It’s time to rein in those who reign over us — the Royal Family are here to serve us, not themselves
Let’s look on the bright side. The richly deserved downfall of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor provides an opportunity to remodel the Royal Family for the 21st Century.
For 1,200 years, the Royals have plundered the public purse to keep themselves living in the manner to which they have become accustomed.
It was the old Duke of Edinburgh who recognised and redefined what he was marrying into. He would call the Royal Family The Firm and ran it as if it were a private company.
The Queen was the chair and Prince Philip acted as CEO. Charles’s role was to learn how it all worked, provide a lineage and await his turn on the throne.
All the rest were entirely superfluous but were provided with titles and sinecures. Andrew was a Prince and the Duke of York as well as a trade envoy.
That ended with the discovery of his sickening exploitation of his position. His titles were stripped from him and he was kicked out of his home, Royal Lodge, Windsor.
He was in no mood to go quietly and reportedly shouted at those in charge of the dead-of-night removal: “But I’m the Queen’s second son, you can’t do this to me.”
And there, in a single, petulant sentence you have the problem: Entitlement. The Royal Family believe – are encouraged to believe – that they have a divine right to reign.
In fact, the power dynamic is much more subtle than that. Despite the bowing, the curtseying, the general deference, they work for us, not the other way round.
Our unwritten constitution allows the monarch to remain on the throne, with a pre-destined succession, only by consent of the people. They reign but do not rule.
The pomp and ceremony, so beloved of royalists and tourists, was designed to suggest power but is merely a hangover from mightier times for the monarch and the nation.
Still, the Royal Family have been here (or somewhere like it) before and have many times proved that they have an uncanny ability to ride out crises.
They weathered the Abdication, Charles’s betrayal of his wife Diana, Princess of Wales, the late Queen’s failure to recognise the public mood after Diana’s death in a car crash.
Then they went back to business as usual. But perhaps not this time. Those whom King Charles thinks of as his People are shocked and revolted by his brother’s behaviour.
The Government – and here, I suspect, we are pushing at an open door – must act to slim down The Firm, make it less costly, bring it under control.
If they do it now, while the Royals are on the back foot, they have a chance of making the Family fit for purpose again. If not, we risk losing the King as head of state.
I have no use, and nor do you, for an elected president. That’s just adding another no-marks political nonentity to the gang of them already in the House of Lords.
Properly managed, the Monarchy brings added value to Britain’s political system. The soft power that seduced President Trump is not to be under-estimated.
But someone – now – has to adopt the role of Richard Addis, cloistered monk-like in his office by Blackfriars Bridge, carrying out a periodic clear-out of his sock drawer.
Andrew is in disgrace and probably soon in exile, perhaps in Dubai; Harry is also cut loose though spending a lot on lawyers to retain some privileges and attempt revenge.
What of the rest of them? Do we have any use for Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh? Doubtless a nice chap, but what does he bring to the party?
Princess Anne? She has worked hard and behaved impeccably but do we really need her to cut ribbons, open buildings and give a royal boost to charities?
Answer: No. Take them off the payroll. No more bodyguards, Rolls-Royces or golden carriages. All except for the King, his heir and a spare.
The palaces are a national asset and need to be properly looked after. And if the Family wish to gather outside church at Christmas and wave to their loyal admirers, that’s fine.
Just not at our expense, thanks very much. The other issues we might examine are transparency, taxes and the idea of duty.
The Civil List was abolished in 2012 when George Osborne was Chancellor. Instead, royal finances were linked to revenues of the Crown Estate. But they remain murky.
Was it ever acceptable that the monarch should decide how much tax they should pay? Despite the labyrinth constructed around their affairs, they should pay their fair share.
I do not believe that King Charles knew nothing of his brother’s repulsive behaviour and friendship with the paedophile financier Jeffery Epstein. He had a duty to disclose it.
At the very least, he must have known that Andrew was enabling Epstein to land his private jet at RAF bases including Northolt, West London. Did he ring alarm bells?
It is time to rein in those who reign over us. If Charles or William find that demeaning or unacceptable, let them make their own way in the world. Just like the rest of us.
*****
Reading the story of how Phil Noble, the Reuters photographer who got the superb shot of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor cowering in the back of a car as he was driven from a Norfolk police station, I was reminded of another picture that will live for ever.
It is the police mugshot of Myra Hindley, the Moors Murderer, taken after her arrest. It shows her as a brassy blonde, defiant, unrepentant, hard as nails.
That picture was taken by the father of an old friend and colleague, former Daily Express chief sub Jon Smith.
Last I heard, fees for its use were still being paid to his father’s estate, which meant to Jon. It was a relatively small but steady source of income.
Noble’s picture (you can call it iconic if you like, but I prefer emblematic) involved by his own admission a lot of luck. “The photo gods were on my side,” he said. Reuters had visited four of five police stations that night hoping to spot Andrew.
“The shutters on the garage at [Aylsham] police station came up and two cars left. One of them he was in.” He fired off as many shots as he could and a single one of them captured the former Prince looking uncharacteristically cowed and chastened.
“Was it the best photo I’ve ever taken?” asked Noble. “No. Is it up there with one of the most important? A hundred per cent.”
*****
A story on my local news website has caused a storm of protest. Well, not a storm exactly. More like a faint breeze gently rustling the leaves on the trees.
The story is a good one. An ambulance worker wheeling a patient – a recent amputee – accidentally tipped him out. He had not followed the guidelines in his training.
He got the patient back in his wheelchair and asked him not to report the matter. Then he gave him £20 to “buy lunch”.
But the man, who suffered further injuries in the fall, did report the incident and the ambulance worker was sacked.
He took his bosses to a tribunal but a judge upheld the sacking and called the £20 a bribe. The story did not jar with readers but the picture illustrating it provoked unease.
It showed an ambulance with, in the foreground, a wheelchair tipped on its side. Gosh, that was nearly as lucky as Phil Noble’s shot of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, right?
Wrong. A note at the end of the caption revealed that the picture was AI-generated. One reader called it “highly questionable and misleading”. It was a “breach of trust”, he said.
Another claimed: “It is a very dangerous path to take.” A third reader added: “It’s lazy at best. A slippery slope.”
I agree with all of them. But a more cynical take on it might be: If you’re going to fake a picture, at least be sure it’s worth the flak and don’t make it as dull as this one.
*****
We can be pretty sure there is no love lost between Tina Brown, former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and Sir Will Lewis, once the youngest editor of the Daily Telegraph, who recently resigned as publisher and CEO of the Washington Post.
In a piece in the latest Spectator, Brown describes Lewis, 56, who stepped down from the Post after sacking a third of its staff, as “one of the media industry’s biggest con artists”.
Brown, 72, repeats accusations that Lewis destroyed 26 million emails in the News International phone hacking scandal and that he “handed over a cache of emails from tabloid journalists to the Met Police in a mass betrayal of all their sources”. Lewis denies doing anything wrong.
Brown, widow of Fleet Street titan Harry Evans, claims: “His [Lewis’s] jargon-laden PowerPoint presentations were a sham.” One featured a bow-tie-shaped graphic that was supposed to show his plan to build subscriptions.
That smacks of DX80, the masterplan to revitalise the Daily Express and make it relevant again. That was dripping in bullshit, too, led by admen with slick, incomprehensible slogans.
It was just a “touch on the tiller”, we were told, but it led us into a vortex of doom.
RICHARD DISMORE
25 February 2026
