What I said about Prince Andrew in 2011

John Finnemore
Feb 20, 2026

Yesterday, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew the Duke of York, was arrested in connection with his time as a British trade envoy. Fifteen years ago, in March 2011, he was in his final few months in that post; and I was on the BBC Radio 4 satirical radio show The Now Show, giving him a little performance appraisal.

I thought it might be of interest now, not because I’m claiming any particular prescience in not thinking much of him - no-one in Britain’s ever thought much of him besides, apparently, the late Queen - but as a record of how much we already knew about him fifteen years ago.

(That said, there were still things we definitely did not know; and also this piece had to be approved by the BBC’s lawyers, as you will clearly see here and there…)

Prince Andrew in happier times. For him.

JOHN: Prince Andrew was in the news again this week. Now, if you haven’t heard the story, you’re probably thinking: ‘How exciting! I expect he’s done something really good, and it’s made everyone say ‘We Love Prince Andrew! He truly is the Duke of our Hearts!’ Well, I hate to disappoint you, but it was in fact a negative story about Prince Andrew, if you can imagine such a thing. MP Chris Bryant asked the following question about him in the Commons:

BRYANT: ‘Isn’t it increasingly difficult to explain the behaviour of the UK Ambassador For Trade, who is not only a very close friend of Saif Gaddafi, but also of the convicted Libyan gun smuggler Tarek Kaituni? Isn’t it time we dispensed with the services of the Duke of York?’

JOHN: To which the Speaker of the House responded:

SPEAKER: “References to members of the Royal Family should be very rare, very sparing and very respectful.”

JOHN: Yes, stupid Chris Bryant. Stupid, disrespectful Chris Bryant for daring to ask if it’s a good idea for us to have an unelected, unqualified Special Ambassador for Trade who is friends with Junior Gaddafi and a gun smuggler. And also, as Mr Bryant didn’t mention, with a billionaire convicted paedophile, whose seventeen year old girlfriend Prince Andrew has his arm around in a photo published this week. Honestly, Chris Bryant should be ashamed of himself.

On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t matter who Prince Andrew’s friends are, so long as he’s doing a good job.

In other news this week, it turns out Prince Andrew is doing a terrible job. Sir Igor Roberts, former Ambassador to Rome, told the Times:

ROBERTS: ‘If I had a criticism it would be that his kind of diplomacy is not mine, in the sense that it has not always led to improved relations with the people he is supposed to be schmoozing’.

JOHN:Which, for a diplomat, is the equivalent of saying:

ROBERTS: He’s a monumental arse who could start a fight with the Dalai Lama in a Prozac factory.

JOHN: Sir Igor went on to say:

ROBERTS: ‘If someone said to me, ‘Why don’t we get the Duke of York to help this British export drive’, my reaction was usually highly negative.’

JOHN: I bet it was. In fact I can’t think of a single sphere of human endeavour, from curing cancer to grouting a bathroom, in which the suggestion ‘Why don’t we get Prince Andrew to help?’ would be met with a response that was anything other than highly negative. Quite honestly, I wouldn’t want Prince Andrew to help if I was running a Prince Andrew lookalike competition, and I had lost all my pictures of Prince Andrew. Prince Andrew is not there to help. Helping is not his thing.

But so what? What did we expect? If as a nation we’re going to ascribe importance to a group of people just because of their birth- and all the polls suggest that as a nation we overwhelmingly do want to do that- then surely we have to take whatever nature and nurture serve up without complaining. Sometimes you get an Anne, sometimes you get an Andrew. You pays your money, and you… fail to be given a choice. That’s very much the point of the system.

But the crucial thing, the one indispensable condition all of this relies on, is that we never give anyone any reason to think that they speak or act on our behalf. Because as soon as you do that, it does start mattering what they’re actually like. So long as Prince Andrew is just Prince Andrew he’s perfectly at liberty, within the limits of the law- which of course there’s no suggestion he has ever broken or would ever dream of breaking- to hang around with gun-runners and paedophiles, and to mysteriously sell his house to a Kazakhstani businessman for three million pounds more than the asking price. I mean, after all, we all have to make a living. Well, not him, obviously, but you know what I mean. None of that, as I’m sure he’d agree, is any of our damn business. But once he’s UK Special Ambassador for Trade, touring the world as our representative, then it becomes our business, because suddenly we run into real danger of people thinking we deliberately picked Prince Andrew because he was the best man for the job, rather than on the basis of his Mum having a pointy metal hat.

So, yes, Mr Speaker, personally I think it is time for us to dispense with these particular services of the Duke of York, or at the very least to be allowed to discuss the question in parliament without getting ticked off for cheeking our betters. And what’s more, any other intrusion of the Royal Family into the sphere of people who are actually elected, appointed, or otherwise accountable should be… what’s the phrase… very rare, very sparing, and very respectful. Thank you.

The last senior member of the British Royal Family to be arrested: King Charles I in 1645. It didn’t end well for him.

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None this time. This is sort of a little bonus edition, partly because it’s topical, and partly to make up for having been so quiet in January. And in that spirit, my slightly eccentric offerings for Spendy Squadron below the cut are 1) The first five things I thought when I saw the above picture of Charles I in the National Gallery, and 2) Three bonus Cerberus pictures and captions I had to cut from the last edition, when I decided to do the dog training manual schtick instead.

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