Will Prince Andrew be called to face Parliament?

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0:30the current occupant. Prime Minister. Well it's important in relation to all properties, crown properties, that there is proper a scrutiny. I certainly support that. The two words you do not hear in that question and the answer are Prince and Andrew. But that is what the question is about. Could he be called to give evidence? Keir Starmer seems to think, yes he can. So will we really see Andrew before a select committee of MPs? and where would that leave relations between the government and the palace? Welcome to The News Agents.

1:08The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And the great tradition in Parliament is you never discuss the royal family on the floor of the House and they didn't discuss the royal family on the floor. I didn't know that. Is that a thing? Yeah, completely. Completely. You don't discuss matters to do with the royal family in the House of Commons like that. So that wasn't discussed today. What was discussed today was whether you can, the royal estate can be somehow held to account. So it's literally why Ed Davies says the occupant, he doesn't name him. Yeah. So you can discuss, so the rule historically has been that you can discuss sort of constitutional matters.

1:46So the role of the monarch, succession, the cost of the monarchy, sort of public policy stuff. But any personal criticism of any member of the royal family, the Speaker will rule out of order. If you think back to the whole kind of constitutional questions that were swirling around the divorce of Charles and Diana and what that would mean. Which was announced in the Commons by John Major. Yeah. With permission, Madam Speaker, I wish to inform the House that Buckingham Palace are at this moment issuing the following statement. It reads as follows. it is announced from Buckingham Palace that with regret the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate.

2:28It was but you don't debate the wrong the rights and wrongs and so we didn't get a debate on the rights and wrongs we just said can the Crown Estate be the subject of a select committee inquiry brackets Prince Andrew's lease on Royal Lodge in Windsor and Keir Starmer saying yeah so it absolutely. Well he didn't even say yeah did he he said I support this. do we know what he was supporting? Well he was so again this is all deliberate obfuscation so you know I was speaking to someone at number 10 well what Keir Starmer said was that it means that we could have a select committee looking into the affairs of Crown Estate well if they're going to do look into the Crown Estate and who gets a lease and what the terms of the lease are it would be pretty weird if they didn't mention Prince Andrew in that of course they're going to mention Prince Andrew and I think this is a warning shot again from parliament to the royal family that the way things have been dealt with so far are not good enough and maybe there needs to be some calling to account of prince andrew and this kind of ridiculous arrangement he's got in this 30 room mansion in a hundred acres of windsor great park well i mean if they are serious about bringing andrew before parliament that has not happened there has not been a member of the royal family brought before or summoned before parliament to account for themselves since charles the first and the trial of charles the first and we know how that one ended right like this is it's just something in our constitutional system and our parliamentary system has not been done i mean by the way i think it's actually crazy in some ways that it's not been done certainly with regards to i mean the rules which have been exposed this week which you know are there and it's not like kind of like they're a secret but they're obviously coming in for a bit of scrutiny this week they are crazy they are crazy not least because i mean there's there's lots of sort of elements to it there's two things that i would sort of point out one is is that we talk about having a constitutional monarchy the truth is actually in this country we've got a parliamentary monarchy i.e when it comes down to it it is parliament who chooses who is king who is prince who is prince all of this sort of stuff all this stuff all these titles i know there's been a lot of talk about prince andrew's title this week as if like well he's It's a son of a monarch.

4:40It could never possibly be taken away. These things are ultimately made up. They're just made up. And it is Parliament which decides ultimately or could decide if it chose to exert its power. But Parliament didn't kick this round off. I mean, that came from the palace on Friday night. Yeah, for sure. But if they wanted to, you know, they could do it. And if you want a sort of proof of that in terms of Parliament's ultimate power over the monarchy, just ask Edward VIII in the abdication crisis who was forced basically to abdicate by Parliament. Just ask James II. You know, ultimately, we sort of talk about these things if they're God-given.

5:09We have a parliamentary... Edward VIII is what? What did we ever call him then? Just Edward? Edward VIII. He became the Duke of Windsor. So he retained a title. He retained a title. He was conferred. He was given a title by King George VI, his younger brother. He would have been a prince at one stage, presumably. I think he still was technically a prince, but he was then known as Duke of... And it was the abdication crisis, and you had the players of the British society. So you had the Archbishop of Canterbury of the time, a guy called Cosmo Lang, and you had the Cabinet Secretary. And they decided what was going to happen.

5:37For all our listeners who just think they've wandered into country life. Oh, what a joy. Archbishop Cosmo, please come in. But I think this is why it is so fascinating what has happened today, exactly for the reasons you say, Lewis. When was the last time a member of the royal family was summoned to the Palace of Westminster like that and what happened? And this is, I think, a way of Downing Street, the government saying to Prince Andrew, You've got to get out of Royal Lodge now. Otherwise, this is what might happen next. So just to bring listeners up to date, if they don't know how we've suddenly got to this point.

6:16Yes, exactly. The horse and hounds. Basically, this goes back to a story that the Sunday Times broke in the last 24 hours about the very minimal rent that Prince Andrew pays on his house, Royal Lodge, which is on, it is part of the Royal Estate in Windsor. and the reason he pays a peppercorn rent was because 20 years ago he paid down a big lump sum of eight million pounds I think it was for refurbishments and since then he's paid what they call a peppercorn very very little indeed and it has worked both ways in the sense that you can't have just anyone living on the royal estate because it would be a security risk so they found a way of saying if you repair the house you can have it for a minimal rent and And I was talking to somebody who's quite close to the palace yesterday.

7:05One of the things they said was, you know, everyone goes on about the 30 bedrooms. It is an absolute falling apart state. The Royal Lodge is not luxurious. You want there to be rats crawling around, don't you? I mean, it's pretty hard work to look after something. And eight million pounds probably doesn't go very far. 20 years on, it doesn't go very far with a 30 bedroom house. So they are not weirdly living in a state of huge luxury. I've realised this is like the world's tiniest violin, but it's just to put it in context for people trying to understand whether there is a lot of excess money around Prince Andrew.

7:41And I don't think there is. But one of the questions this goes to the heart of is where is his money coming from? Where is the money coming from? Because there are essentially three places that he could have had his money from. One is public purse. One is what they call a sort of the settlement, you know, which is a special amount of money that goes on the sort of upkeep of the monarchy. And the other is from a personal purse. In other words, his late mother, the Queen, would have left him something. His father would have left him something. Maybe his brother is even paying for him now. We know he's not really earning.

8:18But read Andrew Lowney's book on Prince Andrew. The business dealings of Prince Andrew are arcane. And the line between what was public interest and what was personal gain was forever being blurred in the way that he would conduct his own affairs. And even some of the businesses that were charitable things that he set up at the palace. They also had a business spinoff that Andrew Incorporated was a beneficiary of. But this is what I mean about taking it back to Parliament's lack of scrutiny over the royal family, as if it's kind of like just a bit improper or just a bit rude or it's just not something that's done in this country.

8:54This is the net effect, right? Because people come up with these sort of bizarre kind of excuses, which is to say, well, what's Parliament got to do with the royal family's private money or private wealth? The truth is, when it comes to the royal family, they are the head of state, right? It is very difficult to delineate between where public money starts and their private wealth ends. These things are basically fused together, not least because the British royal family have one of the most opaque sets of financial arrangements of any monarchy, any constitutional monarchy in Europe. You compare them to the Scandinavian monarchies or the Dutch monarchies and so on.

9:28They have this sprawling set of affairs. Remember that they are exempt from things like the Freedom of Information Act. The king pays income tax, but only voluntarily through his own personal choice. They don't pay inheritance. They don't pay inheritance. They do not pay capital gains. And we know so little about, actually. I mean, and I think that that is encapsulated in this story by two things. One, the fact that, as you say, Emily, we didn't even know the guy was paying a peppercorn rent until yesterday. Right. This guy who has been at the centre of this endless set of fiascos and scandals for years now.

10:00We didn't know. It is not a coincidence that that has come out this week. No. As you said yesterday, I think somebody was pushing it an open door if they asked about that. Exactly. But we didn't even know that. And then secondly, as well, we still don't know to this day where that money rumoured to be, you know, 12 million pounds of payment to Virginia Gaffray's family and her at the time in her estate came from paid by Andrew. We still don't know. And there are all these rumours that it was paid for, or at least part of it was paid for by the late Queen. Again, where did the Queen get that money?

10:31People will say, oh, well, it's her private wealth. But she gets a lot of her private wealth from things like the Duchy of Lancaster, which ultimately basically is given to her by us, given to her by the state. How can you say in some ways that's not public money? And therefore, it is possible to say, incredible to say, that we have all at least in some way contributed to that payoff, which I think a lot of people would find. But I do think we get it. I mean, you're right that there is no opacity. We have created this fairy tale, haven't we? When you have a monarchy, there is so much that is not really asked, not really explained.

11:04I mean, how ridiculous that people live in a castle. If you don't like a monarchy, you certainly won't like a castle. You certainly won't like the Queen's golden piano. You certainly won't like a sort of pumpkin coach that drops you up and down the mall with horses. No, because you can have a monarchy and you can have all of those things. And A, you don't need to have all of the bloody hangers on, the sort of endless extended family, as you don't in the Scandinavian countries or in the Netherlands. But also you can have transparency. You can have Parliament being asked aloud to say whatever it likes and ask whatever questions it likes, and it not being treated as just terribly improper and terribly rude to ask those questions.

11:36I think we've travelled incredibly slowly with change. You know, there was a lot of people thinking that after the death of Diana, the relationship between government and the palace would change fundamentally. And, you know, the role that sort of the Blair government played in saying to the Queen, look, you can't just stay at Balmoral. You've got to come back to London. And the people are kind of feeling really unhappy that you're just all squirrelled away in your Scottish estate. And nobody is coming back to talk to the concerns of the British people. And she was brought back. And Parliament did, you know, the government did that.

12:10But genuinely, I think we look at that in a different light today. I mean, knowing what we know now about the vulnerability of those two young princes, young boys, I think we always got the Blair side of things, inevitably, the Campbell Blair side of things. We would never have heard the Queen's side of things. We would never have heard that actually she thought it was far more important to protect the boys who just lost their mother and keep whatever was normalcy going on around them whilst this whole country was losing its, you know, losing its head. And I guess you will never, ever hear from the Queen herself.

12:44There will never be a justification from the royals. But there is another side to that, which is maybe that did come first. But that is the question that I think, Lewis, you're getting at, which is there's got to be an accountability and a transparency about the royal family. And I think that this is all being played out now through Prince Andrew and the kind of huge problems that he's caused the royal family, because you're starting to see some of the absurdities of it. And we've just talked about the possibility of him going before a select committee. Can you imagine the circus that that would be if Prince Andrew is there and has to give evidence?

13:19Because the same thing, it's possible because there could be a pincer movement where the House Oversight Committee in the United States of America says, we also want to speak to him. We also want to speak to him about what he knew and how he can help us with this inquiry. Because don't think the Prince Andrew story is just a British obsession. And they won't care. They won't doff their caps. They won't doff their caps. And I think that Prince Andrew, the situation for him is getting worse and worse. If the calculation was, we'll make this statement on Friday night. I'll say I'm renouncing my titles of whatever of the Garter and Duke of York, and then it will all go away.

13:55Absolutely wrong. This is not going away. I think something that's been underestimated, though, is how deeply uncomfortable this is for the king. There is a world in which we have been sort of led towards thinking, you know, the king's rubbing his hands in glee at seeing all this sort of come to fruition. And I think two things can be true. He doesn't want Prince Andrew in the Royal Lodge anymore. He doesn't want him on the Windsor estate. You know, I was told that he'd quite like, doesn't really want him in Scotland, but that would be the lesser of two evils. He wants him out of the way. The king wants to get on with the stuff he's doing.

14:26He wants to be able to visit the synagogue in Manchester after the killings. He wants to be able to go to the Vatican where he is today and be with the Pope without this kind of hanging over him. And also he's not, you know, this is from people who know him well. He is not a vindictive man. He feels the sibling sort of side of things very intense. It's horrible. You know, he basically doesn't have a sort of vindictive bone of saying, ha, ha, ha, you had this coming to you. He just wants the noise to stop. And so I think as soon as you call Andrew, you are, by implication, making things 100 times more complicated for a monarch who we all know has not been well.

15:01Which is doubtless why Starmer, his reluctance to go well. And they get on very well. The King and Starmer get on very well. They get on well. And there is a long history of prime ministers, especially Labour prime ministers, actually, sort of coming to the monarch's aid, wanting to shield them. I mean, Harold Wilson did in the 60s when there were loads of questions then about royal family finances. And it became like a really big public sort of policy question at the time, a lot of political pressure. He was the one who basically saved the Queen and went in to try and defend her. So I can completely, completely understand that.

15:30I just think that, again, these things sort of all end up linking back, right? Which is that, you know, one of the reasons they're now struggling is precisely because of that opacity, which is that if in other countries in Europe, like Scandinavian countries, Every penny piece of royal family finances is accounted for, scrutinised by their parliaments and their equivalent, the National Audit Office. That doesn't happen here. And so all the questions start to rise more and more and more about where all this money is coming from and where the money came from. The truth with that, Lewis, is that I can see it going down the sort of like MPs expenses things where we hear about, you know, the Chris Hewn trouser press, you know, and it's like, well, did you need the trouser press?

16:06I think it's going to be a bit more than trouser press. That's what I'm saying, though, that I don't think you can marry. I mean, I totally get you. My logical brain of democracy says, of course. But if you are believing in the fairy tale of monarchy, then do we really want to know how much those gold coaches are? Let's go. Well, because it is, because the whole thing is preposterous. But that's the way we do it. As soon as you touch it, it is preposterous. But on that basis, you could justify any amount of opacity at all. And that is how the royal family have done it for decades. But let's go back a step from the financial transparency, which is to talk about the abdication crisis and how that can guide us.

16:43The fact of the matter is, we do not have a written constitution in this country. There are no rules. We can change the rules as we see fit and when we do it. We're very, very flexible. Parliament could strip him, if they wanted to. Parliament could strip him. Exactly. Every title. It could say that he is now Andrew Windsor and will be held accountable as such. Exactly. When the abdication crisis happened, it was a question of what public opinion would bear and the government decided what public opinion would bear and what was the right thing for the government to do, given those circumstances.

17:12And Baldwin and, you know, the archbishop and everywhere else, they kind of thought, right, well, we can't absolutely have him marrying an American divorcee and all the rest of it. He cannot remain king like this. He's got to abdicate the throne. They could decide what they want Prince Andrew to do. If they feel that public opinion is running so far and so fast against him, they could decide that. But they just won't. And I thought... Because that makes a mockery of having a monarch as the head of state. Yeah, but they, I mean, they won't. I mean... They did in the 1930s. Where I think it becomes interesting is William's response to his uncle, right?

17:50I mean, I was told that he thinks his uncle is, quote, beyond hideous. So whatever Charles does or doesn't do, I think the relationship will be very, very different in the next King's reign. But I thought it was very interesting yesterday that Robert Jenrick broke ranks and decided, apparently off his own bat, to basically criticise Andrew directly and to break some of the parliamentary kind of omerta on discussing this. And I think that does tell you something, and you're seeing it more and more among parliamentarians expressing more and more frustration. You heard Starmer today say what he did.

18:21He could have just said, no, no, no, no, no, this is a matter for the palace, which is what the line was at the weekend. He didn't. I can completely understand the king's reluctance to see any parliamentary process because it's obviously very uncomfortable for them. I mean, Emily, you're right. In one sense, if Parliament then decides to start legislating to take, you know, formally dukedoms away. Yeah, that's an uncomfortable precedent for them. Right. And it does conjure these memories, John, of the abdication crisis, which still is a sort of running sort of saw and not a happy episode for the British royal family.

18:50But I do think it is interesting that you're starting to see it. This isn't going away. Right. It's not going away. and MPs, because they are directly elected, are representing their constituents' unhappiness with this. And I think it'll be very interesting to see whether... Don't you just think that Jenrick was kind of... I mean, I just heard that and I thought, oh my God, you're just jumping on a bandwagon here. You could have said this at any time in the last five years. But the fact that he's made the calculation that if I jump on this bandwagon, I will get a huge amount of support... Well, he jumps on a lot of bandwagons.

19:18...from the press and from others. I think there is... Anna Davey doing it and others. And even Rachel Reeves yesterday again, saying there should be more scrutiny. You can just feel it's an edifice which is cracking quite quickly. I mean, the trouble is you've got the immovable, stupid object of Prince Andrew who thinks, oh, I'm fine, nothing to see here. I'm getting on with my life, I'm going on my shooting weekend. I mean, that's the problem.

19:41News you can trust and the conversations that matter. With award-winning journalists at the heart of the stories from the UK and around the world. Breaking news here in Edinburgh. I'm Simon Marks, my American Week is next. Reporting from the heart of Cardiff. Discover how today's story affects your life. Listen on our free Global Player app or the new LBC app. LBC, leading Britain's conversation.

20:09The News Agents. Instead of banning Maccabee, how about banning the burqa and halal meat? Right. Well, I probably would ban the burqa. Can we point out, before it becomes hysterical about the burqa, many European countries have banned them. They have. Because the politicians will say that the way that women are treated... That's an opinion. Sarah Pochin asked that question and everybody went nuts in the comments. She did, but then you've also seen Georgia Maloney, the Italian Prime Minister, say in the last week that this is something that she's going to pursue. So I think there's definitely a strong argument for it.

20:46There are basic values in this. That was Robert Jenrick again. Not that, as Emily said, he's ever wanted to jump on a bandwagon. He's talking to the wonderful Jeremy Kyle on Talk TV there. Always good for a nice, nuanced, measured discussion. They're talking about the burqa. And as you heard Robert Jennerick saying that he would ban the burqa. And this comes quite quickly after a series of quite interesting interventions from Conservative MPs, including one rising star, so-called, of the new intake. And the new intake isn't very big, but she's considered potentially a future leader of the party.

21:18This is Katie Lamb, who told the Sunday Times at the weekend that she believed that large numbers of people with legal status in the UK, i.e. indefinite leave to remain, would need to have their right to stay revoked and should go home. She said there are a large number of people in this country who came here legally, but in effect shouldn't have been able to do so. It's not the fault of the individuals who came here, but they will need to go home. What that will leave is a mostly, and this is the very interesting and perhaps chilling bit, is a mostly, but not entirely culturally coherent group of people.

21:54and this follows what I would say has been a rapidly accelerating trend in conservative politics right of centre politics I would say in particular over the last six to twelve months which has started to move very rapidly away from the traditional right-wing critique of immigration which is look this is basically about numbers we don't have the capacity to absorb these people we don't have enough schools we don't have enough hospitals we don't have enough roads blah houses blah blah blah blah perfectly fair critique sometimes to a much more traditional and potentially much more problematic critique of immigration which is basically what i would describe as a bit of blood and soil nationalism old-fashioned which is basically these people aren't like us they can never be like us and they're destroying our society by us allowing them to stay it is extraordinary to hear that phrase you know culturally coherent and i just i i want to speak to katie lamb and just ask can you just explain that for us just put it in simple black and white terms and maybe it is black and white for her or muslim and christian for her i mean what is the lack of cultural coherence that she sees who are the people that she's going to say are legally here but have to go how would you determine who these people are you just think of it in practical policy terms and just see the impossibility or near impossibility of it unless you're going to have ice squads just stopping brown people on the streets and say you're not part of our cultural coherence it may be time you go home i think there's lots to sort of get into with this and i think um we've sort of it orbits seems we've talked about quite a few times in the last sort of six or twelve months i think a lot of it represents the kind of rapid radicalization of right-wing thought which is mainly being driven by x among other things i think clearly part of it is about reform and you are hearing, you know, senior conservative figures making statements that I think might make some, even Nigel Farage blush on occasion, you know, trying to sort of out-reform reform.

23:58Obviously, this sort of echoes in a way, reform's promise on indefinitely to remain. It's motivated a lot by this, basically. You'll hear a lot of people talking about the Boris wave. These are people who came during and in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, who, because they've been here for five years, will qualify for ILR status, indefinitely to remain. And this is animating a lot of conservative opinion at the moment. But let's just leave all of the kind of potential kind of like, you know, a lot of people would say this is racism. They would say that, you know, that it would be deeply chilling to many people, which is correct.

24:30You know, what it also represents is a rapid retreat of conservative politics away from being the party of law and order of the rules-based system. Like, I mean, are we really saying this is, you know, conservative parliamentarians here turning around and telling people who have come here under an existing legal order not talking about changing it for future people which can have an argument about and maybe that's a good idea maybe it's better you know you know but you're basically turning around to people and their families and saying sorry you've been building a life here um you don't actually have the right to stay here and why don't you have the right to stay here because you're insufficiently culturally coherent now that's going to really i'm already getting i I don't know about you, John.

25:12I'm already getting a lot of messages from people exactly in this sort of position who are really scared. Yeah. And I'm not surprised they're bloody scared because it's then not even just about when we're talking about cultural coherence, when we're injecting that, it's not even about the legal regime which existed and whether they're still making some qualification about, you know, are they still in a job? You know, what sort of job have they got? What's their income? Sort of criteria that you might be able to apply, which would still be a bit problematic in terms of basically changing the rules after the fact.