In a YouGov poll from January — conducted before Andrew’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct in a public office, but after the revelations that led him to lose his titles — just over two thirds of Britons said they were in favor of the monarchy. That’s the same as in 2019, before Andrew’s calamitous Newsnight interview. However much opprobrium the ex-prince attracts personally (he has a net approval rating of minus 87), it seems he can’t drag the rest of his family down with him.

The House of Windsor is, if nothing else, resilient. Its history is a history of crises, every one of which it has weathered: Edward VIII’s abdication; Charles and Diana’s divorce; Diana’s death; the subsequent cataclysmic unpopularity; Harry and Meghan’s resignation in 2020. Every one of these was pitched as an existential challenge to the institution of the monarchy, and none of them ultimately was.

But Andrew could be different. That’s the sense you get, at any rate, reading Russell Myers’ new joint biography of the Prince and Princess of Wales, William and Catherine: The Intimate Inside Story. The book is, on the whole, spectacularly boring, perhaps because the Prince and Princess of Wales are too. The several paragraphs on the intricacies of Kate’s family’s party planning business, and the detailed breakdown of her nursery schedule, suggest that Myers had slim pickings from which to build his portraits.

That’s not, however, for a lack of sources. Myers (the royal editor of the Mirror) had access to dozens of people from William and Catherine’s inner circle, both named and anonymous. While this biography is unauthorized, it has also clearly been written with a “team Wales” slant. It would be too much to read William and Catherine as a manifesto for this heir to the throne’s future reign, but it’s certainly sympathetic to his and Catherine’s interests. Unpleasantness tends to get glossed over: the false “rural rivalry” rumor of William having an affair, which eventually made it into a Stephen Colbert monologue on US TV, is only alluded to opaquely as “hurtful and often dangerous speculation… untruths and fake news.”

Wherever William and Catherine risk coming off badly, Myers is keen to give their side of the story — particularly in the case of their disaster-strewn 2022 visit to the Caribbean. Throughout the tour, which took place during what we can now term as “peak woke”, the couple were beset with demands to apologize for slavery on behalf of both Britain and the Royal Family. A photo of the couple having an unscheduled encounter with a group of local children was described as “a white-savior parody” (four years on, it looks touchingly organic and rather sweet).

In Myers’s telling, everything that went wrong happened because William and Catherine were imposed on with bad advice. But it was an experience with an important lesson: in his speech at the end of the trip, William broke with protocol to address some of the criticisms. This, writes Myers, was a sign that “William and Catherine would be approaching things very differently”.

Perhaps most significant, though, are the mentions seeded throughout of William’s antipathy towards Andrew. We learn that, after the Newsnight interview, William lobbied Queen Elizabeth and his father Charles to take immediate action. “He never much liked his uncle and wanted him out of the picture immediately before the rot further set in,” says a source. We discover, too, that William was an early adopter when it came to Andrew: “Long before he was embroiled in the scandal [involving Virginia Giuffre], he’d always thought his uncle was a bit of an ignoramus.”

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The repudiation is so total that you might even feel sorry for Andrew, were it not for everything we suspect about his character and personality (Andrew denies any criminality). But there is a delicate balance here. Yes, the rest of the Royal Family has been insulated from association with Andrew’s misdeeds up to this point. The problem is that much of the family’s current popularity derives from that of Elizabeth II. Unfortunately for her posthumous reputation, Andrew was her favourite child, and she protected him for far longer than is defensible.

“The late Queen sought to protect her son from complete banishment, clinging to the hope that he would one day be exonerated,” writes Myers. “Similarly, while acknowledging that his brother could never return to public duties, Charles attempted to honor his mother’s wishes and for a long time stopped short of pushing for Andrew’s complete banishment.” Elizabeth reportedly contributed £7 million of the £12 million settlement Andrew paid to Virginia Giuffre, who alleged that Andrew had sex with her while she was trafficked by Epstein (Andrew denies this). Another £3 million was taken from the late Prince Philip’s estate, while a further £1.5 million came from unnamed other members of the family: the King recently issued a denial that any of it came from him. It looks, and is, grubby.

That leaves William in a difficult situation. Being Elizabeth’s beloved grandson is an asset, for so long as the public continues to think of her as a benign and morally impeccable woman who shepherded Britain through one century and into another. But if that perception switches — if Elizabeth begins to be seen as a grotesquely indulgent mother who used her privilege to ensure that Andrew’s accuser was paid off rather than heard in court — then the association turns into a liability for William.

Andrew’s conduct has the potential to deeply discredit the whole institution. While Myers refers to the allegations against him, rather prissily, as “a vulgar scandal”, they are more profound than that. The decision to appoint Andrew as a trade envoy (despite what was already known about his worrying associations) points to the alarming cost of habitual deference to the royals. Andrew was already nicknamed “Randy Andy” and the subject of headlines about him “chasing girls”. The government must have realized it was, at best, subsidizing a libertine, even before we heard reports it was bilked for Andrew’s massages.

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The parliamentary maneuvers required to discuss all this in the House of Commons, where criticism of the Royal Family is generally forbidden, puts the lie to the idea of Parliament’s supremacy. The monarchy’s place in the British constitution is underwritten by its shows of deference to our elected leaders — hence the theater of Black Rod having the door slammed in his or her face every year when asking for admission to the chamber on behalf of the monarch. If the public begins to see that as a fiction, the monarchy’s future looks perilous.

The case against Andrew, then, could easily become a case for the abolition of the monarchy altogether. Why, the public might begin to ask itself, should we foster a sub-class of the indolent and entitled — “spares” who are necessary as back-up for the succession, but who almost inevitably become redundant and curdle in their own uselessness. It’s all very well to point to the counter-example of the diligent, hardworking ones like Princess Anne, but there’s no way to stop potential Andrews from being born without tearing the whole institution down. As a secular age made it increasingly absurd for monarchy to rest on the idea of divine right, the royals have claimed authority from its popularity. This has a costly flipside for them: if they’re not likable, or even actively disgusting, their existence becomes hard to defend.

This is why one of William’s most important jobs between now and his accession to the throne is to put as much distance as possible between himself and Andrew: not only to condemn Andrew’s actions (at a minimum, associating with a suspected sex offender), but to make it clear that William was always, always wise to Andrew’s turpitude. Monarchs have always had to be unsentimental about their own family to secure their own rule. Once, you might have had an embarrassing uncle locked in the Tower, and arranged for him to be beheaded (or discreetly strangled) when convenient. Now, the murder is figurative, but no less ruthless.

Myers’s version of William is fair-minded but implacable when the things he cares about are threatened: he is frequently described as “angry” when he perceives either that Catherine has been mistreated, or that someone within the family (usually his brother) has failed in their duties. That’s a trait that will be invaluable as he reshapes the monarchy to fit the sensibilities of a modern nation.

But his greatest weapon may well be Catherine. The descriptions of their relationship offered by Myers are often saccharine to the point of nausea (one source says they embody “love in its rawest, most powerful form”), but there is a hard-edged point to this. Their marriage serves in a way to reconcile the hopes of his bitterly divided parents. Charles and Diana understood themselves, and eventually each other, as victims of the royal machine: both sought to make their sons’ lives a little closer to “normal” than their own had been.

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Catherine is portrayed here as the exemplar of that normality. Not a member of the aristocracy, but a regular middle-class girl he met at university. Not a trembling virgin many years his junior, but a peer and (emotionally, at least) an equal. Not a fairytale princess, but a young woman who takes her work seriously, whether that was her pre-engagement job at the fashion retailer Jigsaw, or her current job as a member of the royals. The snobbish jibes once aimed at Catherine and her family for being new-money social climbers, now look very misplaced.

Strangely, given Myers fetish elsewhere for chronicling every minute detail of his subjects’ lives, there no mention in this book of what I think of as Catherine’s most significant public action. In 2021, after the murder of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens, Catherine attended the vigil in Everard’s honor. She did this not as part of a planned media op, but as a private individual, laying her own flowers.

Even as a longstanding royal cynic, I found it moving. Everard was not much younger than Catherine, living the kind of life Catherine herself might have lived under other circumstances; it also showed that she was one of “us”, even though she was now one of “them”. As a gesture, it was modest and compassionate, and the antithesis of everything Andrew has been accused of. More than anything, it articulated the kind of royal she might be. An ordinary princess — the true inheritor of Diana’s “people’s princess” tag.

Breaking the gilded cage that bred Andrew, or at least bending the bars, is good politics: it shows a rejection of the kind of irresponsible privilege that made his misdeeds possible. It also might be a little more humane for the individuals in the cage. No monarchist should feel comfortable defending an institution that has such apparent power to corrode a man’s morals. Our Royal Family will only be able to retain its special status if, paradoxically, it can assure its subjects that it is (in some ways) just like us. But when it is just like us, will we still remember what it is for?

Tragic figures who overreach themselves and come to nothing are traditionally said to fall prey to hubris: for the ancient Greeks excessive pride or self-assurance. Andrew was already an arrogant young puppy by the time he arrived at prep school, and later had his head swollen even further by being applauded for killing Argentinians. The result of hubris is nemesis, when someone or other cuts you savagely down to size. In Andrew’s case, the agents in question are too numerous to count, but they include one of the most courageous of his victims, his elder brother and — probably above all — himself.

Philosophically speaking, the Greeks were for the most part rationalists, but the tragedians among them knew that life didn’t work like that. Everyone was potentially guilty, not least the innocent. This was because the ancient Greeks saw guilt less as a subjective state than an objective affliction, rather like illness or pollution. Oedipus is a so-called guilty innocent: the fact that he never intended to kill his father, or have sex with his mother, is morally speaking neither here nor there. In fact, he never once justifies his actions by pleading ignorance, to the amazement of the modern mind.

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If Andrew is far from a tragic figure, it isn’t only because he lacks the necessary dignity, but because tragic figures must evoke some kind of sympathy. Aristotle writes of tragedy as evoking in us both pity and fear: fear because the destruction of the hero reminds us of our own sickeningly fragile state, and pity because we need to have some sympathy for the protagonist if his plunge from a great height is to move us. You can’t be an Oedipus or a Hamlet if you’re mostly responsible for your own undoing, as is the case with Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

Andrew doesn’t know very much. No doubt he has some knowledge of ships, horses and dubious commercial dealing, but like almost all of the rest of his family, he’s probably never read a book. This is another way in which he differs from certain classical tragic heroes, whose problem isn’t ignorance but an excess of knowledge. Take Sophocles’s Oedipus, for instance. He is one of the smartest of tragic heroes, not least because he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, by doing so saves his city from destruction. What he doesn’t know, however, is who he is, which is to say who his parents are.

This is also true of Andrew, who of course knows who his parents are but not what ought to follow from this knowledge. To be a prince is to know that you have enormous privilege, but also that you must play it down. You can only maintain it by being suitably discreet about it. In a democratic society, entitlement survives by seeking to conceal itself. The late Queen was said to be horrified by the retinue of cooks, footmen and multi-purpose lackeys that accompanied her eldest son when he descended on some unfortunate friend for a weekend party. She herself went around Buckingham Palace switching off lights to save electricity. If your elite status has no rational foundation whatsoever, but depends in the end on nothing more substantial than the approval of the common people, you don’t flaunt your luxurious lifestyle in ways likely to alienate them.

Instead, you keep in mind the fact that admiration and resentment, veneration and derision, lie cheek-by-jowl in the public mind. You have to make sovereignty look like service. You don’t make public visits to banks, unless they’re food banks. You don’t descend on the offices of transnational corporations but on old people’s homes. Andrew’s problem is that he never learned this golden rule. Rude, bullying, pompous and infantile, he wasn’t only socially superior but actually behaved as though he was, which makes life uncomfortable for those close relations of his who are just as pampered as he — but have the nous to keep quiet about it. He once talked on television about “my first day at public school”, as though to remind us that he wasn’t sent to a back-street comprehensive. To be truly upper-class, by contrast, is to be ignorant of class altogether.

Oedipus does finally come to how little he knows. His search for his own origins leads him to uncover a monster which is no less than himself. At the root of his identity lie murder and incest, a darkness that no mere knowledge can dispel. As with Andrew, the revelation of a sexual transgression brings Oedipus low. In tragedy, you have to be careful what you do, because past events can breed calamitous consequences in the present. What you thought safely buried in the past can return to haunt you. Your own free actions can come to confront you as alien forces. Old ghosts refuse to lie quiet, but rise up to cry out for justice. In the face of this, the tragic protagonist must come to recognize just how frail and finite he is, and only then can he be redeemed.

Lear’s regal delusions run so deep that he has to be hauled through hell for them to be purged. “They told me I was everything”, cries the dethroned king, “’tis a lie — I am not ague-proof”. Caught in a storm, surrounded by fools and madmen, the lunatic monarch comes to acknowledge that he is not everything but nothing (“I am a very foolish fond old man”), and only in this act of self-knowledge can he become something. He has done grave harm to a young woman, his daughter Cordelia, but comes to repent of his crime and beg her forgiveness.

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All this has a political dimension in the play. Knowing his own weakness allows Lear to feel solidarity with the dispossessed:

Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel…
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.

These are not words one imagines Andrew wakes up with on his lips, or indeed the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shakespeare writes in Lear that the“superfluous and lust-dieted man” must have a change of heart and “shake the superflux” to the poor. Excessive wealth and privilege insulate the body from the afflictions of others. A superfluous and lust-dieted man isn’t a bad description of how some now view the former prince. There are those of us who believe that princes are superfluous anyway, so that the phrase “a superfluous prince” is as much a tautology as “business ethics” is an oxymoron; but Andrew has taken that to an extreme. He would now seem, frighteningly, to have absolutely no purpose in being around the place — to be surplus to the needs of humanity. That is indeed the kind of forlorn condition which might lend itself to tragedy. But there’s nothing tragic about justice. However futile his life from here on, he has got his comeuppance. His heart is still beating, which is more than can be said for Virginia Giuffre.

King Charles would no doubt be pained by the suggestion that the finest work of his beloved Bard might be read as promoting some kind of communism, or even social democracy. He once called me “that dreadful Terry Eagleton” because he thought that I didn’t venerate the Swan of Avon sufficiently. Even so, he would have done well to make the work required reading for his delinquent brother, alongside stripping him of his house and titles.