Mummy's BOY

From the moment he arrived, Prince Andrew held court in the queen’s heart. Is there nothing the scandal-plagued royal can do to lose favor?

- SIMON USBORNE

You don’t have to delve too far into the royal archives to find two images, taken only five months apart, that now seem to represent different eras. They both feature Prince Andrew. In the first photo, taken in June 2019, the Duke of York has stepped onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace with the royal family to watch a military flyover. The sun is shining, and the Windsors are resplendent in their glinting medals and millinery. Andrew stands tall in the red uniform of colonel of the Grenadier Guards.

Fast-forward to November, and it’s a dank day in England. The leaves have fallen on the grounds of Windsor Castle. Days after his disastrous BBC interview about his relationship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a slightly hunched Prince Andrew is captured riding a horse in the rain.

If the photos seem to document a dramatic descent, they are consistent in one key regard: The queen is by Andrew’s side. On the balcony the prince stands directly to her left, their shoulders almost touching during her official birthday celebrations. At Windsor, just days after Andrew’s withdrawal from public duties in the fallout from that car crash interview, his mother is riding alongside him.

While the Windsor photo was taken with a long lens, the activity was widely interpreted as a public show of support. “The queen knows where the photographers hang out,” says Ingrid Seward, the veteran royal biographer and editor in chief of Majesty magazine. Because, to repeat a phrase that has long echoed around royal palaces and newspapers, Andrew is the queen’s “favorite son.” When his royal and military career entered its dizzying tailspin, the monarch wanted to be seen to be protecting him.