Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was today arrested for the slightly nebulous common law offense of misconduct in public office. The latest episode in the former Duke of York’s disgrace comes after the publication of more Epstein files, which suggest that he may have shared sensitive information with the financier when he was the UK’s trade envoy.

Of all the habitués of Epstein Island, only Andrew and a short-serving prime minister of Norway have so far been arrested. Andrew may be the fulcrum of media attention and public jeering, but of all the glittering disgraced elite, he is the least powerful. He wasn’t even the most powerful British person there — that would be the still unarrested Lord Mandelson, who has also retained his title for longer than his fellow Briton.

For the Royal Family, all of this is extremely awkward. The late Queen Elizabeth, always indulgent to her second son, left a time bomb that only the most skilled of public relations men could defuse. None of this was helped by Andrew’s bovine stupidity. Journalists may want to deify Emily Maitlis for her skills as an interviewer, but Andrew would have still looked terrible if he sat down with a Labubu instead of a probing journalist. His sense of his own importance, enough to drive the most committed monarchist into revolutionary mode, looks pitiable in that context.

King Charles, whose knife-wielding against his own kin becomes more impressive by the day, released a statement that expressed just enough familial sadness to make the message — he’s on his own — appear less harsh than it was. In former times, he would have been sent to govern a colony, but there are precious few of them left. At this stage, it is dubious whether even the Pitcairn Islanders would take him.

Does this affect the monarchy’s position? Certainly, republican activists are salivating. Yet there is no evidence that the Cromwellians are finally going to win. The monarchy’s support, as of January, still stood at 63%. The King and Queen are still cheered wherever they go. Even the late Queen’s reputation has not really suffered. Perhaps people understand that there is something rather unnatural in a mother casting her son away to the claws of the local police force, no matter how badly behaved he was.

None of this is to say that another revelation won’t change things, for the public is hardly in a charitable mood. But the fact that a man who was once second in line to the throne was arrested like a common criminal, when none of the actual oligarchs in the Epstein files have suffered a similar fate, reminds us that Western republics are hardly more transparent or more just than our constitutional monarchy.

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Yuan Yi Zhu is an academic and writer.

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