Prince of Scandal - Andrew's Sorry 60th Birthday

With so many friends otherwise engaged, it was a non-event for the disgraced duke

As the Duke of York rose to give a speech at his ex-wife’s 60th birthday party last October, none of the guests assembled at their Windsor home, Royal Lodge, knew quite what to expect.

It was not just that it came after a torrid summer of headlines about his friendship with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, who’d died by suicide in his prison cell two months earlier. With word having spread that the duke was desperate to speak out on the scandal, was he about to bare his soul? Or worse, try to make light of the situation?

Yet Andrew read the mood correctly. Appearing close to tears, he took guests back to the day he locked eyes with Sarah Ferguson at a Windsor Castle event in 1985. “I fell in love with her at that lunch and I have never stopped loving her,” he gushed.

One of the 100 guests shared later, “I saw him in the most real way I’ve ever seen him.”

One month later, Andrew sat down to defend his connection to Epstein in the car-crash Newsnight interview that brought his royal career to an abrupt halt.

On November 20, he issued an unprecedented statement announcing he was stepping back from public duties for “the foreseeable future”.

Finally showing some of the empathy he had lacked during the grilling by the BBC’s Emily Maitlis, he added, “I deeply sympathise with everyone who has been affected and wants some form of closure. I can only hope that, in time, they will be able to rebuild their lives. Of course, I am willing to help any appropriate law-enforcement agency with their investigations, if required.”