What did Lance Sergeant Dave Greenhalgh die for in Afghanistan on 13 February 2010? The 25-year-old was, as the euphemistic news wire reports said, “instantly killed” when his vehicle struck an improvised explosive device near Lashkar Gah, Helmand province, this month 16 years ago. Greenhalgh was from Ilkeston, a large town in the heart of Derbyshire with enduring connections to the British military. Following Dave’s death, his father Steve wrote in a moving letter: “I’ve always said that there is no greater sacrifice than to die in service of God, Queen and country, there is no greater honour.”
Dwell on what Steve Greenhalgh wrote. “Country”, well every nation has patriots. “God”, that’s a love older than country. But “Queen”? The Nato soldiers serving in Afghanistan in 2010 from Estonia, Poland, the US could not say that. I doubt the Commonwealth troops venerated her quite in this way. But for hundreds of men and women from the UK, the Queen, their commander-in-chief, was something else, almost semi-divine. When Greenhalgh gave his life for the Crown, he gave his life, in part, for her.
Greenhalgh served in First Battalion, Grenadier Guards. The elite infantry regiment is one of five regiments of foot guards in the Household Division, responsible for performing state ceremonies in London and Windsor. They are the closest thing the royals have to an Edwardian boy’s tin toy soldiers.
Far-flung Helmand is a long way from Derbyshire. It’s a long way from Windsor Castle and the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. Why exactly Dave Greenhalgh was there used to be a difficult question to answer. For freedom? Security? Nato? Women’s liberation? It can be hard to remember at this distance. It was all so long ago, so far away, so grim in how the mission eventually failed, so marginal to the common experience of our flowing national life. Thankfully, an answer – this is what the lance sergeant fought and died for – came with the release of a tranche of the Epstein files in January.
At the time of Greenhalgh’s death, Prince Andrew still generated the aura that resulted from a glittering life of serial high achievement. From a remove, Andrew resembled nothing less than a human peg on which post-nominal golden titles were looped, a doll painted with colourful honours: “Personal aide-de-camp” to Queen Elizabeth II; “Lord High Commissioner” to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; “Grand Master” of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators. Andrew would soon be given the “Freedom of the City of London”. The prince somehow found the time in between all the grand mastering and lord high commissioning and personal aide-de-camping to discharge further duties as the UK’s “special representative for international trade and investment”, an appointment made by the Blair government, wholeheartedly backed by Andrew’s friend, Peter Mandelson.
Andrew, the former trade secretary Mandelson predicted in 2001, would “have a very important role for which he is well qualified”. The prince was not just another golfing duffer wrapped in a tinsel of fake jobs, which was the gist of numerous criticisms from those who didn’t want him to become a “special representative” for the UK. No, no, no. Mandelson was on hand to butler away these dark notions that risked poisoning the public mind before Andrew clinched another top job: “This activity on behalf of the nation should not be confused with the commercial activities for personal gain which is associated with certain other members of the royal family.” Mandelson’s good sense won out. Andrew began the role around the same time British troops filtered into Afghanistan.
Eventually these two parallel foreign adventures met. Special Representative Andrew, as the Epstein files appear to suggest, was taking a close interest in the progress of the war in Helmand, which reached a lethal crescendo with Operation Moshtarak in 2010. A document – a briefing that appears to have been prepared for Andrew by UK officials outlining investment opportunities in the province – was apparently forwarded by him to Jeffrey Epstein that December. There was some money to be made in the region. Helmand’s main airport was a mere 90-minute flight from Dubai, while Gereshk, one of the main towns, was a 90-minute drive from Pakistan. Once all the Taliban’s improvised explosive devices were detonated by careless vehicles driven by the poor blokes in the Household Division, Helmand would be an exporter’s dream. Thanks to the British taxpayer, the Department for International Development was already putting together “secure industry sites” in the main towns. Thanks to Prince Andrew’s apparent email, Epstein knew there were “significant high value mineral deposits” – a spectacular periodic table of marble, gold, iridium, uranium and thorium, as well as possible deposits of lucrative oil and gas – all with the “potential for low cost extraction”. And thanks to men like Greenhalgh, those “high value minerals” could be washed clean and safe for men like Epstein to profit.
Documents like this, an anonymous former trade official told the BBC in February, before Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested at home by Thames Valley Police on 19 February, “were absolutely not for sending outside government and particularly not to somebody who might seek to use them for commercial purposes”. Not for nothing did Epstein have a dog called Duke. Truly, there is no greater sacrifice, no greater honour than to die for God, country and a Crown forwarding investment opportunities in a territory littered with British bodies to a convicted child sex trafficker.
Andrew was appointed a colonel in the Grenadier Guards, Lance Sergeant Greenhalgh’s regiment, by his mother in 2017. Eighteen men in that regiment died in Afghanistan. To make Andrew their honorary chief was a mystifying decision, but it continued to find supporters even after the prince was stripped of that honour in 2022. “Very much to her credit she held on [protecting Andrew] for as long as possible,” wrote AN Wilson in his obituary for the late Queen in 2022. “While the Grenadier Guards and others were imploring her to sack him as an honorary colonel, she placed loyalty, and one must assume her love for her son, above public duty.” Today, we turn from Andrew to the late Queen, then look across the whole House of Windsor, wondering what else they placed above public duty.
Traditionally, if we were to take our seats in the Royal Box for an evening spent watching our never-ending island story, it is the republicans, the intelligentsia, the bourgeois radicals who perform the stock role of anti-English freaks. It is they, risking boos from the crowd, who turn off the television when the monarch makes their Christmas speech, who mock the flag and snigger at suet puddings. It was these careless, limp-wristed, book-worming creeps who made a mockery of “uniforms that guard you while you sleep”, as Rudyard Kipling thundered in his poem “Tommy”. By contrast, the valiantly stolid, unvarying, miniature-flag-waving patriotic masses who loved the monarch and hated nonces were proved right in the end as the curtain fell across the stage. Bravo, encore, fin. I am probably not alone in being someone who accepted this play as a useful myth based on partial truths. I am probably not alone in having relatives who served in Helmand – risking their lives for what? – who now find that their blood is heating up. After Andrew it’s hard not to feel that so much of what we saw in that pageant was a lie.
For who mocks those uniforms now? Where is the laughter coming from? The call is coming from inside the palace and every single one of us can hear it. Andrew has taken the monarchy and dumped it in an acid bath; a very important role for which he is well qualified. We have learned in recent months that princes can be de-princed by a Labour justice secretary, that it is popularity based on polling, not the hereditary principle, that buttresses the Windsors’ continued survival, and perhaps very soon, that the line of succession is for parliament, not the palace, to decide. What kind of monarchy do we have now? A quasi-elective one?
All the glib fogeyism in the realm – do you really want a President Blair or Farage? – will not put the House of Windsor back together again. Things will never be the way they were. Andrew, of course, strenuously denies all wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. He denies any personal gain from his role as trade envoy. He is no longer a prince, a lord chancellor or a grand master of anything other than his £80,000 Range Rover and the seven dogs and two staff who live with him in mud-flecked, photographer-haunted exile in Norfolk.
Let’s follow the line pumped out like water from a holed schooner by Buckingham Palace and its hard-working proxies for a moment. After the arrest, His Majesty the King put out a rare statement written in the first person on 19 February. He asked that the law be allowed to take its course. The King had already promised to cooperate with the police. Charles had “felt powerfully about this issue in his in-tray”, a “friend” told the Sunday Times, forcing us to imagine the ageing King staring hard and feeling “powerfully” at pieces of paper marked “ANDREW” since 2023. This, the Windsorists wittered in print and across the airwaves, was the screeching sound of a line being drawn under the matter. Radioactive Andrew would be placed in a lead-lined box.
According to Jonathan Dimbleby, who went out to bat on Newsnight on 13 February, this was a “personal crisis for the individuals involved”. Andrew was a private individual and this was a private individual matter, perhaps to be decided in a not very private court. “It will blow over,” burped a tramp-like Boris Johnson on 22 February. No more questions, please. Do not wonder how Peter Loughborough, Seventh Earl of Rosslyn, the former head of the Met’s royal protection squad, nicknamed “the Queen’s favourite policeman”, can remain a key player in the King’s Court. Shhh. Pity their plumage. Forget the dying bird.
In the days after the arrest it became commonplace to hear that the police action showed the system was working as intended. All was well in England. Even a royal – forget for a moment that Andrew was supposed to have been un-royaled last October – could come face to face at 8am with 15 coppers surrounding their grace-and-favour manse. It would be more just to wonder why this did not happen a long time ago. “The Met Police will not investigate Prince Andrew”, has been a perennial headline of the past decade, appearing as reliably as stories in the Daily Star about the ghost of Elvis haunting Graceland. Andrew is only being investigated now because the American authorities released the Epstein files. I don’t remember the bit in Blackstone’s Commentaries where the great jurist explains that the operation of our law depends on the 119th US Congress, the US justice department and the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Can our legal system cope with the trial of Windsor, should it come to that? At first sight that seems like a hysterical question. Even a year ago most of us would have laughed at it. But can you have a fair trial of the King’s brother in the King’s Court, overseen by a judge who has sworn a personal oath to that same King, sitting under the King’s royal coat of arms? The mind boggles. It’s not just judges. Magistrates and KCs, soldiers and MPs and the police, privy counsellors, bishops, archbishops: they swear their allegiance to the Crown, not to you. And you can only understand the Andrew story in all its proportions when you know that to cause potential embarrassment to the firm – to ask the wrong questions, to speak out, to raise tedious little concerns – was not a way to open up one’s professional horizons within our multitudinous oath-taking bureaucracies.
“No one would complain, it wouldn’t help your reputation,” a former trade official told the BBC on 23 February. They were attempting to explain why the top-flight (mostly male) Oxbridge brains staffing our diplomatic service never bothered to stop the prince allegedly charging massages to the taxpayer while he was on his foreign jollies. To cause grief to the Crown in official Britain was – probably still is – to commit professional self-harm.
Senior civil servants and former chancellors of the Exchequer are on the record saying as much. The tone such confessions were made in was usually jovial. Before Andrew, the stakes seemed negligible. So what if, as Valentine Low reported last year, the Queen ensured the survival of the Highland Bagpipe School of the British Army during the austerity years by asking George Osborne whether the school was closing? Osborne had been due to junk the place, but reversed the cut once he realised the Queen cared lavishly for piping. We can see how the same force might have protected Andrew during his decade as a “special representative”.
That pre-emptive cringe before the Windsors was a powerful thing in this country. Was. That force – who knows for how long – is at its weakest point for a generation. The crown sits on the head of a timid, tragic King. Unpopular monarchs in the past could at least use the royal prerogative to bribe, bully and intimidate the elite to fall in line. The hated and hateful George IV was able to create 57 peers between 1820 and 1830. For the people, King Charles III offers yoga classes at Highgrove and tea towels at the Balmoral gift shop. For politicians, he can provide association with his family, whose connections to the world’s most famous paedophile continue to stack up. An alluring offer. At least the future King William V will be able to offer them free tickets to the Earthshot Prize gala. The Crown, then, in the gutter. Who will pick it up?
Keir Hardie was a dedicated republican throughout his life, liable to embarrass his colleagues with the strength of his outbursts against the Crown. As Labour danced around the centres of power in the 1920s and 1930s, the party’s hostility to the throne became taboo. Embryonic Labour MPs were overwhelmed by the dazzle and glitter that surrounded the royals. Former revolutionaries, cotton spinners and miners became dedicated Windsorists. Their sharpest teeth were falling out. “He soon took to the grandeur and high life,” recorded the Conservative MP Chips Channon of Labour’s first prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, “and wallowed in it like a man who had been starving all his life.”
It’s an old, sad story. Labour’s radicalism was quenched by the moat of sugar water surrounding the Crown. Whenever power comes into sight for the party, the obeisance and the flags come out. How else to explain the peculiar figure of Keir Starmer and how he relates to royalty? The youthful republican is today a knight of the realm, pursuing a dour pragmatic politics that bends over backwards to shore up our broken institutions.
Whatever stirs in the recesses of Starmer’s conscience, parliament today has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform the monarchy. Erskine May’s convention that MPs should not cast “reflections upon the sovereign or the royal family” ought to be shredded. The Windsors’ exemption from freedom of information law must end. Long-overdue questions about the provenance of the millions Andrew used to reach a settlement with Virginia Giuffre must finally be asked. The Royal Archives, entombed in the Round Tower of Windsor Castle, must be opened up to the nation, not just its most sycophantic historians. Andrew must be removed from the line of succession. Envisioning a constitution and a monarchy appropriate to our circumstances is a challenge Labour was born to take up, though it is unlikely it will. Andrew’s arrest may have stirred memories of Charles I’s capture by parliament in 1649. But it does not appear to have woken up our legislators to their Cromwellian heritage.
Appearing at the Baftas on 22 February, Kate Middleton wore a floor-length Gucci gown, paired with a maroon velvet belt and clutch. By her side was William, the future king, in a coordinated dark red velvet tuxedo jacket. Asked the toughest imaginable question by gathered reporters – had he seen Hamnet? – William gave a morose answer. “I need to be in quite a calm state and I am not at the moment. I will save it.”
The heir has made some odd moves ever since the scandal around his uncle intensified last October. In a recent interview with a BBC podcast, William claimed that his mental health had suffered after a couple of years spent working as an air ambulance pilot. “I’m carrying everyone’s emotional baggage,” the prince recalled thinking. Obscure references to hidden traumas are a predictable part of the bristling public relations arsenal of celebrity. We are probably only a few years away from seeing the Prince of Wales on the Steven Bartlett podcast discussing The Body Keeps the Score with Rylan, Mark Wright and Romesh Ranganathan. What does it tell you about the UK today that some of the highest-paid PR professionals in the kingdom are telling their royal client – whose ancestry can be traced to the Anglo-Saxon god Wotan – that affecting misery is the fastest route to relevance?
At some level, after all this, there will be a great emotional need for him and his wife to just be good. The prince’s father was much-satirised for his moaning during the decades he spent waiting to become a bank note. William’s decision to take up this mantle of depression at a time when direct questions are being asked about the alleged harm done by his family to vulnerable women and girls is, frankly, puzzling. He will be closely watched now. The briefings emanating from his camp against both his father and grandmother suggest a crisis, a lack of “calm” in the heir to the throne that will not be resolved soon.
Windsorists are yet to comprehend what the threat to William’s succession and the firm actually is, beyond a potential trial of Andrew. In January, the Times reported that Prince Harry had won his fight to regain armed police protection. The newspaper did not spell out the full implications for its readers. Harry can now return home to his ailing father and his unhappy country. Should he wish, he will be able to set up a rival court in the land. The House of Windsor and the House of Sussex will be forced to share our small island while the public watches on. A febrile scenario reminiscent of more unpleasant chapters of the medieval period, loaded with the potential for an all-out popularity war between the houses, with unknown consequences for the monarchy itself. What courtiers call “business as usual” will be at a premium.
More dangerously still for the Windsors, the questions that swirl around Andrew threaten to drag the late Queen into the darkness with him. While Charles can be thought of as boring, and William dull, true reputational damage to Elizabeth herself would have been unthinkable at the time of her death in 2022. Lance Sergeant Greenhalgh’s commander is the object of something close to British Shintoism, less a person than a deity. Besmirch her and we could start believing in anything.
What did she know about her son; when did she know it? The British felt as if they knew her all their lives. But there was so little to go on. Only snatches of that enigmatic smile. Look at those close to her. Look at how they crumbled over the decades. Philip, with his wandering eyes, driving his polo ponies mercilessly. Margaret, reduced to the look of boozy seaside landlady by the end, barely able to walk. Miserable Charles, turning to quacks and religion to feel sacred, scrawling his spidery notes to government ministers. Diana, who died believing that the firm bumped off her first lover, Barry Mannakee. The two young grandsons marched behind her coffin in the world’s glare. And Prince Andrew… to the public, Elizabeth justified this broken family as the product of “duty” and “service”. We may soon discover, through the efforts of the Thames Valley Police, what she thought privately. We know what Dave Greenhalgh thought he died for now. Soon we may find out the truth.
[Further reading: Abolish the monarchy]
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This article appears in the 25 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Crumbling Crown
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Subscribe here to commentAbout thirty years ago I was in the audience when Princess Anne gave the opening address to a meeting of a professional society that I was a member of. Listening to her informed analysis of the challenges facing our specialty I gradually altered my sceptical republican stance. Maybe I have underestimated the royals?
Later in the day, propping up the bar, I shared this opinion – the Princess’s speech was actually spot on. Standing behind me was the society’s president. “I agree about the speech” he said. “Bloody good, and I should know – I wrote it!”
And thus Toto pulled aside the curtain to reveal that the wizard was a mere mortal pulling levers. Levers built and maintained by others.
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