Among the many grim headlines attached to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor over the past few years, this one may well have escaped your attention. A government document detailing his travel expenses, briefly released and then quietly pulled from public view, is hardly as eye-catching as his sunny jaunts with sex-offenders or trips to Woking’s Pizza Express.
But look closer, and this seemingly banal bureaucratic decision tells us something far more revealing about how we ended up here. Because if you want to understand how Mountbatten-Windsor was able to do as he pleased without serious challenge, you don’t need palace insiders or conspiracy theories. All you need is a basic understanding of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, and the way it has insulated the royals from scrutiny for decades.
The document detailed how Whitehall covered the then prince’s overseas travel costs when he was a UK trade envoy in the mid-2000s. It was withdrawn using the Royal Family’s FOI exemption, a rule so broad that officials don’t even have to explain why they are using it.
Unlike ministers, civil servants or local authorities, the Royal Family exists outside the normal transparency framework of public life. Its FOI exemption is absolute: no public interest test, no obligation to explain. Where other parts of the state must justify secrecy, the royals are granted it by default. That might have been more palatable when the monarchy was seen as a harmless national ornament. In the age of Andrew, it simply doesn’t land.
For more than a decade, Mountbatten-Windsor travelled the world as a representative of British trade and diplomacy, frequently blurring the line between official duty and personal indulgence.
His fondness for aircraft, the scale of his travel, and the murky way costs were split between government departments and royal offices earned him the nickname “Air Miles Andy”. Nicknames are one thing; institutional challenge is another. He was immune to scrutiny, not because there were no concerns, but because the systems designed to unearth them simply did not apply to him on account of his birthright.
How liberating it must be to operate in a world with unlimited power and money, where no one can ask you any awkward questions. When spending and decision-making are shielded from public scrutiny, there is little incentive for anyone to probe too deeply. In Mountbatten-Windsor’s case, that meant years in which his role, his travel, and his international relationships went unexamined, even as whispers about his judgement circulated.
When his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein finally detonated into public scandal in 2019, it was treated as a sudden shock. In reality, it was the predictable outcome of a system that had spent years looking the other way. Had his use of public funds been routinely open to scrutiny in the 2000s, the warning signs might have emerged far earlier, and intervention may have been possible before the damage became irreversible.
Instead, the public has endured years of belated outrage, not to mention the totally unedifying spectacle of negotiations over Mountbatten-Windsor’s residence and title.
A 21st-century monarchy can no longer rely on outdated protective shields. Secrecy does not prevent scandal; rather, it incubates it and worsens the pain. And each quietly withdrawn document reinforces the perception that the rules are different at the very top, and the top has something to hide.
Andrew may no longer be a working royal, and his titles have been stripped. But the system that enabled his rise and delayed his reckoning remains fully operational. Rules that might once have been defended as a harmless constitutional peculiarity, in a culture desperately deferential to its monarchy, now look less like a quirk and more like a liability.
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Notably, this redaction happened as thousands of files relating to Epstein were released in the United States, further exposing the scale of his access to the rich and powerful. It is, in many ways, peak British behaviour. At precisely the moment transparency was most needed, our authorities opted for discretion – an instinct that has long served the royals better than it has the public.
The question is not whether Andrew deserves scrutiny, but whether Britain – and its monarchy – is willing to acknowledge that the lack of it is what allowed the problem to grow unchecked, and whether it is prepared to learn from that failure.
Until it does, history will inevitably repeat itself. Quietly, deferentially, and behind closed palace doors.
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