Home US TOM UTLEY: Prince Andrew seems to be a mix of stupidity, arrogance and lack of self-awareness. So why do I feel sorry for him?

TOM UTLEY: Prince Andrew seems to be a mix of stupidity, arrogance and lack of self-awareness. So why do I feel sorry for him?

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Prince Andrew and ex-wife Sarah Ferguson during the Christmas morning church service in Sandringham, Norfolk, last year

Every Christmas I remember a tick-off from my late mother-in-law, an observant Roman Catholic, after I had made fun of a celebrity for being as thick as brandy butter.

“It’s not a sin to be stupid,” she said.

Her point was that people like me place too much weight on intelligence and view it as a virtue akin to goodness, when we should view it merely as an accident of birth. Those who found themselves a sausage or two short of a full English were to be pitied, not mocked.

Well, I can’t pretend I’ve always adhered to my mother-in-law’s strictness in the newspaper columns I’ve written over the years.

But with her lesson in mind, and in the spirit of Christmas peace and goodwill, I feel moved today to make perhaps the most unpopular suggestion: Shouldn’t we try to be a little kinder to Prince Andrew – or, if not succeed, at least a little more honestly?

I don’t know about you, but I find something ugly about the lynch mob gleefully descending on him once again, this time for his embarrassing association with a man now suspected of being a Chinese spy. It sounds like bullying to me.

To my surprise, I felt a pang of sympathy for him over his withdrawal from yesterday’s traditional Christmas lunch at the Palace for the extended royal family, apparently after pressure from above and a silent word from his ex-wife, Fergie.

Indeed, I am in the same trouble as Emily Maitlis, the interviewer whose whims caused his fall into the abyss. As for this final episode, she and I are both having a hard time seeing exactly what Andrew did wrong.

Prince Andrew and ex-wife Sarah Ferguson during the Christmas morning church service in Sandringham, Norfolk, last year

As she said in a podcast: ‘I don’t understand why this is being laid at the Prince’s door, with so much chastisement and so much blame.

“If Andrew didn’t know this man was a spy, and there’s nothing to indicate he did, why is he being blamed?”

Of course, it is possible that one day evidence will surface of shady financial dealings with the Chinese, or some other impropriety (for example, I would love to know where Andrew found the money to stay at Royal Lodge, Windsor, after his brother the king had stopped his handsome annual allowance).

But unless and until such evidence comes to light, I fail to see why his association with Yang Tengbo would justify his exclusion from the bosom of his family at Christmas.

After all, he’s certainly not the only public figure to be fooled by Yang (I assume he is indeed a spy, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, he vehemently denies). Judging from the photos, he seems to be getting along well with a variety of other British VIPs, including a few former Prime Ministers.

Leave aside for a moment how unlikely it is that Prince Andrew is privy to secrets that might interest the Chinese. Why single him out for slander? As far as I can see, based on the evidence so far, the only fault he could be guilty of in this case is being a poor judge of character. This is hardly an offense that deserves total expulsion.

If you ask me, the problem with Andrew is that he seems to suffer from a mixture of stupidity, arrogance and a phenomenal lack of self-awareness – an extremely unattractive combination, which makes him very difficult to love and all too easy to despise.

But honestly, I don’t think we can blame him at all, even for his arrogance or his inability to see himself as others see him. For has he not been conditioned to arrogance from his earliest youth, by the extraordinary circumstances of his upbringing?

Based on the evidence so far, the only fault he may be guilty of in this case is being a poor judge of character. This is hardly an offense that deserves total expulsion, writes Tom Utley

Based on the evidence so far, the only fault he may be guilty of in this case is being a poor judge of character. This is hardly an offense that deserves total expulsion, writes Tom Utley

To consider. For the first decades of his life, before the Jeffrey Epstein/Virginia Giuffre scandal, he was always surrounded by sycophants. They indulged his every whim, laughed loudly at his weakest jokes, and never ceased to tell him what an honor it was to be admitted into his presence.

If we were all as stupid as he seems, how many of us could survive such sustained royal treatment without feeling a hugely inflated sense of our own humor, wisdom and worth?

As for his deficiency of a brain cell or two, this was never more apparent than in his immediate response to that car crash during an interview with Ms. Maitlis about the shocking allegations arising from his friendship with Epstein.

Incredibly, he is said to have thought things were going ‘pretty well’.

In short, he was too short-sighted to see how unlikely most viewers would find his bluster about his inability to sweat, and his claim that he couldn’t have had sex with 17-year-old Virginia Roberts (now Giuffre) in London because he clearly remembered taking his daughters to Pizza Express in Woking that day.

He also seemed unaware of how he would be mocked for insisting he would not host a birthday party for convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in Sandringham. She had only gone along to a ‘normal shooting weekend’.

I think Sam McAlister, who wrote a book about the show on which the Netflix docudrama Scoop was based, put it well in an interview she gave to Town & Country magazine.

“Prince Andrew is in a very insulting position because what he has been told basically all his life is that he is wonderful and brilliant,” she said.

‘He’s never had a job interview. He’s never had a 360 (an employee evaluation procedure) – you know, he hasn’t set back in his life. So he has an extraordinary ability to misunderstand his own abilities. I call it royal delusions.’

That seems to me exactly the right expression for his condition. I recently read about another member of his family who suffered greatly from royal delusions.

I think of his great-aunt Alexandra, the ill-fated last Tsarina of Russia. In the 1890s she wrote a moving letter to her grandmother, Queen Victoria, quoted in my friend Frances Welch’s startling, moving new book, The Lives & Deaths Of

The Princesses of Hesse (hurry, hurry, hurry, with only five days left until Christmas).

In it, Alexandra tries to allay the old queen’s fears about the dangers of marrying the Russian royal family: ‘You are mistaken, my dear grandmother. Here we don’t have to earn people’s love. The Russian people revere their tsars as divine beings.’

How she must have wished, on that grim morning in 1918, when she, her husband and children were murdered by Russian revolutionaries in that basement in Yekaterinburg, that she had listened to her wise old grandmother.

I wonder if her great-great-nephew sometimes wishes he had followed his own wise mother’s example of earning the love of the British people through selfless service.

But come on, it’s Christmas. After all these years of utter humiliation, is it stupid and wet of me to ask, “Can’t we give the poor man a rest?”

On second thought, don’t answer that. Make it a very happy one yourself!

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