Show Compassion for Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, Alongside Their Mother: A Perspective by Jan Moir

The recent arrest of the former Prince Andrew on charges of misconduct in public office raises a curious question: will his infamous teddy bears require their own questioning?

As Andrew spent 11 hours under police interrogation, one can only wonder about his attitude towards the officers, whom he has historically derided with derogatory terms throughout his controversial life.

While he may have adopted a more cautious approach during his questioning, Andrew’s overwhelming sense of entitlement likely leaves him feeling as if he is the true victim in this saga.

With the once-mighty House of York now teetering on collapse, the focus turns to the impact on Andrew’s closest family members in the wake of this scandal.

His former wife, Sarah Ferguson, has retreated from the public eye. The damning revelations from the Epstein Files have exposed her unrelenting pursuit of money and her significant role in this unfolding disgrace.

She is now mired in a financial and housing crisis while facing the very real possibility that the father of her two children might be going to jail; all the opportunities that life gave her and Fergie has ended up in the same boat as many a wretched single mum drug addict living in a council estate.

Only with better connections. She is said to have been visiting friends in the French Alps recently before moving on to the United Arab Emirates, a global epicentre for shady money and one of the few places left in the world where the locals might still be impressed by her tattered links to the monarchy.

She has also been spending time with her youngest daughter, Princess Eugenie, who has been in the region for work, attending an art fair in Qatar in her role as a director at dealer Hauser & Wirth.

Police officers outside Wood Farm, on the Sandringham Estate, on the day of Andrew’s arrest

Ah yes. The daughters. The received wisdom is that no matter what happens everyone should be super nice and supportive to Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie in this time of Yorkian strife, but why? Their parents’ sins are not their sins goes the argument – and that is true, up to a point.

Yet just like mater and pater, the girls have never stinted from maximising their royal position to their own advantage, of being unafraid to live big lives of pampered luxury without asking too many questions about where all the funds were coming from.

Along the way, neither daughter has achieved much in the way of personal accomplishment, with perhaps their most noteworthy moment coming when they both sported ridiculous headgear at the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 2011.

‘Once Wore A Silly Hat’ isn’t much of a royal obituary but to be fair, they did give us all a good laugh.

Elsewhere, the most frequent praise you hear about the York sisters is that they have lovely manners, but lovely manners are the very least I would expect from two women raised in a royal family, privately educated, marinated in privilege and afforded the very best of everything, from homes and holidays to opportunities and trust funds. 

So they know how to curtsey, say please and thank you and look interested in bores at cocktail parties? Big deal.

Meanwhile, the tide of sleaze rolling over the Yorks just gets higher and higher and, in the end, it is going to capsize them all.

Beatrice and Eugenie, despite their best efforts to splish-splash nicely in the shallows of purity, have been caught up in the dirty swell.

Spare your tears for the York women, writes our columnist Jan Moir

‘Now we know the former Duke and Duchess of York were effectively bankrolled by Jeffrey Epstein for years’

For now that we know the former Duke and Duchess of York were effectively bankrolled by Jeffrey Epstein for years, and when that wasn’t happening there may have been extra cash coming in from Andrew’s allegedly dodgy dealings as trade envoy, embarrassing questions are being asked about who and what funded the princesses’ luxury lifestyles. 

And what luxury! Back in 2015, when she was a gal-about-town in her 20s, Beatrice went on 17 holidays. Seventeen! That is more than one a month. She skied in Verbier, partied in St Tropez, spent time in Ibiza and lounged on yachts with her rich and famous pals.

At the time she worked at Sony Pictures, earning a salary of £19,500 as an intermediate coordinating producer, intermediate being the key word.

She could barely have been in the office, what with dashing off to sunbathe on teak decks provided by obliging squillionaires and nipping off to Paris on shopping sprees.

Think of all the young people who would have killed for a job in a film company in London, who would have worked damn hard when they got there and made the most of this golden opportunity.

Yet to Beatrice York it was nothing; a fig leaf of professional respectability to mask her jet-set life.

In between travelling the globe with various boyfriends, she had a lot of these niche, rich girl ‘jobs’. She worked as a ‘research associate’ at her mother’s charity Children in Crisis, she interned for an investment firm in London for 16 months before moving to New York to join Sandbridge Capital.

She left there to fulfil her ‘entrepreneurial ambitions’ by launching her own company as a business consultant. 

Sarah Ferguson, formerly the Duchess of York, at a charity gala last year

In an image release by the US Department of Justice, Andrew is seen on all fours over a female

Andrew was arrested and released the same day on suspicion of misconduct in a public office 

Yes, I’m sure lots of firms and enterprises will be frothing at the mouth to sign up and listen to the golden advice from this 30-something self-made hedonist whose chief qualification in life is ‘princess’.

Come on. I suspect what Beatrice knows about business could be written on the back of a stamp, affixed to a postcard addressed to Jeffrey Epstein and adorned with the message: ‘Mummy says thank you for the latest cheque.’

At least she didn’t work in an art gallery – the ultimate trustafarian non-job – like her little sister Eugenie, now a director at posh Hauser & Wirth.

In between doing whatever it is that art gallery directors do, Princess Eugenie launched The Anti-Slavery Collective, a UK-based charity dedicated to raising awareness of and working to end modern slavery and human trafficking. 

You couldn’t make it up. Poor Eugenie was campaigning to free tormented young women from being used and abused by powerful, rich men while her father was allegedly entertaining an ever-changing carousel of them at Buckingham Palace and other royal residences.

How could he do this, to himself, his family, us?

Of course, Beatrice and Eugenie are not the ones who have sinned but all of this, every last bit of their gilded lives, has been leveraged by the fact of their priceless asset of being princesses.

And as they were apparently co-opted more than once to show Epstein’s guests around royal residences it seems unlikely they didn’t know of him or his reputation. 

So spare your tears for the York women. My ducts are dry husks when it comes to this lot of opportunists.

Meanwhile, yesterday’s events must have left Fergie distraught, but as a desperate woman in need of pronto cash she now poses an even bigger threat to the Royal Family.

For she has the ultimate cash-generating weapon at her disposal – a tell-all memoir, one that would make Prince Harry’s Spare look like a parish pamphlet from the Church of Happy Clappy.

It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that if she accuses Andrew of sex crimes and claims that King Charles – or even God forbid, Queen Elizabeth – were aware of his behaviour, that could bring down the monarchy.

Harry wanted to win back the public’s affection and restore his reputation, but Sarah Ferguson has no reputation left to lose.

Damaged people are dangerous, they know they can survive.

Finally, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor might have fondly imagined that his move to the Sandringham Estate might have heralded a fresh start.

In a way it has, for his problems are only just beginning.