’m sure many others – am flabbergasted by the decision.
Why should we feel a shred of sympathy for the two pampered princesses who have lived their lives enjoying, unknowingly perhaps, vast privileges and wealth courtesy of their dishonoured father and his dodgy millionaire friends?
And was this really the moment for Charles and his heir to go out on a limb for two non-working royals who have fed, like blue-blooded leeches, off their parents’ connections – and are now mothers and businesswomen in their own right? I think not.
Prince Andrew’s biographer Andrew Lownie, in his bombshell book Entitled, wrote that Beatrice and Eugenie ‘claim they’re modern princesses juggling jobs and children, but they’re just as entitled as their parents’. And he claimed that they, like their parents, have ‘shady’ connections to the super-rich of Saudi Arabia.
Do the King and the Prince not realise that every time the public sees the pair, we are reminded of their awful, money-grubbing parents? Embracing them now only further damages their dwindling support, especially among young people – polls show of Generation Z, upon which the future of the Royal Family depends, only 30 per cent believe the monarchy is ‘good for Britain’.
Of course, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, now known as Mrs Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Mrs Jack Brooksbank respectively, are in no way complicit in their parent’s avaricious association with Epstein.
Yet one has to ask the question: How could Beatrice and Eugenie, then around 21 and 19 years old in 2009 when their mum took them to meet Epstein in his New York mansion to ‘celebrate his release from prison’, not think that it was all a bit odd?
Princess Eugenie, Prince Andrew and Princess Beatrice on the balcony at Buckingham Palace for Trooping the Colour in 2013
Insiders say Prince William is now so deeply concerned about ‘the message Andrew’s presence at any royal events sends to the victims of sexual abuse’ that he will ban his uncle from his coronation
How could they have stuck by their father’s side so steadfastly as more has emerged about his alleged relationship with the then 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre (which he vehemently denies)?
I wonder if they queried why daddy paid an ‘undisclosed settlement’ in 2022 (believed to have been £12million) to quash the ‘Virginia Giuffre v Prince Andrew’ civil lawsuit – funded, it has been reported, by the late Queen and the then Prince Charles?
I’m sure that, ever the loving daughters, they believed their father’s claims that it was all lies. So much so that they must even have dismissed the devastating picture of dad with his arm around his accuser Virginia on the night she claims she was first handed over to him for sex by Epstein’s madame Ghislaine Maxwell, now serving 20 years in an American prison for sex trafficking.
However, I fear that growing up in the luxury of the 30-room Royal Lodge must have made it far less tempting for the girls to give up that gilded world and believe the allegations about their father’s association with a paedophile.
So how their stomachs must have turned when reading, in Virginia’s posthumous autobiography Nobody’s Girl released this week, her recollection that Andrew told her at 17 that ‘my daughters are just a little younger than you’.
With Andrew and Fergie now banished from public life, insiders say Prince William is now so deeply concerned about ‘the message Andrew’s presence at any royal events sends to the victims of sexual abuse’ that he will ban his uncle from his coronation. And so he should.
But King Charles and Prince William need a reality check: they must now go further and ban the princesses, as every time Beatrice and Eugenie appear in public they will again shine the spotlight on their family’s disgraceful legacy – and remind us that their father, still eighth in line to the throne, befriended a paedophile and then repeatedly lied about it.
And, though the King and William might disagree, it is unthinkable to me that the princesses should be invited to the royal Christmas at Sandringham and the traditional walkabout after attending the Church of St Mary Magdalene.
Harsh it may be, but I feel little sympathy for Beatrice and Eugenie, however innocent they may be. They should be self-aware enough to know that their presence at any royal event would be a disastrous distraction – and serves no one but themselves.
If, unlike their parents, they have a shred of decency and indeed care for the future of the Royal family, they could completely disappear from royal life and get on with their happy married lives and children and their successful businesses.
That would be the appropriate way to show respect for the enduring pain suffered by Epstein’s young victims.
