A foreign businessman and close ‘confidant’ of Prince Andrew, Duke of York, has lost an appeal against being barred from entering the United Kingdom. “H6,” as he is labelled by the security services, was first ruled a threat to national security under the administration of former Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
The immigration decision, made in March 2023, has now been upheld by the special immigration appeals commission (SIAC). At the time, the British authorities were concerned that H6 was on a mission to facilitate relationships between high-profile Britons and senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials “that could be leveraged for political interference purposes.” The increasingly hapless-looking Duke is just such a figure, despite his diminished role in a ‘slimmed-down monarchy,’ thanks to multiple scandals.
H6 is also said to have misled UK civil servants about his own role in Beijing’s intelligence services, which made his unofficial role as Prince Andrew’s business representative in China particularly troubling. After his initial exclusion from the UK, the now 50-year-old pushed for a legal review of the decision, arguing to SIAC that it was unlawful.
The three judges ruling on the case disagreed:
The secretary of state [Braverman] was entitled to conclude that the applicant represented a risk to the national security of the United Kingdom, and that she was entitled to conclude that his exclusion was justified and proportionate.
Vaguely acknowledging Andrew’s self-inflicted woes, which include being forced to step down from being an ‘active royal,’ the trio contend that the prince’s legal situation actually made him more vulnerable to overseas espionage and manipulation. This seems to be confirmed by a letter stored on one of H6’s electronic devices—intercepted along with the alleged spy at a British port in 2021—which presented the connection between the two as particularly close. In it, Andrew’s advisor Dominic Hampshire told H6:
You should never underestimate the strength of that relationship … Outside of [my principal and his family’s] closest internal confidants, you sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on.
At the very least, the Duke of York should appoint some new advisors. Recent years have seen public scrutiny of another of his close friendships, with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, culminating in a financial civil settlement with accuser Virginia Giuffre and a catastrophic television interview where he tried (and failed) to clear his name of all Epstein-related allegations.
