Prince andrew

Friday

Oscar Edmondson

Andrew (Mountbatten Windsor) saves the Chancellor

15 min listen

Happy All Hallows’ Eve, everyone – and there is something spooky going on with Rachel Reeves and a property in Dulwich. Yesterday she was leading the news after admitting to renting out her family home following the move into No. 11 without getting the required licence from Southwark Council. There are a number of mitigating circumstances – not least the fact that the lettings agent said they would obtain the licence – but the Prime Minister has been forced to put out a statement. He backs her, for now, but will he come to regret that? Listen for a rare defence of Rachel Reeves on this podcast from our economics

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Downfall of a duke, double-decker trains in the Chunnel and no more chocolate Penguins

Home Prince Andrew said he would no longer use his titles, including as Duke of York, or his honours; his former wife will be known as Sarah Ferguson and no longer Duchess of York. The posthumous memoirs of Virginia Giuffre repeated her allegations of sexual abuse against him, which he has denied. George Abaraonye, who had rejoiced at the death of the right-wing US campaigner Charlie Kirk, was prevented from becoming president of the Oxford Union by a no-confidence vote against him. Lady Annabel Goldsmith died aged 91. Aston Villa was told by the advisory group responsible for issuing match safety certificates that no Maccabi Tel Aviv fans would be

Peter Jones

How to succeed, Roman-style

Whatever Prince Andrew has done, the succession to our throne is secure. How envious the Roman emperor Augustus would have been! In vain did he offer rewards for faithful marriage and punishments for adultery and such like. The mildest punishment was temporary expulsion from Roman territory; the harshest, banishment in perpetuity to an ‘island or oasis’, with loss of property and citizenship, and death for returning. But Augustus’s only child, Julia, who had five children, took advantage of her husband’s lengthy spells abroad and had (it appears) many lovers, and even assignations in the middle of the forum. She explained the improbable fact that all her children were the very

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Prince Andrew: from playboy to PlayStation

Oh God, not that. That’s all we need, I thought, reading in a long account of Prince Andrew’s current travails that ‘according to visitors to Royal Lodge’, he now ‘spends much of his time playing video games’. Even before all the unpleasantness with Jeffrey Epstein’s child-rape allegations, one of the Prince’s more embarrassing qualities was his appearing as an ‘ambassador’ for this or that – usually accompanied by a helicopter trip to a golf course. Now he’s reduced – no chopper, no putting green; woe is him – to being an ambassador for adults who play video games. As an adult who plays video games, and even writes about them

Wednesday

Michael Gove

Should Prince Andrew be exiled? And how multiculturalism failed in Birmingham

45 min listen

This week on Quite right!: the slow-motion disgrace of Prince Andrew. As Virginia Giuffre’s new book reignites the Epstein scandal, Michael and Maddie ask: how much longer can the monarchy carry its most toxic member? Or should the Duke of York be stripped of his titles and sent into exile? Then to Birmingham, where sectarian politics, bin strikes and football collide. After Israeli fans were barred from attending a Europa League match, Michael and Maddie debate how Britain’s second city became a byword for failed multiculturalism. Has the country finally started telling the truth about integration – or just found new ways to divide itself? Finally, the British Museum’s attempt

Monday

Alexander Larman

I actually feel sorry for Prince Andrew

‘Many would have preferred this book not to be written, including the Yorks themselves.’ So Andrew Lownie begins his coruscating examination of the lives of Prince Andrew and Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, which has excited significant media attention due to its scandalous revelations. Lownie, a historian and literary agent, has pivoted away from an earlier, more conventional career as a biographer of John Buchan and Guy Burgess to the self-appointed role of royal botherer-in-chief. After earlier, similarly scabrous books about the Mountbattens and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, he now finds his first contemporary targets, and the results are predictably marmalade-dropping. Prince Andrew’s decline in public popularity over the past

Thursday

Richard Madeley

I’m torn on capital punishment

There’s no statute of limitations on reporting a government minister’s embarrassing oops-a-daisy. It’s no good them doing a duck-dive, hoping that by the time they resurface everyone will have forgotten all about it. I remember after the Salisbury poisonings in 2018, Gavin Williamson, who was defence secretary at the time, appeared genuinely thrown when I brought up his Vicky Pollard-like comments about the Kremlin (‘Go away and shut up!’) in a live TV interview a few weeks later. I think it’s fair to say the exchange that followed wasn’t his finest hour. So it was when Rachel Reeves appeared on Good Morning Britain last week. It was the Chancellor’s first

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Thursday

Deborah Ross

You'll want to claw your face off: Scoop reviewed

Scoop is a dramatised account of the events leading up to the BBC’s 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. The one he imagined would allow him to put Jeffrey Epstein behind him, but instead put Pizza Express (Woking) on the map, made us want to claw our own faces off with the horror of it, and led to the Queen stripping him of all his royal and military titles. (I think you know you are in trouble with Mummy when this happens.) Although billed as a ‘film’, this isn’t especially cinematic. It’s more like a bonus episode of The Crown but it is phenomenally cast (Rufus Sewell is a revelation)

Wednesday

Friday

Katy Balls

The Sam McAlister Edition

36 min listen

Sam McAlister is a producer and author of Scoops: The BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews from Prince Andrew to Steven Seagal. When she worked for Newsnight, she was the producer who secured the infamous interview with Prince Andrew, conducted by Emily Maitlis. This interview eventually led to Prince Andrew being suspended from public duties and stepping back from all of his patronages. McAlister is now being portrayed by the actress Billie Piper in a coming Netflix adaptation of the Prince Andrew interview. On the episode, she tells Katy about coming from a ‘grafting, entrepreneurial’ family and how that informed her competitiveness; her brief career in law; and the behind-the-scenes story of how

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