Mark Andrews: Forget exams, says the prince with a C and two Ds, and the curiously incurious Nicola Sturgeon

Writing in the Guardian - where else? - he explained how, ‘in July 2024, a European Union law came into force requiring plastic bottle caps to remain attached to their bottles.’

I don’t know about you, but that’s really won me over....

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Following on from last week’s announcement of Gemma Collins as the poster girl for the Government’s further education policy, we now have more sage advice from a man who has really been there, seen it and done it.

Speaking at the Education World Forum, HRH Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh told education ministers that while exams were all very well, they should not be seen as the be-all and end-all.

“When you get to the interview, they will never ask you about your academic qualifications, what they want to know is what you have done, what are your experiences?’,” he explained.

I’m sure he’s right. When, for example, he went for his interview for Cambridge University, I’m pretty sure he talked far less about his C and two Ds at A-level than his ‘experiences’ of growing up in Buckingham Palace, being born third in line to the throne, watching his mum on telly over the Christmas dinner.

And I’ll also wager that when he asked Andrew Lloyd-Webber for a job at his theatre company, he didn’t talk about his lower second-class degree in history, or even dropping out of the Royal Marines four months into his training, but rather how he dreamed one day of staging a royal version of It’s a Knockout.

“What you have done shapes you as a person,” he told the conference. And if anyone is proof of that, it is surely him.

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I can just about understand how a busy wife may be unaware that her husband has spent the past 12 years stealing money from the employer they both worked for, even if £400,000 is some going.

At a push, I can even understand that Nicola Sturgeon might not know that the cruet set Peter Murrell brought home one day cost £2,618, or that the set of three umbrellas cost almost a grand.

But £125,000 on a 25ft motorhome, how did he conceal that? And didn’t she notice the £80,000 Jaguar, and the VW Golf in the drive?

Maybe he smuggled them in under his jumper while she was in the kitchen.

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But let’s give Miss Sturgeon the benefit of the doubt, and assume she was completely oblivious to what was going on.

The other question about Peter Murrell is why did he spend so much money on such silly things? Imagine you suddenly came into £400,000, would you really spend six grand on coffee machines, including one that cost £2,600?

Does he have a problem with caffeine addiction?

It can’t even be that he’s particularly a great coffee connoisseur. He spent another 80 quid on Nescafe Gold Blend.