VARIOUS FLEET STREET HACKS

IT BEGAN WITH a lady called Koo Stark. Who can tell where it will end. The Duke of York, brother of the King of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland minus its entire economy, is his own shaggy dog story.

“I think if you wrote this out forty years ago, when he returned from the Falklands, a young handsome hero, no one would have given you the time of of day,” says Horace Ink, former chief sub-editor of a British Sunday newspaper who now advises Arab princes on their public relations. “Next to his dorky older sibling, who had quite obviously married a girl he hardly knew, and who was far too beautiful for him, Andrew was the action man who promised everything and should have been the one who got the girl.

“But royalty doesn’t work like that. And so it all began to go wrong.

“His marriage was supposed to check the decline, but it only added to the mess.

“He morphed effortlessly from a handsome daredevil into spoiled middle age.

“After that, it was a swift descent. Even being his mother’s favorite could not save him.

“Remember South York, that awful monstrosity he shared with Fergie? That said everything you needed to know about the man.

“He stepped from one squalid rumor to another. Only that other spoiled son, Mark Thatcher, could even compete.

“Finally, if indeed it is finally, he’s where he is. In the old days he would have been expected to take a revolver and do the decent thing. Today, he just sits there while the hyenas tear at him, piece by wretched piece.

“And all of it self-inflicted. This is a man who was born with everything. Except perhaps a genuine purpose. He was the perpetual substitute, being paid to sit on the bench, until he was finally replaced. Then he was merely a kit boy, which must have played on his soul. But for an accident of time, he might have been the star. Should have been, he might think. Well, not now. Now he is that worst of cliches, the embarrassing uncle, a perpetual gift for the tabloid press. Headline after wretched headline.”