Andrew broke Britain's bond with the monarchy - and put the Royal Family at risk

The playwright Tom Stoppard, who died last week at the age of 88, was a patriot. In his last and heavily autobiographical play Leopoldstadt , a former child refugee like Stoppard who has grown up as an Englishman lists what makes him proud about Britain: “fair play and Parliament and freedom of everything, asylum for exiles and refugees, the Royal Navy, the royal family… oh, I forgot Shakespeare.”

The line was not without irony. In 2020, when Leopoldstadt premiered, each of these bulwarks of Britain were showing cracks. But most rocky of all the institutions was the royal family. The previous year, the Queen’s second son had given the most ill-judged TV interview of modern times , spectacularly failing to abate public suspicion about his relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey