The royal family is facing a bona fide crisis as questions relating to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor start to be asked of those around him. A centuries-old culture of secrecy has shrouded the royals, but that’s a hopeless anachronism, writes Herald writer Rebecca McQuillan

Only more openness can help the monarchy survive as an institution. Another day, another insight into the life of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Former senior Whitehall officials, speaking to the BBC, say that as UK trade envoy Mountbatten-Windsor charged the public purse for “massage services”. We have no further details – perhaps the prince had a sports injury.

The official says he refused to pay for the massages, but was overruled by his superiors. Taxpayers covered what the official thought were excessive travel-related costs for him and his entourage too. This might deepen public disdain for the former duke but no one is likely to be surprised by it, not given everything we already know about him.

There is no suggestion in this latest story that Mountbatten-Windsor did anything unlawful, but the story matters because it shows how the tentacles of the scandal around the former prince are spreading to other parts of the establishment. How much oversight was there of Mountbatten-Windsor by civil servants in his role as envoy between 2001 and 2011? Was there too much deference? The whistleblower suggests as much.

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All those around Mountbatten-Windsor past and present are now falling under the widening beam of a pitiless searchlight – and that includes the royal family. With arresting officers arriving at the Sandringham estate itself, there’s been open speculation that this chain of events could prove existential for monarchy.

We’re not about to dump them right now. The old arguments for a constitutional monarchy endure, like the continuity it provides, the global reach it has and how a constrained monarch may still be the least worst option as head of state. But the monarch and his family could be said unofficially to be on notice. The contract between the people and a constitutional monarch rests on public consent. The monarchy continues to exist at the public’s pleasure. If the public is displeased, it’s in trouble. In that sense, this is or could easily become, an existential crisis. Support for the monarchy has been broadly in decline, give or take fluctuations, since the early 1980s, and current lacklustre polling numbers are the worst on record.

The latest polling (carried out before Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office) won’t have reassured them. Only 28 per cent of people think the royal family have handled the allegations against for the former Prince Andrew well since they first emerged, down from 37 per cent three months ago. Only 37 per cent of Britons think it would be bad for the country to abolish the monarchy, down from nearly half last November. Around half of people think we’ll probably have a monarchy in 50 years’ time, but that doesn’t mean they are happy about it. And young people are the most likely to be sceptical.

And who can blame them? People are tired of what they perceive as self-serving unaccountable elites. If the wider royal family don’t want to be seen as part of that rotten complex, they have some big changes to make.

The former Prince Andrew (Image: PA)

The king will get some credit for stripping his brother of his titles last year and for making clear last week the authorities had his “full and wholehearted support”. But the royal family is the original unaccountable super-rich elite and successive governments have helped them remain that way.

There is a quite astonishing level of secrecy around the workings of the royal family. It should be said that Andrew’s arrest was separate from previous allegations of sexual misconduct. Virginia Giuffre said she was abused by Jeffrey Epstein from 16 and trafficked to other men. She said the then Prince Andrew sexually assaulted her when she was 17, which he denies. He reached a settlement with her, which did not include an admission of liability, in 2022. It was reportedly financed by his late mother. Virginia Giuffre died by suicide last year.

We do not really know what the royal household think of all this, or what they might have thought about the former prince previously. The royal family have lived by the adage “never complain and never explain” for decades, which fits with a wider habit of giving nothing away. Their status has made maintaining that mystery all the easier.

The finances of the royals, for instance, are shrouded in secrecy. We don’t know how much they’re worth. They can choose whether to pay tax and how much to pay (and the monarch didn’t until the early 1990s). The monarch himself cannot be arrested or prosecuted either in civil or criminal proceedings. He is exempt from around 160 laws, including some on employment and the environment.

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The monarchy is exempt from Freedom of Information legislation. Prince Charles’s “black spider memos” to ministers on a range of matters were only released after journalists took the government to the Supreme Court. Such a lack of accountability might be overlooked in times when the monarch is popular, but in the current climate that forbearance starts to look utterly absurd. Public patience is slowly running out.

Of course the royal family should have to explain how wealthy they are, where their personal wealth comes from and how much is spent on their security, as is routine with other heads of state. They should be subject to Freedom of Information. The royal archives should truly be open to the public. And they should have to pay a fair share of tax.

Some fear that subjecting the royal family to the same scrutiny as politicians would change them beyond recognition and destroy the mystique around them, but that’s Victorian reasoning. It’s the secrecy that now threatens the institution of the monarchy far more than openness would. They are an elite, but how about becoming a new kind which is open, accountable and tax-paying? How much more proud we could then be.

Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on Bluesky at @becmcq.bsky.social and on X at @BecMcQ

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