The arrest of ex-Prince Andrew over alleged misconduct is not an isolated scandal but the product of a system that shields the royal family from scrutiny. Without transparency and accountability, privilege can become a pathway to abuse of power.

Last month witnessed the remarkable scene of the arrest of ex-Prince Andrew on suspicion of misconduct in public office while British trade envoy. In an early morning police raid that looked more like a scene from one of those interminable British crime-shows than an unprecedented royal arrest, Andrew was driven from his latest home – Wood Farm on the King’s private Sandringham Estate – to face 11 hours of questioning over allegations he sent confidential government documents to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

The instantly iconic photo of Andrew, slumped in a police car post-interview, ashen-faced, brilliantly captured the shell-shocked stare of bloated privilege deflating.

Yet even as that extraordinary episode unfolded, signs were emerging from comments by UK Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, that the full scale of this royal scandal will neither be acknowledged nor its root causes addressed. At the heart of this moral and institutional collapse lie centuries of royal exceptionalism, privilege, entitlement, and an array of legal and other protections that shielded Andrew from scrutiny for years.

Historian and author, Dr Andrew Lownie, whose work more than any other has propelled this furore told the ABC: ‘This is a real crisis, and they don’t seem to have woken up to the seriousness of it."

As he announced Andrew’s arrest Starmer repeated the same ‘ imperial fictions’ that had protected Andrew from scrutiny in the first place. Starmer claimed, bizarrely given the years of inaction over Andrew’s known proclivities, that Andrew’s arrest showed that “nobody was above the law”.

This is patent nonsense, and even more startling given its royal context. The King is, definitionally, above the law. He cannot be charged with an offence and cannot give evidence in court – which raises an interesting question were Andrew to be charged since his brother King Charles would be expected to have much of material interest to such a case and yet cannot be compelled to appear.

A complex web of royal legal privilege, legislative carve-outs, Freedom of Information and other accountability exemptions, a parliamentary cone of silence forbidding any criticism of the royal family, and enabled by media complicity through the ‘ toxic symbiotic relationship’ with the select media ‘royal rota’, has created an effective cordon sanitaire around the royal family. This shields it from accountability and has ultimately enabled the moral and potentially legal breaches that it now confronts.

The royal household, the sovereign and the heir, have an absolute exemption from the UK Freedom of Information Act; the monarch and the Prince of Wales are exempt from any legal requirement to pay income tax, inheritance tax, corporation tax or capital gains tax – although we are assured they do so ‘voluntarily’, just how much is not disclosed.

Through the ‘monarch’s consent power’ the monarch can amend any Bill that might affect their financial interests before it goes to parliament. Over a thousand pieces of legislation were vetted in this way during the Queen’s reign, including financial transparency laws in the wake of the Paradise Papers revelations. The royal ‘private estates’ are exempt from the Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Act that grants police the power to enter and search premises that might contain looted cultural artefacts, thereby avoiding the risk of denuding the corridors of Balmoral and Sandringham of the spoils of empire. The royal household is exempt from measures against racial and sexual discrimination in employment law. And finally, perhaps most remarkably, members of parliament cannot criticise or ‘cast reflections’ on the royal family in parliament.

UK Labour MP Paul Flynn first tried to raise concerns about Prince Andrew’s behaviour as trade envoy in 2011 when a photograph of Andrew and the then recently released convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein strolling in Central Park graced the front page of the New York Post with the headline Randy Andy with NYC sex creep. Instead, Flynn faced the protective ‘convention’ that members of the royal family are not to be criticised in parliament, and effectively silenced. Seriously – who knew? The hallmark of the Westminster system and responsible government – accountability to the parliament – does not apply to those at the very top of the constitutional tree – the monarch and their family.

For 15 years Andrew was afforded this unique parliamentary protection available only to ‘certain individuals’ who could not even be named in parliament, as Flynn told the House of Commons in 2011; “In this House my mouth is bandaged by archaic rules that deny me the chance to be critical of certain individuals [Royal Family]. I can be sycophantically, emetically in praise of those individuals – that is not limited in any way – but I am not allowed to criticise them.”

This is not only extraordinary, it is dangerous.

Had Flynn not been ‘bandaged’ 15 years ago, things might not now be so dire for the royal family and, far more importantly, it might well have brought to light the nature of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s links with Prince Andrew years earlier and prevented further depredations. As Green MP Sian Berry said last week, “Transparency about the working of an organisation is a key way to prevent corruption.” There could scarcely be a more compelling example of the importance of royal transparency and accountability in revealing and preventing wrongdoing.

We have seen that in our own times with the belated release of the Palace letters between the Queen and governor-general Sir John Kerr, revealing the role of the Queen and Prince Charles in what Charles described as Kerr’s “ right" and "courageous" decision to dismiss the Whitlam government. Their role was denied for decades and the Palace letters revealing it to us were closed by the National Archives of Australia claiming they were ‘personal’. Were it not for the High Court’s landmark decision leading to the letters’ release, the role of the Queen and Prince Charles would still be secret and publicly denied by the Palace which claims that; ‘neither Her Majesty nor the Royal Household had any part to play in Kerr’s dismissal’. As As John Menadue succinctly put it; “This was clearly a lie.”

We only know of the Queen’s involvement in the dismissal because the High Court ensured the release of her correspondence with Kerr against the express wishes of Buckingham Palace, enforcing a strongly resisted degree of royal transparency. And we only know the extent of Prince Andrew’s malfeasance and potential criminality because of the release of the Epstein files by the US Department of Justice. In both cases the release of critical documents was taken out of royal hands and the monarchy lost control of the historical narrative they so assiduously protect, with devastating results.

With Andrew stripped of his royal title, the British parliament also lifted the convention barring MPs from speaking about him. Trade Minister Chris Bryant who had called for Andrew to be sacked as trade envoy in 2011, described him as “a rude, arrogant and entitled man who could not distinguish between the public interest, which he said he served, and his own private interest.”

In 2021 Virginia Guiffre filed a civil claim against Prince Andrew for sexual assault, which he has always denied. The following year he reached a settlement with Giuffre without admitting liability, estimated at £12 million. Andrew Lownie told the ABC that serious questions remain over how this ‘hush-money’ was paid and by whom. Lownie also points to serious breaches of national security by Andrew which he considers the most significant of the claims of misconduct in public office raised against the former Prince.

This story and its corrosive implications clearly have a long way to run. Serious questions remain over the circumstances of Prince Andrew’s appointment as trade envoy; the payment of £12 million to Virginia Giuffre and its terms; and over who knew what and when about his relationship with Epstein and what, if anything, they did about it.

The personal and institutional decay now on display is the inevitable conclusion of a system built on the inherent corruption of dynastic title by birthright alone, entitlement without warrant or merit. Unless the royal family enters the 21st century and embraces contemporary expectations of transparency and accountability, removes the myriad protective exemptions that shield it from scrutiny, and becomes a genuinely ‘modern monarchy’, sooner or later this tawdry saga will bring down the House of Windsor itself.