When King Charles stripped his brother of royal titles and military honors last year, the working assumption inside establishment circles was that the accounting was complete. It was not. The City of London Corporation — the ancient, semi-autonomous local authority governing London's financial square mile — is now actively drawing up plans to revoke Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's Freedom of the City of London, one of the last formal honors he still holds.

The Freedom of the City is a ceremonial distinction with roots going back to 1237, historically granted to distinguished individuals and, in certain cases, inherited through familial connection. Andrew received his in 2021, but the unusual wrinkle here is that he holds it not on his own merits but because his late father, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was a freeman. That hereditary linkage, rather than protecting Andrew, has become a bureaucratic puzzle the Corporation is now working to solve: can you strip an honor that wasn't quite earned in the conventional sense to begin with?

The Corporation's willingness to move at all is the signal worth reading. This is one of the most conservative, tradition-bound institutions in the United Kingdom — a body that has operated with legal continuity since the Norman era, that still uses medieval ward structures, and that is not in the habit of making dramatic gestures toward contemporary controversies. The fact that it is now preparing formal plans to revoke Andrew's status tells you something about the political temperature around his name.

Andrew's connection to Jeffrey Epstein — the American financier who was federally charged in 2019 with sex trafficking of minors before his death in a Manhattan detention facility — has been the organizing fact of the Prince's public collapse. A 2019 BBC interview in which Andrew attempted to defend his relationship with Epstein became one of the most catastrophically misjudged pieces of crisis communications in modern royal history. His claims were widely contradicted by witness accounts and documentary evidence. He stepped back from royal duties shortly after.

In 2022, Andrew reached a civil settlement with Virginia Giuffre, who had accused him of sexual abuse. He did not admit liability as part of that settlement, but he agreed to make a substantial donation to Giuffre's charity supporting victims of trafficking. No criminal charges have been filed against him in any jurisdiction. His legal position is that the settlement closed the matter. A large portion of the British public, and evidently the City of London Corporation, has drawn its own conclusions regardless.

What remains notable about the Corporation's current deliberations is the timing. Royal displeasure was already formally expressed when Charles acted. The stripping of military titles and HRH status was the Palace's own verdict rendered through institutional channels. The City moving independently — and against the grain of its usual torpor — suggests that no institution with a public-facing reputation now wants Andrew's name attached to it without a fight.

Andrew himself has shown few signs of accepting a permanent private exile. Reports have consistently indicated he remains in residence at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park and that tensions with the Palace over the scale of his household arrangements and costs have continued to simmer. His public silence on the Epstein matter has been total since the 2022 settlement — but silence has not translated into rehabilitation.

For the City of London Corporation, the specific mechanism for removal matters. The Freedom is normally permanent once granted. Revocation requires establishing either a procedural basis or a new formal resolution — and whatever the Corporation's lawyers produce will itself become a document of record, a small but durable piece of the official accounting of how British institutions handled a man whose proximity to a convicted sex trafficker became impossible to administratively ignore. The deliberations are ongoing. A final decision has not yet been announced.