newsThe Grand Old Duke of York – he had ten thousand lies
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. This one taken in 2011 is worth about £12 million.
By Trevor Grundy
As we say “goodbye” to the Duke of York (but not to Prince Andrew) take another look if it doesn’t make you want to be sick.
It is, as we all know, that infamous photograph taken at Ghislaine Maxwell’s London home showing two women and a grinning born-to-wealth and beyond-belief royal called Andrew.
Marina Hyde of the Guardian (on Friday 17 October) told us all we need to know just a few hours before he put his title as Duke of York in ‘abeyance’ and put on hold few other honours given to him by his mum.
Within hours of writing her piece she learned that Andrew had willingly given up his titles to stop hogging headlines and make us not realise that next week King Charles (Supreme Governor of the Church of England) will be praying in the Vatican alongside the Pope.
A Game of Thrones that could seriously damage the future of what royal insiders call “The Firm.”
But that picture:
- The person who took the photograph, Jeffrey Epstein is dead – having taken his own life (so were led to believe) while in a New York prison awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking under-age girls.
- The teenage girl in the centre is dead. She committed suicide in a remote Australian farmhouse earlier this year, unable to cope with trauma and lies the survival tactics of so many liars in public places.
- The grinning woman in the background is Ghislaine Maxwell who is in an American prison hoping for a pardon from Donald Trump.
- The smiling hunk with his arm around the teenage girl who he never met but who paid her £12 million in an out of court settlement after he accusations that Andrew had sex with her when she was under-age ) is living in a 30-room mansion on a 98 -acres on the Windsor estate. His wife will now be just Sarah Ferguson but his two daughters keep their royal titles, both of them princesses.
As she was writing her short but spot- on- report. a story dropped revealing that Andrew was also a good mate of a senior Chinese Communist party official at the centre of the collapsed Beijing spy case that is dominating the pages of British newspapers.
As Andrew dominated the headlines we hear that Charles and Williams choked with anger that their royal duties played third and fourth fiddle to the now loathsome Andrew’s activities and his sordid link with Epstein and a Chinese official at the heart of the Beijing spy story.
A headline in The Times of October 18, 2025 read: “The lie that was finally too much for Charles.”
The “too honourable” Andrew found it hard to keep away from where the cameras flashed.
But are we really saying “goodbye” to the late monarch’s favourite son, brother of the king and uncle to the one after Charles?
A lot of political commentators, including Hyde, have their doubts.
She says that it’s very clear that there might be “all manner of embarrassing revelations to come in a number of different areas. A lot of known unknowns and a lot unknown unknowns.”
And then a bombshell remark that probably won’t be repeated by the people paid fortunes to boost the image of the firm in newspapers and on tv and the radio.
“I suspect part of them (the royal firm members) fears that booting Andrew out of the tent is a slippery slope towards there being no tent at all.”
What could she mean?