How could Prince Andrew be formally stripped of his titles?

Scandals surrounding Prince Andrew have raised the question of how his royal status and other honours could be stripped from him. Such a move would involve excruciatingly arcane detail and precedents, and there are also considerations of practical politics and public opinion. But the debate is on…

Sort of. After his catastrophic Newsnight interview in 2019, he was persuaded to “step back” from working royal status and duties. At that point he relinquished all his patronages of charities, his honorary military ranks and the like. He also dropped the use of “his royal highness” (HRH) but kept most of the rest.

Last week, he announced he would go further and no longer use his titles, which include Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, Baron Killyleagh, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order and Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. All are “in abeyance”. That just leaves him with the plain old description “prince”, a birthright as the son of Queen Elizabeth II.

Not for some. There is no legal status of “abeyance” and “not using” a title doesn’t mean you don’t own it; like a car kept in a garage under SORN, it could be taken out for a run anytime.

So the demand is that he be formally deprived of them.

It has always been administratively and legally difficult to take honours from people – for good reason, because such powers could be abused. One way would be for the King to issue “letters patent” – a proclamation that Andrew is no longer Duke of York etc. The King could also strike Andrew off the roll of knights of the garter and other orders of chivalry.

Arguably, that’s enough, but for full legal force over the dukedom – including his (now remote) place in the line of succession – an act of parliament would be required.

It would be short and swiftly passed. There are two imperfect precedents. One is the act used to take various grand titles off members of the extended royal family who ended up fighting for the Kaiser, not the King, in the First World War; they were named and shamed in the Titles Deprivation Act 1917, which established a committee of the privy council to advise George V on whether to cut ties with various German cousins, which he did. Around the same time, he also changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor.

The second example arose from the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936. Even though he had made his radio broadcast and signed the instrument of abdication, the change had to be formalised with passage of the His Majesty’s Declaration of Abdication Act 1936. There was a short and decorous parliamentary debate, during which the leader of the opposition, Clement Attlee, told MPs: “I believe that a great disservice has been done to constitutional monarchy by overemphasis and by vulgar adulation, particularly in the press. The interests which stand for wealth and class privilege have done all they can to invest the monarchy with an unreal halo, and to create a false reverence for royalty, and this has tended to obscure the realities of the position.” Wise words for the ages.