Portrait of a prince

From handsome heir to scared ghost, Andrew's image shows his decline

- By Fay Bound-Alberti

COMMENTARY ROYAL FAMILY

You will have seen the photograph by now: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly a prince, slumped in the back of a car outside Aylsham police station in Norfolk. His face is corpse-like.

It's a far cry from Randy Andy, the handsome prince with the big teeth and the easy grin. Andrew's face was part of his - and the royal family's - brand. That face on souvenir cups and plates was not merely decorative but an assertion of something ancient: that lineage writes itself in bone structure; that the face of a royal is a symbol, a cipher, a condensed history of power.

In antiquity, the ruler's face was stamped on coins not merely for identification but as a claim: this profile is authority, this jawline is legitimacy, this gaze is the state. Andrew's face was never intended for coinage. Yet its physiognomy was a text that would have been read for centuries as royal lineage.

We can't read faces so easily now. But for centuries, it was used to "prove" how some men, especially rich white men, were morally, intellectually, physically, superior to others.