Everyone’s least favorite royal is again back in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Yup, we’re talking Prince “Randy Andy” Andrew, who’s the subject of a British political dispute revolving around the impending publication of Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, a book that chronicles the British Labour Party’s rise to power and electoral victory under British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
But it’s a revelation about Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner that’s really rattled some cages. The dispute stems from Prince Andrew’s position as a “counsellor of state,” meaning he’s legally allowed to stand in for King Charles. Rayner fiercely pushed for Andrew to have this privilege removed, allegedly saying: “I’m not going to vote to keep that nonce on… I can’t go back to my constituency and say, ‘Yeah, I support that’.”
So what is a nonce and is Prince Andrew one? In American English, the word “nonce” is generally used in cryptography circles to refer to a certain numerical value, apparently a contraction of “number used once.”
Prince Andrew is, as far as we know, not involved in cryptography in any way whatsoever. In this case, however, Rayner is using the British definition of the term, which means “pedophile.” So, if we accept the quote to be true, we would essentially translate Rayner’s statement in American English as “I’m not going to vote to keep that child molester on.”
The word itself is of uncertain origin. There’s an urban legend it arose in Wakefield Prison, with “N.O.N.C.E.” – an acronym for “not on normal courtyard exercise” – being written on the doors of inmates who were in danger of violence from other inmates. But, like most claims that some words have secret origins in acronyms, this is almost certainly a tall tale. Regardless, “nonce” was being used to refer to pedophiles from at least the 1980s, as per this 1989 quote from The New Statesman: “The nonce wing, where the child-killers, molesters and various perverts have to be protected from the other prisoners.”
For an example of the word in use, see this clip from the popular British comedy Phoenix Nights (perhaps notably, the top-voted comment on this video is, simply, “Prince Andrew”):
And so to the million-dollar question: Is Prince Andrew a nonce? Unfortunately, Queen Elizabeth II robbed us of a non-libelous answer to this question when she paid a hefty settlement to Virginia Guiffre in 2022, who alleged she was forced to have sex with Andrew by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell when she was 16 and 17 years old. If her case had gone to trial, Andrew had been cross-examined, and the judge had delivered a verdict concluding that he had raped a teenager, then yes, we could firmly state that Prince Andrew is a nonce.
As it stands, we only have circumstantial evidence that Prince Andrew is a nonce, albeit backed up by that photo of the smirking prince groping the underage Giuffre while Ghislaine Maxwell – currently incarcerated for, among many other crimes, sex trafficking a minor – grins in the background. And of course, there’s the background hum of Andrew being best buds with modern history’s most notorious pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. After all, what are we to make of an email sent from Andrew to Epstein in 2011 – after Epstein had served time for procuring a child for prostitution – promising “we’ll play some more soon!!!!?”
With the data we have available, we simply can’t say for certain whether Prince Andrew is a nonce, so we leave you to draw your own conclusions. All that said, we can see Rayner’s point that Prince Andrew’s reputation means he probably shouldn’t engage in any diplomatic activities on behalf of the United Kingdom – that is unless they suddenly need someone who can empathize and relate to those accused of sex crimes… Hang on… Ms Rayner! Send this man to Washington, D.C.!
Published: Feb 4, 2025 10:28 am