They’ve endured years of humiliation thanks to their blundering parents’ personal dramas and you can’t help but sympathise with Beatrice and Eugenie but enough is enough – their princess titles have to go. It’s hard to grasp that Princesses Beatrice, 37, and Eugenie, 35, are both edging towards middle-age yet, like many Brits, I feel I barely know them. They’re just ‘there’.
Some constitutional experts will say that’s a job well done – let’s face it, we all know far too much about the world’s wokest royal family-at-large Harry and Meghan. I really wish we didn’t. Beatrice and Eugenie hardly flaunt their ‘Her Royal Highnesses’ as both work in the private sector, with a bit of charity and good causes on the side.
Luckily for the self-made siblings, hard graft has clearly skipped a generation.
They retain their HRH Princess titles thanks to King George V’s 1917 Letters Patent, which grants it to the grandchildren of a monarch in the male line – i.e. Andrew – despite that male no longer being a prince.
But do they even need their titles?
Mother-of-two Beatrice wed childhood friend, and English-born property developer, Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi. He’s descended from Italian nobility, and the founder and chief executive of Banda Property, so not short of a few Euros.
Her official title is HRH Princess Beatrice, Mrs. Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, and as a Counsellor of State she can still potentially carry out official duties while King Charles is abroad or unwell.
Working in the private sector as a strategic advisor for the software company Afiniti and her own advisory firm, BY-EQ, she does not need royal links to climb the ladder.
While married mum-of-two Eugenie – or HRH Princess Eugenie, Mrs Jack Brooksbank – is director at the Hauser & Wirth art gallery in London.
But in recent weeks it’s their parents’ shameful links to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein that’s been hung on public display and Brits have reacted with fury to them.
Air Miles Andy, 65, once the late-Queen’s favourite, has seen his reputation plunge quicker than a cartoon anvil since that disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview.
In January 2022, the Queen stripped Andrew of his military titles and royal patronages in the wake of a US judge allowing Virginia Giuffre’s civil sexual abuse case against him to move to trial.
He stopped using his HRH and roles including Colonel of the Grenadier Guards were handed to other members of the Royal Family – then that March he paid Ms Giuffre a multi-million-pound out-of-court settlement.
Fergie, 66, has been haunted by her own links with vile Epstein and she too is quitting Royal Lodge and will make her own living arrangements, although it’s believed she won’t be moving to Sandringham in Norfolk with Andrew.
She had until recently dodged the firing squad aiming their sights on Andrew – now plain Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, if that can ever sound plain.
But in September her royal fate was also sealed courtesy of her 2011 email hailing Epstein her “supreme friend” and apologising to the pervert for having to publicly shun him.
Yet can Beatrice and Eugenie ever truly disentangle themselves from that sordid mess to remain princesses? I don’t see how.
Firstly, just being pictured with ‘mum and dad’ as HRHs, continues a royal link to Andrew and Fergie’s Epstein shame that never evaporates. It festers. It lingers.
Secondly, as princesses and public figures they’ll always be one precarious step from their parents’ precipice of ignominy – Andrew and Fergie’s past a “sword of Damocles” over their children’s livelihoods.
The pressure on Beatrice and Eugenie, their husbands and innocent children as public figures would be unfair and unbearable. Who wants to see that?
