Andrew Lownie, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York. London: HarperCollins, 2025. 448 pp. ISBN 978-0008775452.

Andrew Lownie has written the biography that the Duke of York deserves. Entitled is a chronicle of taking the trouble to be born, of stupidity, of greed, and of degradation. It shows Andrew not as tragic but as risible, not as an aberration but as the normal fruit of a dynasty that has spent a century mistaking celebrity for sovereignty. The book could almost be read as comedy, were it not also an anatomy of decline.

Andrew was never educated into seriousness. He was never expected to govern. He was indulged and applauded for every mediocrity. His naval career, puffed up in the Falklands, was routine duty performed by a young officer with a famous name. After that brief interlude, he descended into a life of golf courses, shady business deals, private jets, and women procured by others. His connection to Jeffrey Epstein was not an accident. It was the predictable endpoint of a man who took advantage for decades and never reflected on what he was.

When finally cornered in that BBC interview, he made excuses that insulted even the intelligence of the interviewer. He claimed not to sweat, he denied what was obvious, and he did so with the smug assurance of someone who had lived too long without ever hearing the word no. That interview was not simply the collapse of a man, but the exposure of an order of things: a royal family reduced to scandal fodder, its members convinced that evasions would always protect them.

Andrew is not unique. He is simply the loudest symptom. His cousins and nephews are shallow, his brothers timid, his late mother revered only because she smiled while presiding over national disintegration. The monarchy that once produced rulers has become a soap opera of broken marriages and environmental sermons delivered from private jets. What Victoria began—an endless multiplication of brainless children—has culminated in a family tree filled with branches that bear only trash.

Elizabeth II is praised for her “service.” What did that mean? That she attended ceremonies, signed papers, and let her governments take Britain into Europe, out of Europe, into endless American wars, and into an economy hollowed out for the benefit of financiers. She was gracious, but her reign was empty. It was precisely the sort of reign oligarchs prefer: pageantry at the front, looting behind the curtain.

Republicans point to Andrew and say the monarchy must end. They dream of a republic, as if electing a president would restore dignity. They are fools. A republic means endless elections decided by television, manipulated by lobbies, financed by banks. It means presidents as the obedient clerks of oligarchs. One glance at France, one glance at America, is proof enough: rulers without legitimacy, changed every few years, obedient to whoever funds their campaigns. Nothing noble there, nothing independent, nothing to admire.

The answer is not abolition. It is restoration. Monarchy is not an ornament but a form of rule. We need not the present House of Windsor, but a monarch who governs. Not a mascot, but a sovereign. Someone chosen from among the wider royal blood if possible, but selected for ability rather than for seniority in a family that has long ceased to matter.

A true monarch is not beholden to donors or parliaments. He governs because he is sovereign. He checks ministers because they serve at his pleasure. He restrains the state because its income is his income, and he cannot spend beyond his means without debasing his own authority. Elizabeth I had real power precisely because she was forced to live with financial restraint. Her parsimony gave her freedom. She cut down extravagance, she watched every penny, and by doing so she avoided dependence. The country benefited from that discipline. So would we again.

The monarchy we remember—Victoria’s dullness, Edward VII’s gluttony, George V’s pompous mediocrity, George VI’s frightened stammer, Elizabeth II’s ceremonial emptiness—is not the only monarchy imaginable. There is another model: the ruler who commands, who embodies sovereignty, who does not beg Parliament for money but rules because he must. Think of Elizabeth I, of the Tudors, even of earlier Plantagenets, who reigned as more than figureheads. They were not perfect. No monarch is. But they ruled in person, and the country was theirs in reality, not merely in pageantry.

A sovereign restored to such authority could sweep aside the bureaucracy, not by appointing different managers but by abolishing the apparatus. He could dissolve ministries, silence quangos, dismiss whole classes of parasites. He could treat Parliament as Elizabeth once did: an assembly to be called rarely and dismissed when troublesome. The effect would be a nation cut free from managerial strangulation, ruled not by committees but by a crown with an interest in survival.

Andrew shows us the alternative. A monarchy that rules nothing becomes a family of grotesques. It produces men who strut about as dukes while depending on oligarchs for cash. It tolerates daughters-in-law who sell sob stories to American talk shows. It keeps afloat by lending itself to charity galas and photo opportunities. It ceases to be monarchy at all. It becomes trash.

Andrew is entitled, as Lownie’s title reminds us: entitled to indulgence, to immunity, to excuses, but in no sense to honour. He is the symbol of a monarchy that has survived only as a screen behind which Britain is looted.

The lesson of Andrew is clear. Monarchy must be restored or it will rot entirely. We do not need a republic of mediocrities. We do not need another century of Windsors pretending to serve while everything collapses. We need a sovereign who governs as Elizabeth I did: with authority, with restraint, and with independence from the parasites.

The Duke of York is entitled to nothing. The nation is entitled to a monarchy worthy of its name.