Hey Andy – mind the curtain!

Prince Andrew has always been less a man and more a cautionary bookmark left in the pages of a fading institution. His recent public re-emergence—blinking awkwardly in the light like a chandelier that has somehow learned to sweat—has done the monarchy an unintended favour. He has reminded everyone what royalty looks like when stripped of ceremony: not majestic, not dignified, but faintly helpless. A man raised in velvet who never developed the muscles required for gravity.

For decades, Andrew drifted through life on a cushion of inherited relevance. He opened leisure centres with the solemnity of a surgeon and shook hands with the kind of seriousness normally reserved for peace treaties. Yet the unsettling truth was always there: nothing depended on him. If Andrew vanished tomorrow, the tides would still rise, Parliament would still argue, and the nation would still find other distractions.

That is the peculiar genius of monarchy. It elevates ordinary mediocrity into national theatre. Andrew did not need talent, wisdom, or even basic self-awareness. He needed only a title and the ability to remain upright long enough for photographers to capture him performing usefulness.

But Andrew has gone further. He has pulled back the curtain, revealing the fragile machinery behind the mystique. Remove the uniforms, the trumpets, the rehearsed deference, and what remains is a family business with excellent branding and limited purpose. A hereditary lottery where the winners are burdened with palaces and the losers with sympathy.

What makes Andrew so fascinating is not his scandal or his awkward public performances. It is his emptiness as a symbol. He embodies the strange bargain at the heart of monarchy: the public pretends these people matter, and in return, they pretend to justify existing.

Andrew has failed at the pretending.

He has exposed the monarchy’s greatest vulnerability—that beneath the gold leaf and ceremony lies something alarmingly ordinary. Not divine. Not essential. Just people who won history’s strangest raffle.

And Andrew, perhaps unintentionally, has done the nation a service. He has shown that royalty, when examined closely, is not a pillar of greatness but a relic of habit—kept alive less by necessity than by inertia, and occasionally embarrassed by its own reflection.