He was never going to win, and now he has struck a settlement that will stand as a stain on his reputation, and that of the monarchy
• Stephen Bates is a former Guardian royal correspondent
It was always going to come to this. Prince Andrew’s American lawyer’s statement in New York this afternoon announcing the agreed settlement with Virginia Giuffre sets the seal on the prince’s humiliation over his association with the convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein and his friend, the woman who procured girls for him, Ghislaine Maxwell.
It has cost the prince his much-prized royal position on palace balconies, his perks – all those helicopter flights to golf matches at public expense, all those private flights across the world to shake hands with sheikhs – and all his military ranks, titles and honorifics. No more honorary colonelcies: colonel of the Grenadier Guards, commodore-in-chief of the Fleet Air Arm, to say nothing of the colonelcy of the New Zealand Army Logistic Regiment and the Princess Louise Fusiliers of Canada. All gone. Strangely, he remains a vice-admiral, but the full admiral title will now for ever elude him. He may be a duke, but he is no longer an HRH. The retreat is complete.
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