The task of making the prince even vaguely palatable to the public has been called ‘the rebranding job from hell’. But I’ve got a few ideas
History is unfolding all around us. Tragedies are occurring every day. So I was very taken with a recent article addressing the most urgent issue of our time: what can be done to help Prince Andrew’s reputation? As even the staunchest royalist papers have accepted, being forced to deny sexually assaulting a minor – Virginia Giuffre, then 17 – is not a great look for a prince; an even worse one is a prince who insists he “can’t remember” meeting her, despite the inconvenient photograph of Andrew wrapping his mitt around Giuffre’s waist while Ghislaine Maxwell – currently awaiting trial for sex trafficking, a charge she denies – grins in the background, Aunt Lydia with a Cheshire cat smile. Andrew’s “friends” (his what?) insist the photo is clearly faked because “the prince has chubbier fingers”, which, as alibis go, is as ironclad as being at Pizza Express in Woking. The task of making the prince even vaguely palatable to the public is, according to the article, “the rebranding job from hell”, given that, as one strategist beadily noted, he “has no accomplishments or public admiration he can leverage, no day job he can go back to”. Treasonous talk there from the PR industry, and yet not even the Queen could defend her favourite child against any of it.
There is another problem for Andrew’s PR, aside from sheer uselessness, personal unlikability and general idiocy that have wafted off him for most of his adult life. It’s that he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. This has been a lifelong problem. When interviewed in 2017 , he was asked about his various “gaffes”, which included allegedly giving Maxwell and – naturally! – Kevin Spacey a tour of Buckingham Palace and allowing them to sit on thrones; inviting Maxwell and later convicted sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and – but of course! – Harvey Weinstein to his daughter Beatrice’s 18th birthday party; selling his house to the Kazakh oligarch, Timur Kulibayev, for £3m over the asking price, which seemed strangely generous of the buyer, given it had been on the market for years. The prince, as per, denies he has done anything wrong.