With half an hour to go before her arrival, her press secretary James Roscoe went outside and found a group of Army officers who were there to meet Her Majesty. Just before an engagement in Richmond Park that involved the Queen and the Duke of York, it started pouring with rain and aides realised no one had remembered to bring an umbrella for the Queen.
On one occasion, that is exactly what he did. 'The fact he lashed out and was very rude to advisers like me was down to a total lack of self-confidence, and that he could always run to his mother and say: 'They are all being nasty to me.' That arrogance could have stemmed from a lack of self-confidence. One senior courtier recalled: 'He was not easy as an adviser to deal with. Prince Andrew was seen in public for the first time since the Queen's funeral riding in Windsor last week One member of staff said: 'He was just dreadful - very happy to pick up the phone and shout at whoever answered it.' Inside Buckingham Palace, Andrew made little effort to be pleasant to members of the household. He was known, he said, as HBH - His Buffoon Highness - and would ignore advice, make inappropriate jokes and regularly refuse to keep to the agreed programme. Simon Wilson, Britain's former deputy head of mission in Bahrain, once delivered a scathing assessment of Andrew's efforts as an official trade envoy. Sir Ivor Roberts, a former ambassador to Rome, said the duke was sometimes 'brusque to the point of rudeness'. While some ambassadors appreciated Andrew's presence, others did not. He was, they say, a good team leader, who looked after his staff. There were letters from chief executives 'from companies which were thanking him for helping unlock a deal which had been stuck in Qatar or Central Asia for years'. It was very hard to change the idea that people had about him.' 'It often felt it was us against the world,' said one.Īll the critical coverage - about his dubious friends, his penchant for private jets - 'failed to understand the work he did, and the good that he did. Many of those who used to work for the prince remain surprisingly loyal to him. However, when he first took on the role, even those who are privately critical of him say he put in a real effort. In 2001 he was made a trade envoy to the government, a position he held for ten years until his friendship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was revealed and he was forced to step down. Over time, however, informality became boorishness, and as his marriage collapsed and his naval career wound to an end, he became a man with limited horizons whose interests rarely strayed beyond golf, videos and women. When he and Sarah Ferguson were first married, their informality seemed a refreshing change from the stuffiness associated with the Royal Family.
Good looking, and with an appetite for the opposite sex that earned him the nickname Randy Andy, he cut a dashing figure when he served as a helicopter pilot during the Falklands war. Although it seems hard to believe now, Prince Andrew was once a popular figure.
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