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King Charles is right to have cast his brother Andrew into the outer darkness but, unlike a politician, he can’t be sacked from his constitutional role as a royal prince and remains eighth in line to the throne.
The oath MPs take upon election is to ‘the King, his heirs and successors’, which still includes Andrew, the poisonous barnacle on the ship of state.
No doubt the beleaguered prince, with his arrogance and puffed-up sense of entitlement, blithely assumed that his scandalous secrets would never be exposed.
But now that they have been, the public have every right to know if such a senior royal has engaged in any law-breaking.
His position is potentially very serious. The revelation that Andrew allegedly sought to save his own skin by digging dirt on Virginia Giuffre – known by Andrew to be a traumatised individual as a result of Jeffrey Epstein’s exploitation of her as a sex slave – is despicable and stomach-churning.
To seek to persuade his Met Police protection officer to do the spade work for him was to pressure the officer to behave corruptly and, in passing on Giuffre’s social security number, Andrew may well have committed an offence under data protection legislation.
What will the Met do with these disclosures? A spokesman said: ‘We are aware of media reporting and are actively looking into the claims made.’
But judging by their track record, I am not holding my breath that anything close to a thorough examination will be carried out.
For the police, it’s long been one rule for the royals, and one for everybody else.
In 2015, Ms Giuffre alleged to the police that she had been trafficked for sex with Andrew when she was just 17. The Met Police policy at the time, in the wake of the #MeToo campaign, was that ‘victims must be believed’. Yet they failed to undertake any meaningful action to test the allegation and, in November 2016, closed the case.
Three years later, after Epstein’s death in prison, they were again urged to investigate and again batted the whole thing away.
They argued that, as most of the alleged offences had occurred outside Britain, it was for authorities in other jurisdictions to take matters forward – despite the fact that there had been an alleged offence of sex trafficking of a minor on British soil.
In 2021 and again in 2024, the Met looked into the case anew following the release of pertinent documents in the US. But again, no further action was taken.
The truth is that the police take a notoriously light-touch approach when it comes to the royals.
Just ask Michael Fawcett, Charles’s former right-hand man. Following his offer to help secure citizenship and honours for a wealthy Saudi national in exchange for donations to the then Prince of Wales’s charities, no charges have been forthcoming.
In every case, from the late Prince Philip being caught not wearing a seatbelt after causing a road traffic accident to Andrew giving a false address to Companies House, our globally respected police force has given the royals a free ride.
What a contrast with other European countries, where monarchies are not considered above the law. In Norway, the son of the country’s Crown Princess was charged in August with 32 offences, including rape.
This ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ attitude of the Met has to end. First, they need to get a statement from the officer asked by Andrew to dig dirt on Ms Giuffre.
Next, they must reopen the inquiry into her allegations, including formally interviewing the prince. In the process, they can solve the mystery of his alibi: whether he really was at Pizza Express in Woking that fateful night in 2001.
The person who would know, of course, is his protection officer at the time. But if Andrew’s police bodyguard did carry out his shameful request to unearth Ms Giuffre’s past – and it should be stressed there is no evidence he did – how can any of the prince’s Met-provided officers be believed?
Norman Baker’s new book on the Windsor family’s finances, Royal Mint National Debt, will be published next month.