There is a particular cruelty in being made less popular than the family member the institution spent three years publicly destroying. That is now the measurable reality for Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, whose approval ratings in a fresh YouGov survey have dropped below those of Prince Harry — the Duke of Sussex who renounced his working royal status, relocated to California, sued the British tabloid press, and became, for large portions of the British establishment, a kind of walking apostasy.

The poll numbers are not a rounding-error fluctuation. They represent a meaningful signal about where public sentiment has landed after years of turbulence centered on the York branch of the royal family — a branch that has been in slow institutional freefall since the moment Prince Andrew's association with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein became impossible for Buckingham Palace to manage quietly. Beatrice and Eugenie are not accused of any wrongdoing. They are, by most accounts, the collateral damage of their father's choices and their mother's persistent proximity to a story that will not die.

Prince Andrew — formally Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, stripped of his HRH styling for official purposes in 2022 — has retreated almost entirely from public life. His settlement with Virginia Giuffre in 2022, made without admission of liability but for a figure widely reported in the tens of millions of pounds range, did not resolve the public's questions so much as end the legal proceeding that was forcing them into open court. The ongoing House of Commons and international scrutiny of the Epstein network has kept his name in circulation. Every new Epstein-related hearing in Washington or document release in New York sends a fresh ripple back across the Atlantic and lands, indirectly, on his daughters.

The irony embedded in the YouGov data is not subtle. Harry's approval rating, long battered by the fallout from his memoir, his Oprah interview, and his and Meghan's sustained public conflict with the Palace, has apparently stabilized or even recovered sufficiently to clear the bar that Beatrice and Eugenie can no longer meet. That is a statement about how badly the York princesses' numbers have deteriorated, not necessarily a rehabilitation of Harry's standing. The British public, or at least the polling sample, appears to have concluded that being the son who left is preferable to being the daughters of the father who stayed and became a liability.

Beatrice, in a recent podcast appearance, addressed her parents' divorce — Sarah Ferguson and Andrew Windsor separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996 — with a candor that was notable for a member of the royal family. That kind of personal openness might, under other circumstances, have generated sympathy and boosted her numbers. In the current climate, it barely registers against the structural weight of the association her surname carries. Eugenie, who has maintained a lower public profile and relocated between London and Portugal in recent years, faces the same arithmetic.

The broader picture here is one of institutional cost-benefit calculation playing out in real time. The monarchy's handling of the Andrew situation — the Newsnight interview that backfired catastrophically, the slow withdrawal of royal duties, the retention of his residence at Royal Lodge despite reported pressure to vacate — has satisfied almost no one. Critics of the institution see half-measures. Defenders of Andrew see abandonment. And the two women who had the least agency in any of it continue to absorb the reputational shrapnel.

There is a separate, quieter subplot in the data: the reported suggestion that Andrew and Sarah Ferguson may now have what is being characterized as a "golden opportunity" to rebuild some relationship with King Charles amid the ongoing recalibration of the royal family's internal politics. Whether that represents genuine reconciliation or a managed repositioning ahead of further scrutiny is impossible to say from the outside. What the YouGov numbers make plain is that whatever reconciliation or repositioning is happening, it has not yet translated into a public rehabilitation of the York family's standing.

For Beatrice and Eugenie, the trajectory of the past three years has been one of slow erosion they cannot arrest because the source of the erosion is not their own conduct. That is a specific kind of injustice — one that the tabloid press cycle is not well-designed to acknowledge, and that royal PR machinery has no obvious tool to fix. The poll is not a verdict on who they are. It is a verdict on the family structure they were born into and what it has cost them.