Prince Andrew

Fifteen minutes before the Duke of York is due to arrive, and I am fretting about a serious breach of protocol. Prince Andrew’s press secretary has called ahead to say that he, the private secretary and the British consul-general for New York will accompany the duke. Given the unexpected crowd, Buckingham Palace is offering to pay. The rules of Lunch, or Dinner, with the FT are clear: we pick up the tab. They say nothing, however, about dinner for five.
Fortunately, the staff at Harry Cipriani is used to last-minute accommodations for demanding guests. The maître d’ agrees that two bills can be prepared: one for the FT and the fourth in line to the throne; one for his retinue.
Cipriani, on the south-east corner of Central Park, is made for Manhattan royalty. The compact but open room seems designed for a court of publishers, dealmakers and admen who are there to be seen. I have been briefed that the duke doesn’t go for flashy restaurants, and I assume a discreet private room has been booked. Instead, we have been given the VIP table, slap bang in the middle of the crowded room. Shows of power are everywhere, as one man gives another a painful-looking back slap, Botoxed cheeks are kissed and the maître d’ makes small talk with his regulars.
There is not much room, so I step outside in time to see the tinted windows of a consular Chevy Escalade pull up on Fifth Avenue. The duke emerges, marching briskly into the restaurant as members of his small security detail disappear into the crowd. He sits down at the table, but quickly decides it is too big. The consul-general has stayed behind, so we will be four. The duke suggests a cramped table on one side, where we squeeze in, knees almost touching, as confused waiters try to keep up.
The duke is in town on a rapid-fire tour of financial firms and regulators in his role as the UK’s special representative for international trade and investment. The position – part ambassador, part travelling salesman – has no obvious parallels elsewhere in business or government so I begin by asking how he defines it.
“It is the application of royal patronage to the business community,” he says. Just as other members of the House of Windsor might lend their support to a ballet company or a homeless shelter, so “the business community needed somebody to take an interest in it”.
The duke took on his duties in 2001 after 22 years in the Royal Navy, which included flying helicopter missions during the Falklands war. He agreed to be “headhunted” because he felt his naval job could be done as well by a non-royal officer, he explains, while the special representative role offered the chance to do something only a royal could do.
“Unfortunately, officers have initiative”, he says with satisfaction, “so we’ve rather taken the agenda that was given and developed it beyond what was originally envisaged or we ever considered appropriate.”
Last year, his schedule included 628 official engagements, twice the number he performed in 2005. He has flown from Algeria to Ulaanbaatar to open doors for the likes of BP, International Power, Lloyd’s of London and Rio Tinto – a former navy man offering a peculiarly British take on the idea of a military-industrial complex.
A waiter comes by to take drinks orders and the teetotal duke asks for still water. The Cipriani logo features a cocktail-shaking barman, but neither of us will be ordering its trademark $20 bellinis.
How well did managing a squadron prepare him for his role, I ask? “Oh, undoubtedly, but from a perspective that wasn’t business-oriented. When I was flying my helicopter and delivering weapons to the target, there was the impression that one was the sharp end of the sword. All right?” he adds, for emphasis. His style is crisply articulate, perhaps not surprisingly for someone who learnt the Queen’s English from the Queen.
“We [the navy] see 90 per cent of international trade going by sea,” he continues. “But it wasn’t until I left the navy and met businessmen and began to understand what was inside those containers that it became much more evident that business was the engine room of prosperity.”
He spent part of the first three years in his new role learning the basics of business, he says. Now, though, he finds he has outlasted several trade ministers and departmental officials. Picking his words carefully, he ventures: “My corporate memory is now, as it were, slightly greater than theirs. So continuity is one thing I bring to this.”
Is another advantage the fact that, at a time when trust in both business and government is at record lows, he is from neither camp? He pauses, again watching his words. “Yes, is the answer to that. There are a number of things that are going on at the moment where people come to me in preference to going to somebody else.” Another pause. “We are still trusted, as it were, above and beyond governments. I have no political will or desire. My desire is to serve the United Kingdom to the best of my ability and to get the best for the United Kingdom.”
He is, at 49, greying, but in his impeccably-fitting dark suit cuts an imposing physical presence at the small table as he spears a butter curl, rips into a bread roll and expands on his “self-employed” role. “I don’t work for anybody,” he says, describing his function as helping British business punch above its weight against international competitors with armies of lobbyists behind them.
“Through knowing what they want to achieve and by being in the right place at the right time, I’m able to say something that will paint Rolls-Royce in a favourable light. It’s for Rolls-Royce to go through the open doors. The people who are supporting GE are as effective or more ... ” There is a pause and he reaches for a military metaphor to clarify his point. “When you’re fighting the United States, they can bring one or two more guns to the table than we can, so we’ve got to fight clever. All right? So it’s the art of being clever.”
Naval analogies pepper his speech: “If the ship is alongside, there is absolutely no need for a captain,”; “Where I play my part is outside Buckingham Palace, when I take the ship to sea.”
I suggest there may be a book in this collection of nautically tinged wisdom, to join the business manuals that fill airport bookshelves with the leadership lessons of Shakespeare, say, or Joan of Arc. “I don’t need to write one,” the duke says, disclosing that Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has travelled with him for many years “and should be in every businessman’s briefcase”.
Our waiter returns and we turn to our menus. Tightly packed days of close contact meetings that could be wrecked by an encounter with a dodgy prawn have cut garlic and shellfish from the duke’s diet, and his tastes seem disappointingly plain for a prince.
He orders a baked tagliolini with ham, and is asked whether he would prefer green or white noodles. “Doesn’t worry me. I think we’ll go for green, shall we? Which is your most popular?” White, comes the answer. “I’ll go with white.”
He turns to me, saying: “Are you somebody who requires three courses, because if you are ... ” I abandon thoughts of appetisers and order the mushroom risotto.
I suggest that New York is an unusual stop for someone with years of exposure to parts of the world where British businesses require more help opening doors. “The need for me to intervene here is minute,” he admits. As someone whose friends include the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, he can seem more at home in the Middle East and Asia. Until the dispute in August over Scotland’s release of the Lockerbie bomber, Prince Andrew had been considered to represent the UK at Libya’s celebrations for the 40th anniversary of the coup that brought Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to power.
The ability to work with countries with which British diplomats may have rockier relationships is something he highlights, pointing to a 2008 visit to Sakhalin, where he attended the opening ceremony for a Russian liquefied natural gas plant. “Five minutes of conversation” with Dmitry Medvedev were invaluable in preparing the Russian president for the G20 summit in London, he argues: “He’s a young man with no experience of that sort of environment ... The ability to walk through the door and see a smiling face he knew made all the difference.”
He is in New York to highlight the role of British businesses in employing 1m Americans and to argue for a co-ordinated transatlantic approach to financial regulation. “For the stability of the financial system”, the rival financial capitals “need to be working on similar pages of the book”, he argues.
On a previous meeting we’d had in Davos, he had been brave enough to declare that the Bernie Madoff scandal “couldn’t happen in London”, and now he returns to his defence of the “principles-based” regulation preferred in the City of London. Polishing off the last of the bread rolls, he launches into a discussion about free-floating exchange rates, the perils of protectionism and a back-to-basics explanation of what banks do with their savers’ money that borders on teaching a financial journalist how to suck eggs.
As our food arrives, I ask about his routine, travelling for 100 to 120 days a year, sometimes squeezing 16 meetings into a two-day visit. Sawing at his food with a fork, the duke says the key is the painstaking preparation that goes into each trip. He adds that “this business of engagement” is something his family may just be genetically predisposed to understand.
“You could look at it another way,” he says. “There’s nothing you can do about it. You just have to go with the flow. You just have to go into the thing with the mental attitude that it’s a conveyor belt, and you’re a piece of luggage, and the airline will do its utmost to make that experience as pleasant as possible. It’s outside your control. Sit down. Get on with it.”
It is a startling image: the sovereign’s son as a lost suitcase. Does he enjoy the job, I ask, instantly realising how silly the question must sound to someone born into a role where, despite his golf hobby, duty crowds out niceties such as work-life balance.
His answer is a slow, “Ye-es. There are times when it gets really quite nerve-racking because if you are having a conversation with a head of state, it is just him and I. There is no help.”
The royal family is known, even by its own members, as The Firm. How accurate is the analogy, I ask. Are duties and strategy clearly set out from the top?
“Charities and everything else are purely a personal choice. The only time when there was the remotest bit of collaboration was over what the family did when Queen Elizabeth [the Queen Mother] and Princess Margaret died. There was a period when nothing happened, and then everybody was provided with a list and we all stood around a table and went, ‘Right we’ve got to sort this one out.’
“Everybody understands they’re there to support the monarch and what she does and what she stands for. We are all subsidiary companies, effectively, with our own boards of directors and everything else. But there’s not any obvious direction.”
What about succession planning, I ask. The curt response reveals I have stepped over into lèse majesté. “We only do one sort of succession planning. I don’t see anybody in the wings at the moment and that’s mostly because they see how hard I’m working.”
The corporate analogy is potent enough for the duke’s office to have approached PricewaterhouseCoopers about 18 months ago to identify what value his role creates. “We’re trying to come up with a model but I’m not sure that it’s going to work. I’d love to be able to say I’ve been responsible for £10bn of business, or for another 250 jobs coming to the UK [but sometimes] the companies themselves don’t know,” he admits.
On the cost line of the profit and loss account, he is more adamant, conscious of perennial tabloid needling about royal expenses. “I’m not in receipt of any public funds. The Queen funds out of her personal pocket the cost of my office,” he says. “It’s quite important to understand that we do not get an expense account. Privately, I hold the risk until the audited accounts are done and then I get paid back. And I get paid nothing.”
So, I say, you’re doing this job for no pay, with no hope of promotion and no prospect of retirement. Before I can finish asking what is left to motivate him, an explosive laugh interrupts me. “It’s a simple answer. That’s my life. That’s what I expect. Right? That is because of who I am and that is because of the life of the family within which I’ve been brought up. So to me this state of affairs is not extraordinary. To anybody else who looks in, they think I’m bloody mad! But that’s what we do.”
He rises from the table, declaring that he is 20 minutes late for his next appointment, and leaves us to settle our two bills. Turning to his staff, he says: “See you back in London. I’m not going to be up when you get up.” Before the next flight, the next conveyor belt, there will be the comfort of eggs and bacon – a fixture of every breakfast, wherever in the world he wakes up. “We measure places by the comfort of their beds, and how they cook a breakfast,” he says, as the security men reappear.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson is the FT’s media editor
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Harry Cipriani
Fifth Avenue
New York

Lightly baked tagliolini with ham $28.95Risotto and select wild mushrooms $33.95Large bottle of San Pellegrino $11.00
Total (including service) $94.09
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Royal calendar: Life and times of a ‘playboy prince’
1960 Born February 19 at Buckingham Palace, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II and the first child born to a reigning British monarch since Queen Victoria’s youngest, Beatrice, in 1857.1973-1979 Attends Gordonstoun in northern Scotland, following his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, and brother Prince Charles. Rumours about his romantic attachments lead the tabloid press to nickname him “Randy Andy” and “The Playboy Prince”.1979 Chooses not to go to university, and joins the Royal Navy.1980 Passes out of Dartmouth naval college and attends elementary flying training with the RAF. 1981 Receives his Wings from the Duke of Edinburgh and wins the award for best pilot in his year.1982 Sails to the Falklands on HMS Invincible as part of the Task Force to regain the islands. 1983 Completes his frontline tour. He is described as “an excellent pilot and a very promising officer” by Nigel “Sharkey” Ward, commander of the 820 Naval Air Squadron. Relationship with American actress Koo Stark ends after a scandal over her semi-naked appearance in a film some years earlier.1986 Marries Sarah Ferguson at Westminster Abbey on July 23 and the couple are given the titles of Duke and Duchess of York.1988-1990 The couple’s first child Beatrice is born, followed two years later by her sister Eugenie.1992 The Duke and Duchess of York announce that they are separating. 1996 The couple divorce but remain friendly and share custody of their daughters.2001 Formally leaves the navy and is appointed the UK’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment. Widely travelled role leads cynics to coin a new nickname, “Air-Miles Andy”.2009 Years of practice on the golf course pay off as it is reported that he is a good enough player to turn professional. It is also erroneously claimed that he has had a nine-hole golf course built in his garden at the Royal Lodge in Windsor