Prince Philip behaved in the same dismissive way to Beaton’s 1990s equivalent, Terry O’Neill, at the christening of Prince Andrew’s younger daughter, Princess Eugenie, in December 1990. When Terry, who works very quickly with just one assistant, was snapping the christening group at Sandringham, Prince Philip kept saying, ‘Come on! Come on! Haven’t we done enough?’ Then he added what is known as his photographer’s phrase: ‘If he hasn’t got what he wants by now, he’s an even worse photographer than I thought!’

After that time, there was a lack of news about the royal baby and, because of the lack of photographic evidence to the contrary, whispers began that there might be something wrong with the baby. People were noting how Andrew had been kept away from public gaze much more than was the case with Charles or Anne. Eventually, it was left to the foreign press to make the first move and a French newspaper ran a story claiming that the baby was malformed. Prince Philip was furious, the Queen upset and Buckingham Palace defeated in its aim to keep things private. Then as now, the Palace are reluctant to give way to media pressure, but they saw little sense in keeping Andrew hidden any longer. So, at sixteen months old, he made his public debut on the Buckingham Palace balcony for the Queen’s birthday parade. When the crowd spotted the baby dressed in his best embroidered romper suit bobbing up and down in his mother’s arms, a huge cheer went up. This was what they had waited to see.

Nanny Mabel Anderson was thirty-four when Prince Andrew was born and she ran the nursery in the traditional royal manner: unchallenged, unopposed and almost as a private fiefdom. She had the assistance of an under-nanny, June Waller, who helped her in much the same way as she herself had helped Helen Lightbody with Charles and Anne, and a nursery footman. Royal nannies do not have to clean, cook or do the laundry. Their job is to purely see to the children’s wellbeing and run the nursery, which Mabel did perfectly. She set up an unswerving routine, like so much of their structured royal lives. Mabel was the central pivot around which everything revolved for Andrew. His parents were almost strangers by comparison.

By now, the Queen had been on her throne for eight years, and compared with the austerity years when Charles and Anne were younger and the Queen seldom had the time to see them during the day, she was now able to find more time for Andrew. Where previously she might have sometimes popped into the ballroom where they had their weekly dancing lessons with Madame Vacani, now, with Andrew, it was different. She had more time available, and so was able to schedule time with him into her diary in a way that had not been possible before.