Cocaine, Jeffrey Epstein and a dead elephant: Royals behaving badly vex Europe’s leaders

All families have problems — and royals are no exception.
That was Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre’s message last week, when asked about a scandal enveloping the Norwegian crown princess’ son, Marius Borg Høiby, who admitted assaulting his girlfriend during a cocaine binge.
“It [the Norwegian royal family] is a family with some clear challenges, which applies to quite a few other families in Norway,” the prime minister said.
That said, not all families have a constitutionally enshrined role and live in lavish palaces funded by the public purse.
While most of Europe’s monarchies were abolished after the First and Second World Wars, there are 12 who managed to hang onto their crowns and scepters, albeit after being forced to relinquish most of their political power.
They are Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as the principalities of Andorra, Liechtenstein and Monaco, the grand duchy of Luxembourg, and the Vatican, a theocratic absolute monarchy.
Then there are those royal dynasties who lost their thrones but retained a semi-legitimate ceremonial role, such as those in Romania and Montenegro, or at least a measure of public fascination, as in Greece.
The result is that, even today, the Continent is rife with royals who often wield enormous influence and celebrity — and whose antics, when they get up to no good, cause their governments no end of grief.
Belgium’s famously rebellious Prince Laurent received a dressing down from Prime Minister Yves Leterme in 2011 after he made an unauthorized trip to the DR Congo, with Leterme threatening to revoke the prince’s allowance.
His allowance was eventually slashed in 2018 by then-Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel as a punishment after the prince attended a Chinese embassy event in naval uniform without receiving permission from Belgium’s foreign ministry.
“Monarchy has always been beset by scandal,” said Robert Aldrich, professor emeritus of European history at the University of Sydney. “Scandals can indeed weaken, and even threaten monarchies.”
That proved true in the case of Spain’s King Juan Carlos I, who abdicated in 2014 and headed into exile after a bevy of blunders, including an infamous safari hunting trip with his lover in Botswana in which he proudly posed for a photo holding a rifle next to a dead elephant, as well as allegations of corrupt financial dealings.
The former monarch’s conduct triggered a political storm, with protesters taking to the streets calling for constitutional reform and the abolition of the crown. In 2020, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez sided with the king’s critics, slamming the charges against him as “disturbing” and “troubling.”
It would not be the Spanish monarchy’s last brush with scandal. The king’s youngest daughter, Princess Cristina, was later prosecuted for tax evasion along with her husband, and stripped of her title. When the charges were first announced, then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy defended the princess, declaring she was innocent. She was acquitted in 2017.
In the U.K., the cloud of ignominy surrounding one infamous royal has beleaguered multiple prime ministers.
When Prince Andrew first faced scrutiny over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2011, he was working as a trade envoy for the British government. Then-Prime Minister David Cameron was forced to step in to defend him amid calls for his firing — though after public pressure, Prince Andrew stepped down anyway.
As more information about the prince’s relationship with Epstein came to light years later, including allegations (which Prince Andrew has long denied) that he had a sexual encounter with a teenage girl who alleged she was trafficked by Epstein and his circle, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to weigh in.
In 2020, Johnson denied his government had been approached by American prosecutors investigating the prince, and insisted the charges against Prince Andrew were ultimately a matter for the royal family, not his government. And in 2022, his treasury denied public funds were used in a settlement between Prince Andrew and the alleged sex-trafficking victim.
By then, the prince had largely vanished from public life. “Royal families have tactics to minimize scandal — those who have created scandal are shuffled out of the limelight,” said Aldrich.
Romania’s government has spent years hunting its fugitive prince across Europe. Prince Paul of Romania, grandson of the country’s penultimate king, Carol II, was convicted by the Romanian authorities in 2020 of being part of a plot to illegally claim old royal lands belonging to his ancestor.
Last month, the Romanian authorities sent a delegation of officials to Malta, where the prince was caught and arrested, to argue for his extradition to Romania. But last week, a Maltese court refused to hand him over, citing the inhumane conditions of Romania’s penitentiaries. Romanian Justice Minister Alina-Ștefania Gorghiu called the ruling “outrageous.”
In the Netherlands, “relatively few” scandals have beset the royal family in the past 50 years, said Paul Bovend’Eert, a professor of constitutional law at Radboud University.
A notable exception was a meeting at the G20 summit in Japan in 2019 between Queen Máxima and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was facing international outcry over the murder by Saudi henchmen of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“Her meeting led to much criticism in the lower house of parliament,” Bovend’Eert said. A United Nations rapporteur also slammed the queen for not raising Khashoggi’s killing during the meeting.
Then-Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte rushed to defend the queen, saying the Netherlands had already signaled its disgust over Khashoggi’s killing to Saudi Arabia through other channels.
“The public relations people, lawyers and financiers of royal families can combat scandal,” Aldrich said.
“So over the long term — and monarchy is, after all, a very long-term proposition — dynasties can be remarkably resilient,” he added.
Ketrin Jochecová contributed to this report.