PETER HITCHENS: Charles has lost control of the Andrew crisis – and it may bring down the Crown

I warned in November that this wouldn’t work after Prince Andrew was stripped of his brotherhood and principality by the King. I said: ‘It’s going to get worse. Revolutionaries sought true blood and found it. ‘The king is defenseless.’

So what did I tell you? Everything is out of the King’s control now, and I suspect this will eventually shatter what’s left of the monarchy. Without respect and dignity, the throne is just an uncomfortable chair and the crown is just a very heavy hat.

Thames Valley Police (TVP) were said to have failed to tell the King before sending their famous team to Norfolk to carry out their spectacular arrests. I believe this. And this was the kind of gratuitously melodramatic public humiliation that British police, copied from the US, now specialize in.

They can’t parade Andrew in chains and an orange jumpsuit just yet. Some ancient judges of the old school might argue that this is objectionable. But photos of the former prince, exhausted in the back of a car after hours in custody, will be quite successful.

And what a difference it must have made when hundreds of burglaries in the real Thames Valley went unsolved. There were 6,819 thefts in the TVP region by March 2025. Home Office Crime Summary figures show a ‘positive outcome’ in just 733 of these cases.

Congrats TVP on your first arrival at Sandringham though. Many other forces are also investigating Andrew’s case. How they must have gritted their teeth on Thursday morning when they saw the TVP boys surpassing them.

I fully expect the police forces of Toytown, Trumpton and Dock Green to join soon, perhaps because Jeffrey Epstein’s plane once flew in their airspace. Very good. There are few things more fun for officials than tracking the pariah of the moment.

All of this helps distract from the thefts and epidemic drug taking they can’t handle. And in difficult times, it is good for us to have someone who is subjected to various embarrassments and miseries whom we can really, truly despise. But be careful; Those who are most interested in this process are anti-monarchists.

They had been looking for this moment for a long time. They know that the trafficking of defenseless girls and all the other horrors of the Epstein empire are also carried out by the kind of people admired by Leftist anti-monarchists. But that’s not the point. The aim is to discredit and eliminate the old order.

Brits love lockdown

New Channel 5 drama The Curfew, in which all the men are forced to stay inside after dark

If I had a hat I’d tip it to the Daily Mail’s TV critic Christopher Stevens for spotting something very important about new Channel 5 drama The Curfew.

It is set in future Britain, where hardline feminists have managed to impose a law forcing all men to stay indoors after dark, for fear of immediate imprisonment.

Nonsense? Is it far? That is, until you remember that in March 2020 the Government successfully ordered us all to stay at home and we obeyed that order.

How did the Letby police manage the media?

The promotional brochure, which featured a grisly image of a grinning human skull, urged police homicide investigators to buy tickets to a conference at the delightful Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill Hotel in Washington, DC.

A promotional brochure from the US conference

Non-members of the International Homicide Investigators Association (IHIA) can sign up for £440, which includes attendance at an extended session (three hours 20 minutes) on ‘Operation Hummingbird UK – Nurse serial killer investigation’. This is, of course, the Lucy Letby case.

The program has been promised by four of Cheshire Police’s senior officers, Detective Superintendent Paul Hughes, Detective Chief Inspector Nicola Evans, Detective Superintendent Simon Blackwell and Detective Sergeant Danielle Stonier. It was August 2024. What did they say? Who paid? Cheshire’s Finest won’t tell me, and neither will IHIA.

But the program notes support my view that fabricated news stories, some made in closed press conferences for selected journalists, played a large role in the Letby investigation. Participants were promised to discuss ‘the management of the case through trial and verdicts’. Plus strategic management of the investigation, media and stakeholders.’

I’m not sure why a prosecution should be ‘led’ by the police, whose job it is to investigate alleged crimes impartially and find evidence for prosecution. And I really don’t like the tone of ‘strategic management’ of the media. Isn’t that what Peter Mandelson did for Sir Anthony Blair?

I love museums (many people say I belong in museums) and one of my favorites is our magnificent National Gallery in London.

But something strange happened to him and made the visit less enjoyable. Almost all men’s toilets have been modernized, with lockable cabins now replacing urinals. The result, predictably, is tails outside the beys, a previously unknown problem.

I always felt sorry for women for having to suffer this pain all the time. But I don’t think imposing this on men would help women or anyone else.

The gallery says: ‘The reconfiguration of our toilet facilities allows us to make better use of available space while improving accessibility while responding to demand.’ Bizarrely, they add: ‘The decision to move to entirely cubicle-based facilities was taken with physical distancing in the wake of Covid-19,’ and that is definitely over.

Their other justifications include this, which says a lot about Britain in 2026: ‘Cabinets provide a private, enclosed space that supports individuals who experience anxiety or prefer greater privacy.’