Despite losing his royal titles, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor remains eighth in the line of succession. Photo / Getty Images
The constitutional wonks at Buckingham Palace have served up an interesting stew after Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’s departure.
The official line on why there was an agonising wait to rid the House of Windsor of its dead wood was that every move had to be “carefully considered” before swinging the axe, but there appear to be glaring mishaps in the implementation of the coup de grace. And so the remote but alarming possibility remains that we could one day have Andrew Mountbatten Windsor on the throne.
Despite everything, Andrew remains eighth in the line of succession. Before him come William and Harry and their children, but, for now at least, the former prince would be crowned regent in the event of the loss of King Charles and the Prince of Wales within the next six years.
Though unlikely, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility. The scenario could go like this. Prince William has an unfortunate helicopter accident, his father succumbs to cancer. Prince George would then become King but have no constitutional power until his 18th birthday in July 2031. The next throne candidate who might serve as regent, Prince Harry, would be disbarred by reason of his residency abroad.
Which brings us to Andrew, whose regency his ex-wife Sarah constantly fantasised about, according to biographer Allan Starkie. Certainly Andrew knows the ropes, and could be persuaded without too much difficulty to come out of retirement from his impending Norfolk bolthole.
Which makes one wonder whether the Palace wonks considered it? And raises the question of what could be done to stop it from occurring?
Many people would rather abolish the monarchy than let Andrew get his hands on it, but, in the scenario outlined above, would public opinion be enough to keep an ambitious ex-prince off the throne?
When a power vacuum occurred in the reign of George III, as the monarch succumbed to madness, his son the Prince of Wales grabbed the levers of state and clung firmly to them. The nine years which followed, until his father died, were characterised by excessive consumption and personal indulgence – and riots. As it made its way down the Mall, Prinny’s carriage was set upon by an angry crowd of protesters who threw stones and shouted abuse. A window was shattered.
On the Regent’s nod, habeas corpus was suspended, seditious meetings were outlawed and a round-up of anti-royal printers and writers ordered. On this last point, Andrew as our regent might very much relish revisiting history.
But that regency was at least legitimate. A few years ago I revealed in the Telegraph a plot engineered by Kenneth de Courcy, a close friend of the Duke of Windsor, to edge him back into Britain in the late 1940s while his brother King George VI lay in hospital “walking with death”, in the words of Winston Churchill. An anti-Mountbatten (and therefore anti-Prince Philip) cohort wanted to keep Princess Elizabeth, then just 21, off the throne using the argument that as a woman she would achieve her full powers only when she reached 25. De Courcy, later imprisoned on other matters, cooked up the seditious plan that, as the country’s ex-king, the Duke of Windsor was best placed to take up the duties of regent. Initially the duke was intrigued, but didn’t have the bottle to go through with it.
Those events speak to the fact that the Regency, though rarely discussed in public, is never far from the thoughts of those closely involved with the machinery of monarchy.
Still, for those who might seek to block Andrew, it may offer some reassurance that Parliament does have the power to overthrow the pecking order.
After a 700-year history of royal ownership, it whisked away the sovereign’s right to nominate his own regent in 1936, when there were real fears that Edward VIII, in thrall to Mrs Simpson, could nominate her should a regency be required.
What followed was the 1937 Regency Act which provided a permanent legal framework for a regent to act on the monarch’s behalf if the sovereign is under 18 or is incapacitated by “infirmity of mind or body”. Under the rarely-tested doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, Parliament could pass legislation regarding who acts as regent.
The Act was updated, again by Parliament, in 1943 and 1953, and is designed as a flexible piece of legislation which answers the challenges of the day, such as whether any given regent is fit to hold the position. Whoever gets the job possesses nearly all monarchical powers, with exceptions such as not being able to approve Bills altering the succession, or repeal specific Acts concerning the Protestant religion and the Church of Scotland.
The year before the Regency Act was hastily introduced, Parliament – or at least the cabinet – grasped the nettle of who was, and who was not, fit to sit on the throne. Hidden in the copious handwritten notes of Sir Horace Wilson, a civil service mandarin tasked to troubleshoot the run-up to the abdication, there’s a terse single line dated December 6, 1936 which states “Cabinet discussed the possibility of Queen Mary as Regent.”
This was a bombshell – suggesting the soon-to-be King George VI, Edward’s younger brother and then the Duke of York, should be removed of his birthright by putting his mother on the throne instead.
Parliament, which our present king likes to keep at arm’s length and doesn’t want meddling in palace affairs, had found a way to overthrow the pecking order. In George VI’s case, there had been grave concern among senior politicians that he wasn’t up to the job and the worry that, following his charismatic older brother, he would look like a damp squib.
The idea, unvoiced in Wilson’s note but articulated later by Dermot Morrah in an early authorised biography of Queen Elizabeth, was that the throne would then be offered to the Duke of Kent on the entirely specious grounds that he was the only candidate with a son and heir (the present duke).
And so in 1936, Parliament, if so guided, would have been ready to move against the then Duke of York. It didn’t happen because the man who’d cried on his mother’s shoulder at the thought of impending kingship opted, in the end, to take on the challenge. History, as a result, changed course.
But Parliament was ready. Just as, we now know, they would be again – if Mountbatten Windsor dared to poke his nose round the door.
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.