Prince Andrew's fall should seal the fate of the monarchy
TetleysTLDR: The summary
Buckingham Palace’s decision to strip Prince Andrew of his title wasn’t about morality, it was crisis management. The monarchy sacrificed him to protect its brand, just as it has done for centuries: Edward VIII’s fascism was airbrushed into romance, Princess Margaret’s misery was rewritten as duty, and Lord Mountbatten’s alleged child abuse was buried beneath eulogies. Brand Windsor survives through denial, PR, and myth-making. It sells moral virtue while embodying privilege and hypocrisy. The monarchy doesn’t unite Britain, it infantilises it, distracting from inequality and decay. Charles III, the supposed moderniser, is merely caretaker of a decaying institution propped up by propaganda. The Crown sanctifies hierarchy and inequality, binding citizens to a family rather than democracy. Prince Andrew’s fall isn’t reform, it’s a death rattle. The monarchy has outlived its purpose, its legitimacy, and its lies. It’s time Britain ended this hereditary cult. Let Charles III be Charles the Last
TetleysTLDR: The article
When Buckingham Palace announced that Prince Andrew would no longer use the title Duke of York, it was framed as an act of duty: a man putting the dignity of the Crown before his own. But the real story was far darker. This was not contrition. It was containment. A last-ditch effort to stop the Windsor brand from collapsing under the weight of its own hypocrisy. Behind the softly worded press release lay a brutal calculation, that the monarchy could survive the exposure of a prince accused of sexual abuse, but only if it sacrificed him completely. Andrew’s banishment is not evidence of moral clarity; it is proof of institutional fear. Brand Windsor is ruthless because it is fragile. It purges to survive.
Our United Kingdom is nothing of the sort.
The monarchy doesn’t deal in justice; it deals in optics. Andrew was stripped of his military roles, his patronages, and his public duties not because his actions violated moral codes, but because they violated the rules of PR. For years, his ties to Jeffrey Epstein were tolerated. He attended parties, took flights on the 'Lolita Express' and maintained friendships with known predators. None of it mattered until it looked bad.
Once the headlines became unbearable, the Palace moved like a corporation in crisis mode, distancing, disowning, deleting. The man who once strutted around as 'Randy Andy' became the family embarrassment, exiled from the balcony at Trooping the Colour, photoshopped from official portraits, ghosted by the institution that once indulged him. The message was clear: the monarchy would feed one of its own to the wolves if that’s what it took to save the brand.
This wasn't an act of moral evolution - it’s a modern demonstration of the survival instinct that the royal family has honed over centuries. The Windsors, and the lineages that preceded them, have always been adept at one thing above all, self-preservation through sacrifice. When the façade cracks, they cut loose the liability and pretend it never happened.
Consider the first great purge of the modern age, Edward VIII. The official story, polished into myth, tells of a king who gave up the throne for love. How romantic, how noble. The truth, of course, was less poetic. Edward was a Nazi sympathiser whose admiration for Hitler went far beyond polite diplomacy. MI5 monitored him for years. In 1937, after his abdication, he and Wallis Simpson paid a friendly visit to the Führer in Germany, where he gave the Nazi salute. The establishment, terrified of a fascist on the throne, forced him out. But the monarchy could not admit that its king had flirted with tyranny. So it rewrote history. The Nazi King became the lovelorn exile. A constitutional crisis was sanitised into a fairy tale.
This is how Brand Windsor operates: when faced with moral rot, it reaches for the airbrush.
Then came Princess Margaret: vivacious, rebellious, human. She wanted to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, a divorced man. The monarchy, bound by a Church that still forbade divorce, told her she must choose: love or duty. She chose duty and spent the rest of her life drowning in alcohol, cigarettes, and despair. Margaret was punished for wanting to live like a normal person. Her suffering was collateral damage in the monarchy’s endless PR war to appear pure. She became another ghost in the Windsor attic, a reminder that within this family, individuality is a threat, and emotion an inconvenience. The message was the same then as now: humanity is expendable, image is not.
But perhaps the most grotesque example of this institutional hypocrisy is the case of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the revered 'Uncle Dickie', last Viceroy of India, mentor to Charles, murdered by the IRA in 1979, and lauded by the establishment as a sainted figure. The FBI files paint a different picture. Reports described Mountbatten as a pedo with a perversion for young boys. Testimonies from the Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast, an institution later exposed as a nest of abuse linked to intelligence agencies placed Mountbatten among those who preyed upon vulnerable children. The allegations were serious and longstanding, yet the Palace did not respond with outrage, investigation, or even denial. It responded with silence. When he died, his sins died with him, buried under eulogies, naval salutes, and solemn BBC tributes. The abuser was sainted. The victims were forgotten.
Compare that with Andrew. Mountbatten’s crimes were buried because exposure would have endangered the entire establishment. Andrew’s, in the age of the internet, could not be contained. His punishment, therefore, was exile: not for the victims, not for justice, but for optics.
The Windsors are not a family - they are a brand portfolio. Their product is moral spectacle. Their currency is illusion. Every royal wedding, every balcony wave, every syrupy documentary about 'service and duty' is a carefully scripted advert designed to obscure what the institution truly is, an unelected, unaccountable, taxpayer-funded cartel of privilege. The Queen, may she rest in myth, perfected this strategy. Her reign was built not on leadership but on silence, a genius of invisibility that allowed the monarchy to project moral virtue without ever having to demonstrate it. She outlasted crisis after crisis because she understood one thing better than anyone: never explain, never apologise, never be human.
That legacy now burdens Charles. The new King has inherited not a dynasty of devotion, but a debt of deception. The brand is cracking and Andrew’s disgrace has turned the hairline fracture into a chasm.
For all its pomp and pretence of permanence, the monarchy has never been more vulnerable. Its legitimacy rests entirely on the perception of moral authority. Once that evaporates, the game is up. The monarchy is not protected by divine right or constitutional necessity; it is protected by marketing. It has survived because it has convinced enough people that it somehow embodies Britain, that its gilded pageantry is synonymous with national identity.
The country it claims to represent is collapsing under inequality, austerity, and moral exhaustion. In that landscape, the spectacle of inherited opulence looks increasingly obscene. The sight of the King clutching his gold-tipped sceptre while millions queue at food banks feels less like tradition and more like insult. The only people now that support it are the same people that buy Chinese made flags in their hundreds to mount upside down on lamposts at half mast, paint roundabouts and bother Travelodges.
That’s why the Palace acts so ruthlessly when scandal threatens the façade. The Windsor myth depends on the belief that these people are better than us: nobler, purer, more deserving. Andrew’s downfall punctured that myth so completely that even the tabloids, once the monarchy’s bodyguards, couldn’t patch it so the Palace had to amputate.
There is a pattern here as old as the Crown itself: deny, distance, survive.
- Edward’s fascism was denied.
- Margaret’s pain was denied.
- Mountbatten’s depravity was denied.
Andrew’s guilt is denied. Every generation repeats the same ritual of suppression, because the monarchy cannot afford honesty. Honesty would kill it.
The result is a dynasty hollowed out by deceit. A family so obsessed with appearances that it no longer knows what truth looks like. The Crown survives only because it keeps reinventing its own mythology: a little nostalgia, a little contrition, a little bunting. It’s the longest-running reality show in human history, and the ratings are falling.
What’s remarkable is not just the monarchy’s shamelessness, but the system’s complicity in maintaining it. The British state behaves as if the Windsors are an indispensable organ of governance, when in truth they are a parasite attached to it. The courts bend to protect them. The press treads softly around them. Politicians of every stripe, Tory, Labour, Lib Dem bow before them like supplicants before a golden calf. They are the emotional glue that holds a disintegrating nation together. Without them, Britain might have to look itself in the mirror.
Of course it’s all illusion - the monarchy doesn’t unite the country, it infantilises it. It replaces civic pride with celebrity gossip. It distracts us from corruption, inequality, and decay.
Now, in the reign of Charles, the mask is slipping. The younger generation, raised on scandal, cynicism, and social media see through the act. The old spell no longer works.
And then there's ol' sausage fingers himself: Charles III presents himself as a moderniser, climate-conscious, compassionate, a man who talks to plants rather than generals. This is smoke and mirrors, he is not a reformer - he is the caretaker of a decaying institution. He can tweak the curtains, but the house is falling down. He presides over a realm in which the rich grow richer, the poor grow desperate, and the Crown remains the golden symbol of an obsolete class system. His very existence is a contradiction, a man who preaches environmentalism while living in palaces, who speaks of compassion while defending an empire built on theft. Charles may think he can modernise monarchy into moral relevance, but the Andrew affair proves otherwise. There is no 'modern monarchy' only an ancient hierarchy dressed in recycled PR.
If Charles were serious about renewal, he would open the royal finances to full public audit. He would return the Crown Estates to the Treasury. He would dismantle the hereditary system that elevates one bloodline above all others.
Of course he won’t. Because to do so would be to dismantle himself.
The monarchy has outlived its moral credit. It has outlived its constitutional purpose. After centuries of hypocrisy and concealment, it has outlived its welcome. The banishment of Prince Andrew is not a sign of health; it is a death rattle. It shows that the institution has become so brittle that it must cannibalise itself to stay alive. The rot is not in one man, it is in the system that made him untouchable for decades. The Windsors have survived war, empire, divorce, and scandal, but they cannot survive the truth and the truth is this, there is no divine right, no moral superiority, no public service: only inherited privilege defended by propaganda.
If Britain wishes to be a modern democracy, it cannot continue to genuflect before this absurd, anachronistic cult. It cannot teach children that merit matters while worshipping bloodlines. It cannot claim to stand for justice while excusing pedophiles, fascists, and exploiters because they wear crowns.
The monarchy is not the soul of Britain, it is its mask and the mask is slipping. We should let Charles be the last to wear it. Let the line end with him, not in scandal or exile, but in honesty. Let him be remembered not as the third, but as the final. Charles the Last. Not the last King of England, but the last illusion we ever needed one.
The monarchy’s defenders claim it’s merely symbolic. But symbols have power and this one distorts our entire political culture. The Crown legitimises hierarchy. It teaches submission. It makes inequality sacred. Every oath of office, every courtroom crest, every 'God Save the King' is a ritual reminder that Britain’s democracy is only partial, that ultimate authority still flows from blood, not consent. It tells the poor to tug their forelocks and be grateful. It tells the powerful that their status is ordained. This is why politicians protect it. The monarchy props up the entire architecture of privilege. It’s why the press genuflects before it even as it devours celebrities. It’s why no government Tory or Labour, dares to ask whether a hereditary head of state has any place in a 21st-century democracy. To challenge the monarchy is to challenge the very class system it sanctifies. And that is why, even now, Andrew’s disgrace is being managed rather than examined.
More so, it show something our democracy can't hide: that 70% of the land in Britain and a whole House of Parliament belongs to people who are the descendants of people who came over with William the Conqueror in 1066. This is the elephant in the room. How can this country progress when we are tied to custom from over a 1000 years ago? The keystone of this fraud is the monarchy
Many of us swore an oath to the Queen and her 'heirs and successors'. The military, teachers, MPs, police officers: all pledging allegiance not to the people, not to democracy, but to a family. We did it because we were told it was tradition, because nobody ever questioned it. Look at what that oath really means. It binds us to silence. It tells us that loyalty to privilege outweighs loyalty to justice. It demands fealty to an institution that has shielded predators, flirted with fascism, and stolen from its subjects while claiming divine virtue. To swear allegiance to that is not patriotism, it is servitude. It is a moral obscenity. We should never again confuse obedience with honour. Our allegiance belongs to each other, to the common good, to equality, to democracy: not to a fucked up family of hereditary parasites living off the memory of empire.
A bit of shameless self-plugging here. This is www.TetleysTLDR.com blog. It's not monetised. Please feel free to go and look at the previous blogs on the website and if you like them, please feel free to share them.
