Two weekends ago, there was big breaking royal news: Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice were being banned from Ascot! The venue did not ban them, the royal family has. The Windsors have decided that it would “look bad” if Prince Andrew’s daughters rode around in a carriage and cheered on royal horses from Ascot’s Royal Enclosure. It begs the question: why doesn’t the whole thing look bad for the Windsors? But I digress. It absolutely appears that the knives are out for Beatrice and Eugenie, and the knives belong to Prince William and Kate. Not only that, it also looks like Eugenie was forced to cut her ties with at least one major patronage. Well, the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden has been hammering B&E for weeks now, and he devoted his latest column to whether or not B&E will ever be welcome in elite circles again, and whether or not the Yorks are too delusional to know when it’s over for them. An excerpt:
As disclosures from the Epstein files continue into how much the sisters knew of the late sex offender and how little [Beatrice & Eugenie] did about it, their benefit to charities looks more and more questionable. They now face the drip, drip, drip of stories about how they may be dropped by organisations they once boosted by their association.
It’s reminiscent of the situation last September when their mother, Sarah Ferguson, was ditched as a patron or ambassador by a string of charities after an email from 2011 was published by The Mail on Sunday in which she called Epstein her ‘supreme friend’ and seemed to apologise for her public criticism of him.
I had always been one of the biggest cheerleaders for Beatrice and Eugenie but, after what I have read in the Epstein files, I believe they should step down from their public roles altogether. The best thing for them would be if they became private figures and enjoyed their lives with their husbands and children away from the public gaze. However, one of their friends says this is unlikely to happen.
‘Bea and Eug have a great sense of public duty,’ the pal tells me, using their nicknames. ‘They were always happy to carry out engagements when asked by their grandmother [the late Queen Elizabeth] or by other members of the family. They don’t see why they should slope away like criminals when they’ve done nothing wrong.’
The Mail on Sunday disclosed this week that Andrew pushed for his daughters to receive £100,000 in secret payments from a controversial billionaire, David Rowland, he was helping while trade envoy. MPs demanded to know whether the payments were made in return for Andrew’s help in pushing Rowland’s commercial ventures.
Revelations such as this may continue to taint the princesses and the organisations with which they are associated. If they have learned anything from the experience of their greedy, lying parents, they will set an example by withdrawing immediately from public life.
Eden’s advice is that Beatrice and Eugenie should make some kind of formal withdrawal from “public life” and their patronages and just live as “private figures” within the UK? As I’ve said before, I don’t disagree that B&E should cut their losses and move on from the Windsors and half-in royal life. But here’s the thing – for their own safety and their own careers, they need to get the hell out of the UK. They need to get physical and emotional distance from ALL of these people, including their parents. They’re being targeted by Kensington Palace, and King Charles would gladly feed them to the wolves. Get out of the UK! I know it’s easier said than done, but the royal family does not give a sh-t about them.
Meanwhile, there’s a renewed conversation about Beatrice and Eugenie’s “royal rentals.” Years ago, their father struck a deal for both of his daughters to maintain residences on royal property – Eugenie still lives in Ivy Cottage for part of the year, and Beatrice still has an apartment in St. James’s Palace. They are not paying “market rent” for those homes and there’s some talk about how they need to be evicted too. That’s an easy decision for Charles and William to make too, considering they seemingly want to evict all of their relatives from all of the royal properties.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
