Home is the sailor

We are in the Silly Season, so the newspapers can be forgiven for including some rubbish. Someone in Whitehall has clearly thought they could earn a few bob by leaking a list to my colleagues

in the Street of Shame, disclosing the details of plans for Royal Funerals. It has given some of the columnists the chance to fulminate once more against Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.

One of the old cliches of my profession as hack and gutter journalist was ‘he’s suffered enough’. Prince Andrew, as he once was, isn’t a very nice chap, by all accounts. My friend Andrew Lownie has written a whole book - ENTITLED - itemising the gross extravagance of Andrew and his awful ex-wife; the dodgy company they have kept; their dreadful sense of entitlement and in Andrew’s case, his foul-mouthed rudenes to underlings. . And we all know that, in common with dozens of other men, he went to stay with Jeffrey Epstein. We hastily add, when writing about the matter, that he has always denied wrong-doing. But he has SURELY suffered enough?

I am not defending anything which Andrew has done, or not done, but having hounded him to internal exile, the journalists are still slavering for blood, in this case the blood cold in his corpse’s veins. He has been stripped of his titles, made to leave his grace and favour house and removed from his honorary position as Colonel of the Grenadier Guards. All this for his association with a man - Epstein - who entertained Presidents, professors, IT millionaires, and other prominent members of Andrew’s family. None of them have been prosecuted, or stripped of their titles, or publicly disgraced.

Now, thanks to the box-wallah in Whitehall who leaked the documents, we learn that there are still plans, when the time comes, to give Andrew a ‘royal’ funeral. And the hacks have gone wild with faux-fury, suggesting that this is an ‘insult’ to the sex-workers and abused young women who accepted money from Epstein for providing honey-traps by entertaining his famous blackmail-victims.

Andrew, like very many men, has behaved in a stupid, selfish, boorish way, whether or not he has commited a crime. He is not a very nice person - again, like very many people. But he is a human being, with a family, with children and grandchildren. We do not know if he has any friends - I would guess not. He is stupid, so he can’t fill his day as others might, by reading or having interesting thoughts on solitary rides in Sandringham. And one day, he will die. Are we really saying that he should not be allowed a funeral?

Obviously, the Royal Family are not going to give him a big public funeral. But is it really worth getting hot under the collar about his being buried at Windsor, or Sandringham, with a royal standard covering his coffin?

When Queen Elizabeth II died, the code word was LONDON BRIDGE. As soon as the Civil Service, the Army and all those concerned received this encoded message, they knew that Her Majesty was dead, and then whoe carefully-planned funeral arrangements could begin.

All members of the Royal Family have such a code attached to their names. The Cabinet Office holds on to the codes and , when the day comes, they wereprogrammed to send out the message to all those concerned – TADCASTER BRIDGE. That was the code they were using to signal the death of the former Prince Andrew. Because TADCASTER is in Yorkshire and he was Duke of York.

Obviously, they will have changed the code name by now. Perhaps to the BRIDGE TOO FAR , or the BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS.

According to the leaked source, his death will be followed by honours and ceremonies which copy what happened in the case of his aunt, Princess Margaret . So, we are not talking here about a huge state funeral. Nevertheless, there would be a period of court mourning. Flags would fly at half mast. And the coffin, when it arrived at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, would be draped with the Royal Standard.

The Royal Family and their advisers have obviously been forced to consider whether this would cause offfence to the sex workers and others who once worked for Epstein. And maybe they think that when the man is actually dead, we can stop, just for a moment, feeling vindictive towards him, and consider his family, who might like to be allowed to bury him with dignity?

His family would be inhuman if they did not want to give him a decent burial, preferably as low-key as possible, but with the dignity befitting the son of a much-loved Queen and the brother of a king, who also knew Epstein, though no one is supposed to say so? Even if Andrew had no scandal attached to his name, he was never going to be given a huge state funeral. His coffin was never going to be trundled through the streets of London on a gun carriage. He was always going to be buried in the relative obscurity, either of Sandringham Parish Church, or of the row of minor-royals’ graves beside the Mausoleum at Frogmore.

In the case of some royal burials in the past, the ceremony happened at night, when it need not become the object of the public gaze. It would seem rather an extreme measure in the case of Andrew. Many people must feel that he paid a very heavy price for his catastrophic friendship with Epstein. We know the names of some of the most illustrious of Epstein’s friends and guests and few of them, apart from Lord Mandelson, have suffered at all. We also know, though libel laws and other factors forbid us from naming them, that there are other people who were just as heavily involved with Epstein, who have never been publicly exposed. The only person involved with Epstein to be sent to prison so far is Ghislaine Maxwell. A woman, we note.

The late Queen was an old-fashioned navy wife. She knew perfectly well how Prince Philip had behaved throughout her mariage.She would have known how her favourite son Andrew, a decorated naval officer for his bravery during the Falklands War, would behave, and how many of his fellow officers behave when their ships came into port. If you had told her that this was a reason for stripping every naval officer of their honours and titles, I suspect she would have thought you were insane.

But, public moods change,

and moral fashions change and no sane person would defend the old-fashioned life of a roue. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has not had a very dignified life and, unlike so many such men, he has had the misfortune of everyone knowing about it.Everyone knows that Andrew Lownie only put a tiny fraction into his book of the mountains of salacious material which as available to him. Everyone knows that Andrew is not the only royal man who has behaved in a way which is nowadays utterly deplored.

In death, though , we either cease to be, or we pass to a judgement more solemn than that dealt out by hacks such as myself. The funeral ceremony , although politenes decrees it is in honour of the dead, is really for the survivors. I liked the retired naval officer who wrote - when this story broke - to say, in the Letters column of a newspaper, that if asked, he would help to carry the coffin of the late duke to his final resting place.

Lord Mountbatten, who was blown up by the IRA, was a naval officer with a chequered reputation, to say the least, almost certainly a paedophile and certainly a by-word among midshipmen and naval ratings . He was given a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, and Richard Ingrams, editor of Private Eye, committed his only known act of cowardice. At the last miniute he pulled a brilliant cover of the mag, which showed a picture of Mountbottom, bearing the simple legend GOODBYE,SAILOR.

The family of Andrew have all often visited the drawing-room at St James’s Palace hung with pictures of great admirals, some of them royal, who have been ornaments of our naval story, or, like dear old King William IV, much loved by the Senior Service. All these portraits are of men whose behaviour would be deplored by current sexual convention .

The royal family deserves to be allowed to bury the former prince decently. And we can all, rather shame-facedly, wonder whether we went too far in our desire to hound and persecute a figure who, however charmless, was not the worst of men - whatever such a phrase might mean.