As the Profumo affair dragged on and on, with a hungry press whipping itself into a billowing froth over tales of aristocratic sex and Cold War espionage, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, became utterly fed up. “All sense of proportion seems to have gone,” he wrote in his diaries, complaining of a “wretched business” that had been “magnified far beyond its real importance”.
But the affair continued regardless. By October 1963, Macmillan himself had resigned, citing ill health. His government’s authority had been corroded by months of embarrassing headlines about the liaison between his war secretary John Profumo and Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model who had also been sleeping with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché.
Six decades later, Britain finds itself caught up in another news cycle involving privilege, sex, abuse of power and government cover-up. A story that is on one level unseemly and unworthy of such enduring national attention. But on another speaks to a rot in our establishment that justifies the ongoing obsession, and could yet alter the face of British public life.
Much like the Profumo affair, some of the great currents of the age run through the Prince Andrew scandal: paedophilia, MeToo, the abuse of power, hysteria, Chinese spies, Jeffrey Epstein, even Donald Trump. At the core of it all is Virginia Giuffre, now tragically dead, whose posthumous book has reiterated claims, which Andrew has always denied, that the prince slept with her when she was 17.
Virginia Giuffre died in April aged 41
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And much like the Profumo affair, parts of our old establishment view the whole grim palaver as wildly overblown. When Rory Stewart, an heir to Macmillan’s one nation Toryism (if not his high office) and a former tutor to William and Harry, went on the BBC’s Newsnight last week, he was asked about the Prince Andrew scandal and echoed Supermac. There are, he pointed out, “unbelievable things happening in the world”. President Trump is “destroying the global order” and yet our parliament and press are obsessing over allegations that predate 9/11.
His view was greeted with indignance and outrage. Such was Stewart’s despair at the panel’s — and the country’s — midwit parochialism, he ended up staring at the floor in a numb horror. “Are you all right, Rory?” the host, Victoria Derbyshire, asked.
Rory doesn’t seem all right. But does he have a point? How important is this scandal really?
After all, we still don’t know for certain if the allegations of Giuffre, herself an unreliable witness at times, are definitely true. And we probably never will. Regardless though, the Andrew story, which has now been rumbling on for more than a decade, has plenty of calories left to burn.
Members of the House of Commons’ public accounts committee are now pushing for an inquiry into Andrew’s continued residence at Royal Lodge, something the prime minister has indicated he might support. The parliamentary omerta around criticising the royal family appears to be breaking.
Even the Tory shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, has backed calls for the friendless prince to be formally stripped of his titles by parliament and kicked out of his palatial Windsor home. “The public are sick of him,” the Conservative MP said.
Andrew, meanwhile, is indicating he will not go quietly. On Friday, there were reports from his camp that he believes Charles is trying to evict him from his beloved lodge so that Queen Camilla can live there after his death. It’s important to note that Andrew’s home and titles are more than just baubles; they are the foundations of his princely self-regard. Which makes allowing his total public evisceration a fraught business. He may be disgraced, but a cornered desperado prince short of Xbox cash would be a dangerous beast. With the right ghostwriter in place (JR Moehringer anyone?), Andrew undoubtedly has a pretty searing memoir in him. This issue isn’t close to being sorted.
Why does it all matter, though? This is where the Profumo analogy might be helpful. That scandal became epochal not because of its lurid nature (Cliveden bed-hopping, machinegun-wielding Antiguan gangsters), nor even because it helped bring down a prime minister, but because it revealed a kind of entitled decadence among the British ruling class and catalysed the birth of a new, less deferential era.
John Profumo resigned as war secretary in 1963 over his affair with Christine Keeler, below
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The Andrew story matters not because he is a boorish scoundrel who continues to abuse his enormous privilege, but because there are concerns that young, vulnerable women may have been harmed as a result. And also because today’s establishment enabled his behaviour to continue for far, far too long, often at the taxpayer’s expense. This included leveraging his job and position as special representative for trade to pursue his own private activities and business interests over many years.
The Foreign Office, the Department of Business and Trade, Downing Street and of course Buckingham Palace all turned a blind eye to the prince’s behaviour. They then did their best to prevent the story from coming out — and this went to the top. “People are not going to like it, but the [late] Queen was colluding in this,” as Andrew Lownie, the author of Entitled, put it to me in August.
The timing of all this is what makes it so acute. Much like the Profumo affair, it is taking place just as Britain turns a page of its history. With Queen Elizabeth gone, the King severely unwell, Prince Harry alienated and Andrew now excommunicated, the monarchy we all grew up with appears to have reached some form of denouement. “We’re seeing the dimming of the 20th-century monarchy,” says the royal historian Gareth Russell. “The end of the royals as a very large family.”
This speaks to a wider changing of the guard in Britain. Just a few years before the Profumo affair erupted, in a controversial article in the Spectator magazine, the journalist Henry Fairlie coined the modern use of the term “establishment”.
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He characterised it as “the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised in Britain”. By the time the affair was over, coming as it did after revelations of Cambridge spies and the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial, the 1960s had arrived and England’s old establishment was crumbling.
Today it increasingly looks as if our postwar society, the new Britain that emerged in the 1960s, is also beginning to crumble. Worn down by financial crisis, Brexit and the pandemic, our government has now reached a state of dysfunction that goes well beyond the current inhabitant of No 10. Successive governments seem strangely powerless to operate a system that is itself broken, and all over the country voters left and right are looking at populist solutions to fix it.
Just 15 months into his term as prime minister, having won a landslide 412-seat victory last year, Sir Keir Starmer’s government has a shockingly low approval rating of 12 per cent, according to YouGov. Relatedly, trust in government is also at an all time low, with almost half of people saying they “almost never” trust governments, of any party, to place the needs of the nation above their own political party.
The third established pillar of the British state, the Church of England, appears to be heading towards obsolescence. Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury, for failing to properly investigate allegations of child abuse, was greeted with a shrug when it finally came last November.
Last week we learnt that almost one in three churches, some 2,000 buildings, could close by the end of the decade. We’ve just appointed the first female Archbishop of Canterbury and no one seems remotely interested.
Our public mood appears to oscillate alarmingly between outrage and apathy. As our ancien régime fragments and community bonds weaken, many of us now spend much of our time scrolling on our phones, adrift in algorithmic content while the world spins off in ever-more confusing directions. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described this as “liquid modernity”.
The royal family may seem outmoded to some, the British state hopelessly ineffectual, the Church of England a relic, but we corrode these institutions at our peril. They have underpinned centuries of affluent stability on this island.
Yet even amid the squalid carousel of Prince Andrew stories, there is at least the hint of an opportunity for the next monarch, William, to renew his resilient and still popular institution. To expel his uncle and slim down, modernise and open up the monarchy to make it more fit for its 21st-century purpose.
He might look to George V, who became king in 1910 and was presented with all manner of difficult decisions, as the First World War broke out and crowns began to fall all over Europe. George managed to move beyond the Victorian monarchy, anglicising all German royal titles and family names, denying asylum to the Romanovs and accepting a reduction in the crown’s constitutional role. “It may be we’re seeing a new form of that from William, 100 years later,” said Russell.
In one sense, Rory Stewart was right. In the grand scheme of things, whether Andrew can cling on to his titles and his stately home is a fairly trifling matter. If this scandal is remembered at all in 60 years’ time, it will be as something emblematic of a shifting, unsettled nation fed up with the way it is being ruled and seeking to cast off tired orthodoxies. A tawdry, fin de siècle imbroglio that shone a light on the strangeness of this present moment and helped give birth to some overdue changes. Perhaps that will be Andrew’s real legacy.
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