Former Prince Andrew’s scandals highlight a monarchy losing relevance — and an Australia ready to move on, writes Vince Hooper.
ASK MOST AUSTRALIANS about former Prince Andrew these days and you’ll likely get a shrug, a sigh, or a laugh into a schooner. “Isn’t he the bloke who can’t sweat?” someone might quip, before moving on to more relevant royal gossip — like what Prince Harry’s up to now, or whether the Governor-General actually does anything.
We love our wildlife, but not royal reptiles who slither through scandals like they’re dodging customs at Sydney Airport. In the grand family saga of crown and controversy, Andrew’s chapter reads like a dodgy episode of Home and Away, where the acting’s bad, the excuses worse and everyone wishes the writers would just kill off the character on the spot.
Fresh from his quiet “banishment” to Sandringham and rumoured pleas for public duties, the ex-Duke of York remains the monarchy’s most awkward subplot. Once dubbed “Air Miles Andy” for his fondness for luxury travel, he now finds himself permanently grounded — an aristocrat without altitude and a former Duke without a hill.
After those infamous court settlements that left Buckingham Palace blushing and the royal brand bruised, his public life has shrunk to the size of the Sandringham estate. He’s about as welcome as a warm stubby at a stinking hot summer barbecue.
Still, Aussies are generous storytellers. Some reckon we should make him useful — stick him in the Outback to run a pub for wayward minor royals. “Ye Olde Royal Redemption Inn,” someone quips, with a sign out front: No paparazzi, no questions, no sweat. He could pour pints, polish reputations and tell locals about the one time he nearly served honourably in a family full of drongos.
Our tabloids, of course, adore him. Nothing sells papers like a royal trainwreck with a posh Pommy accent. Yet even they seem to have grown weary. He’s like last season’s footy scandal — embarrassing, overplayed and impossible to make interesting again. Once the subject of frenzied headlines, he’s now relegated to the trivia section of royal reporting, wedged somewhere between “palace corgi update” and “Camilla’s new hat”.
And maybe that’s the point: the royals no longer shape our headlines — they just clutter them. What once dominated front pages now reads like nostalgia from an empire that forgot to log off.
Meanwhile, Britain’s monarchy keeps sending its representatives to remind us that the link still matters. But when it comes to Andrew, even the most patriotic Aussie monarchist quietly mutters, “Yeah nah, you can keep that one.” The Palace might see him as a rehabilitated relative; Australia sees him as a living argument for the end of import strength royalty.
In truth, Andrew’s scandal fatigue says as much about us as it does about him. We’ve reached the point where royal misbehaviour no longer shocks — it merely entertains, like reruns of a soap we no longer take seriously. Once upon a time, scandal threatened the Crown; now it’s just another subplot in an endless Netflix media franchise.
Australia, though, has moved on. We have our own celebrities and former prime ministers to embarrass us and our own public inquiries to provide moral instruction. The monarchy feels increasingly like a colonial subscription service we forgot to cancel — a relic auto-renewed every time a royal cuts a ribbon or waves from a balcony. Andrew’s misadventures simply remind us how little we need the brand.
The truth is, he’s done what no constitutional lawyer or campaigner could achieve: made the idea of an Australian republic sound like fair dinkum. It’s hard to argue for hereditary privilege when the heir’s brother is a walking HR crisis. Even among monarchists, there’s an unspoken weariness — an acknowledgment that the mystique has curdled.
Perhaps this is what modern monarchy looks like: not glorious pageantry, but a slow, awkward drift into irrelevance. The scandals no longer spark outrage; they provoke eye-rolls. The pomp feels quaint, the hierarchy absurd. Andrew, unwittingly, has become the monarchy’s cautionary tale — proof that inherited power without accountability always rots from within.
If anything, he’s become the best argument for an Australian republic since the last referendum. The idea that we must still curtsy – metaphorically or otherwise – to a family whose black sheep makes front-page news for all the wrong reasons feels absurdly outdated. We don’t need scandal to make us interesting, or a prince to make us proud. We are the lucky country!
So if Andrew ever feels unwelcome in London, we’ll politely decline his retirement tour here. The Outback’s harsh, but even snakes deserve better company. Let him stay at Sandringham, polishing his trophies and watching old news clips. The rest of us have a nation to run — one that doesn’t need royal drama to prove it’s grown up.
Because in the end, perhaps that’s the quiet revolution: we’ve gone from God Save the Queen to Mate, Save Yourself. And if that means finally cutting the royal cord, then Prince Andrew – sweating or not – might just have done Australia a service after all. I'll say God Save The King to that!
Vince Hooper is a proud Australian/British citizen and professor of finance and discipline head at SP Jain School of Global Management with campuses in London, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
Support independent journalism Subscribe to IA.
