What Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor did shows Guy Fawkes might have had a point
TetleysTLDR: The summary
Guy Fawkes wasn’t rebelling against democracy, he was rebelling against the corrupt elite who ruled by divine right. Four centuries on, that same class still sits on the throne, now rebranded as the Windsors. The monarchy isn’t a family but a PR machine, a cartel of privilege built on deceit, rebranding, and moral rot. From Edward VIII’s Nazi sympathies to Charles’s friendship with Savile and Andrew’s ties to Epstein, corruption is the family business. Every scandal is met not with justice but with spin, titles stripped, files sealed, blame deflected. The Crown survives not because it’s noble, but because it’s the mask of Britain’s class system, the symbol that tells us hierarchy is destiny. As we burn effigies and cheer fireworks, we’re celebrating the wrong defeat. Fawkes failed to destroy tyranny, we just gave it a castle and called it tradition.
TetleysTLDR: The Article
Remember Remember the 5th November: Gunpowder, treason and plot. Tonight is the night we burn effigies, light fireworks, and half-remember that Guy Fawkes wasn’t trying to blow up democracy, he was trying to blow up the ruling order. The unelected, untouchable, divine-right clique that had run England for centuries. We commemorate his failure with sparklers and hot dogs, but maybe, just maybe, he had a point. Because four centuries later, the same class still rule and the same sense of impunity still festers. Prince Andrew is often painted as the aberration, the black sheep, the one who 'let the side down'. Really? scratch the surface of royal history and you see he’s nothing of the sort: he’s the continuation of a long, seedy tradition of arrogance, excess, sexual misconduct and moral rot. He’s not the outlier he’s a rotten apple on a diseased tree.
The House of Windsor is not a family, it’s a multinational cash enterprise trading in nostalgia, myth and deference. Every crown, every portrait, every “We’re so humbled to serve” speech is marketing collateral for Brand Windsor, the oldest PR operation on earth. But like any brand, it’s only as good as the image it can maintain. And that image was manufactured, quite literally, in a boardroom. The family weren’t even Windsors to begin with. They were the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, German to the bone, a proud branch of the same dynasties that sat on Europe’s thrones before the First World War tore them down. When German Gotha bombers dropped ordnance on London in 1917, the royal brand suddenly became toxic. So King George V did what all good image consultants advise when your name becomes poison, he rebranded. Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was out. Windsor, named after the castle, was in. It sounded solid, Anglo-Saxon, safe. The German roots, the Prussian ties, the Kaiser cousins? All scrubbed away like an embarrassing LinkedIn history. The monarchy didn’t evolve; it re-marketed. That’s the context for everything that’s followed. Brand Windsor has survived two world wars, colonial collapse, divorces, racism scandals, and a son accused of sexual abuse: not because it’s noble, but because it’s ruthless about its image. When the rot shows, the Palace doesn’t reform; it rebrands. The rot itself is heritage stock.
Andrew’s friendship with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, his public arrogance, his financial murkiness, they’re not personality flaws: they’re the family DNA expressed without the usual polish. He’s the product of an institution that has always equated birth with exemption. When he claimed he couldn’t sweat, when he smirked through that car-crash Newsnight interview, when he used public money to settle allegations out of court, he was merely following the Windsor playbook: deny, delay, deflect, protect the brand. And when the brand could no longer absorb the damage, the Firm did what it always does: it sacrificed the expendable to save the crown.
The 'stripping' of titles wasn’t accountability; it was asset protection. He remains a prince without title, still living in royal grace-and-favour housing. The monarchy’s code is simple: the rules apply to everyone else.
If Andrew is the symptom, then his brother Charles is proof that the rot reaches the head. It’s easy to forget because the British press worked overtime to bury it, but Charles spent decades being pals with Jimmy Savile, Britain’s most prolific child abuser. Savile was not a distant acquaintance; he was a trusted fixer and informal adviser to both Charles and Diana. Letters later revealed Charles gushing about Savile’s 'wise guidance'. Savile was given the keys to royal palaces, a knighthood, and intimate access to hospital wards, prisons, and children’s homes all with royal blessing. When the full extent of Savile’s crimes emerged after his death, the Palace stayed silent. No apology, no introspection, no inquiry. The king who lectures on moral duty saw fit to ask a predatory pedophile for PR advice. It tells you everything about what passes for judgement in Windsor circles.
Charles’s mentor, the much-revered Lord Louis Mountbatten, was hardly cleaner. Long celebrated as the last great imperial statesman, Mountbatten’s reputation has been tainted by credible claims supported by declassified intelligence files that he was a predatory pedophile. Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast, the notorious site of systematic child abuse linked to intelligence agencies, has Mountbatten’s shadow all over it. Former residents have testified to his involvement, and MI5 files hint he was a man of low morals with a perversion for young boys. This is the same Mountbatten who was Charles’s beloved honorary grandfather. The moral compass of the Windsors has always pointed towards whoever flatters them most.
Prince Andrew’s behaviour doesn’t stand out when you trace the Windsor-Saxe-Coburg lineage. Edward VII, the playboy king, was a serial adulterer and gambler whose string of affairs with actresses and aristocrats routinely splashed across the papers. The royal baccarat scandal of 1890, when the future king was caught cheating at cards, set the tone for royal immunity, everyone else took the blame, he carried on unscathed. George V, Edward’s son, presented the stiff moral face of empire but ruled his family like a drill sergeant. His brutal parenting scarred his sons for life. The stammering George VI, and even Edward VIII the Nazi-sympathising dilettante, were products of that cruelty. George V was said to have told his eldest: “You’ll ruin yourself just like your brother.” And he did. .Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor, went beyond sleaze into outright treasonous sympathy for fascism. He met Hitler in 1937, gave the Nazi salute, and was investigated for passing secrets to the Germans. Yet he was allowed to live out his days in comfort, his pension intact, because Brand Windsor couldn’t afford another scandal during wartime. Even the Queen Mother, the supposed matriarch of decency, was a snob who despised the working class, saw colonial subjects as the darkies, and opposed decolonisation. Even the Queen, when the was finally shamed into paying taxes, avoided them by hiding her wealth in Panama and the Cayman Islands. That's money that could have paid for hospitals and relieved poverty. The institution has always been morally bankrupt; it just had better lighting.
Every generation of monarchs claims to modernise. Elizabeth II modernised by televising her coronation and letting cameras film her Christmas message. Charles III modernises by talking to houseplants and pretending that green capitalism can save the planet. The structure though, never changes. The monarchy’s modernisation is just a new coat of PR. The hierarchy, secrecy and unearned wealth stay intact. Andrew was caught in the wrong media age. In the past, his behaviour would have been hushed up, the women discredited, the files sealed but in the age of social media, the old courtiers can’t suppress everything. The mask slips, and beneath it we see what was always there, an institution rooted in exploitation, servility and self-preservation.
Compare how the Palace handled Andrew to how any normal institution would handle a scandal. If a senior executive were credibly accused of sexual exploitation, they’d be suspended pending investigation. If found guilty or liable, they’d be dismissed and face prosecution. But Andrew? He 'stepped back from public duties', the royal equivalent of a sabbatical. The £12 million out-of-court settlement didn’t come from his pocket, it came from mummy’s. It’s a masterclass in crisis PR: make it disappear, buy silence, refuse to admit guilt, and hope the next wedding or Jubilee distracts the public. That’s Brand Windsor, ruthless crisis containment. The Crown survives not because it’s virtuous, but because it’s skilled at laundering its image through pageantry. And that’s the punchline, the very reason the monarchy exists in the 21st century. It’s not about service or stability; it’s about distraction. The family provides soft-focus theatre to obscure the class structure they sit atop. Their scandals are absorbed into entertainment, their excesses into gossip, their corruption into ceremony. Andrew is the perfect mascot: a useless man elevated by birth, shielded by power, and deluded enough to believe he deserves either.
When Fawkes and his conspirators plotted to blow up Parliament, they were reacting to a corrupt elite that ruled by divine right, silenced opposition, and punished dissent with torture. We’re supposed to see them as villains. Four centuries on, who’s really been blown up? Not the monarchy, it’s still there, still fattened by public money, still exempt from Freedom of Information laws, still vetting legislation before it passes. We’ve replaced divine right with constitutional sleight-of-hand. We fund palaces while hospitals crumble, bow to unelected monarchs while elected ministers kneel before them. And we call it tradition. The monarchy’s defenders love to say “It’s just pageantry, harmless, symbolic.” This is far from the truth, symbols shape nations. And the symbol we’ve enshrined is this: that birth outranks merit, that image outweighs justice, that money can bury truth. When Fawkes’s effigy burns tonight, maybe we should ask ourselves whether we’ve been burning the wrong villain.
The monarchy’s greatest trick has been to convince us that its survival is somehow tied to Britain’s. The truth is simpler: the Windsors are a cartel of privilege. They’ve survived through propaganda, censorship and the cultivation of celebrity. When Edward VIII flirted with fascism, the state closed ranks. When Mountbatten’s name was linked to child abuse, the files vanished. When Savile prowled the palaces, the press stayed mute. When Andrew was accused of rape, the palace merely recalibrated its optics. Every scandal follows the same pattern: the institution shields itself first, the public second. The family’s motto might as well be Never explain, never apologise. And it works, because too many of us still mistake deference for patriotism.
Prince Andrew is the monarchy stripped of mystique. He is what happens when centuries of entitlement collide with an era that demands accountability. There will be no redemption arc, no noble comeback only the slow erosion of credibility. The king’s friendship with Savile. Mountbatten and Kincora. Edward VIII and Hitler. George V’s cruelty. Edward VII’s decadence. Andrew and Epstein: it’s all one story of power unmoored from morality, of an institution whose legitimacy is nothing more than habit. And like any brand past its sell-by date, it can only repackage for so long before the public stops buying. The fireworks we light tonight are a reminder that the British once knew how to resist tyranny. The tragedy is that we’ve traded rebellion for ritual.
The name Windsor was supposed to cleanse the monarchy of its German guilt, its royal sleaze and its embarrassing cousins. Instead, it merely re-perfumed the corpse. The family that rebranded itself after being bombed by Gothas is the same family that still bombs us with PR: coronations, jubilees, weddings, scandals, repeat. Prince Andrew is not the exception, he’s the honest face of the monarchy the mask off. The monarchy has always been a cesspit of hypocrisy dressed up as heritage. He’s just too stupid to hide it.
The monarchy isn’t just a symbol of privilege, it’s the beating heart of Britain’s class disease. Everything foul in our national bloodstream flows from it: the hierarchy that deems some lives worth more than others, the snobbery that underwrites inequality, the quiet violence of deference that tells working people to know their place. The Crown doesn’t just sit atop the system, it is the system. The public school cliques that run Westminster, the landlords hoarding homes, the financiers bleeding the economy dry, they all take their cue from the same hereditary logic that says power belongs by birthright. And when people see that injustice calcified into tradition, some turn bitter, some turn desperate, and some turn to the far right: a grotesque parody of rebellion against the very order the monarchy sustains. Every fascist surge in this country feeds off the same lie the Windsors embody: that inequality is natural, that hierarchy is destiny, and that your rulers were chosen by God or history rather than greed. The monarchy is not a harmless relic; it’s the living architecture of British injustice, the polished mask of a class system that has spent centuries grinding the rest of us into silence.
So tonight, as the fireworks crack and the effigies burn, let’s stop pretending the villains are long dead. The monarchy didn’t survive by moral right. It survived by deceit, by rebranding, and by convincing a weary public that its parasites were somehow patriotic. Guy Fawkes failed to blow them up. Maybe it’s time we finally stopped lighting fireworks for his failure and started thinking about finishing the job he began, not with gunpowder, but with truth.
I see no reason why this piece of treason should ever be forgot, because treason is just another word for wanting to do something about an inherent abuse that is toxic and harms the country.
Tetley is a left of centre writer and retired musician based in the UK. A former member of the Labour Party, he writes political analysis exposing Britain’s authoritarian drift, the criminalisation of protest, and the erosion of civil liberties.
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