It was the sort of elaborate birthday surprise that Andrew — practical joker and fond of a fart gag — might have arranged to prank a friend. Six unmarked police cars roaring up to the farmhouse where he had been living on the Sandringham estate at the unseemly hour of 8 a.m yesterday. Only these rozzers were real and the ‘ex-UK prince’, as one international news network described him, was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office before being released under caution around 12 hours later.

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‘I’m just glad the Queen didn’t see this day,’ wrote one commentator on X. ‘It would have broken her heart.’ Yet the root of Andrew’s downfall lies with the late Queen Elizabeth II — an unlikely early advocate of gentle parenting. 

‘Speak roughly to your little boy / And beat him when he sneezes,’ exhorts the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. ‘He only does it to annoy / Because he knows it teases.’ Would that the Queen had been in receipt of such frank counsel from her ladies-in-waiting when Andrew was in the cradle.    

‘The baby is adorable,’ the Queen wrote to her cousin Lady Mary Cambridge, soon after his christening in 1960. ‘All in all, he’s going to be terribly spoilt by all of us, I’m sure.’    

And indeed, the arrogant, tone-deaf oaf we know and loathe today was forged in the nursery.   

Conventional wisdom has it that, bar a wobble over Diana, the old Queen never put a foot wrong. But by indulging Andrew from an early age, she nurtured and shaped the sweating, bombastic buffoon that may yet bring the whole edifice crashing down.   

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