Bill Kay puzzles over Prince Andrew's accent

Marina Del Rey, on the Pacific coast near LAX, was the unlikely setting for my first meeting with royalty since, ooh, let's see now, I was tested by Prince Philip on how to operate a Datastream stock market computer 23 years ago.
This time Prince Andrew was the royal who had the honour of being in the Kay Presence, a prospect daunting enough for him to be flanked by flunkeys and discreetly circled by secret service monkeys with giveaway Foreign Office lapel badges.
The venue was the Ritz Carlton hotel, a sore point since Pasadena only last month lost its own Ritz Carlton. The building and most of the staff are still there, but it was sold to a Hong Kong company which manages its own hotels. That meant bye-bye to Marriott, who had the management contract and own the Ritz Carlton name (not sure about the Ritz name, which appears to be owned by Mohammed Fayed through the Ritz Paris).
The occasion last night was a dinner thrown for Andrew by the British American Business Council Los Angeles, or Babcla, a forum for British businesspeople in the area to get together with Americans interested in doing business in Britain, or just networking. Andrew was there in his marvellous freeloading role as Special Representative for International Trade and Investment, a government front organisation for promoting British business abroad.
I naturally did not get to meet His Royal Highness, as access to him was carefully controlled and he was rightly mainly interested in meeting business people operating in Los Angeles.
Give or take an American accent here and there, the dinner proceeded much as it would have if it had been held at the Savoy or Grosvenor House in London. Drinks were followed by a formal dinner in a large, chilly room with a head table and thirty or forty circular tables holding about ten people each. A simple salad was followed by a choice of tornedos of beef or risotto primavera (my preference, and very good too) and then either creme brulee or tiramisu, washed down with red or white wine. Even the bread rolls and accompanying pat of butter seemed British, except that they were warm and fresh - Grosvenor House doesn't do warm, fresh bread.
When they had finished eating, quite a few of the 300 or so guests slipped away. Possibly they didn't realise that if they had turned their menu over they would have realised that speeches were to follow the meal, rather than precede it, and that Andrew was going to speak last of all. He clearly did not like that running order; he is not a natural public speaker and may not have enjoyed his meal with the prospect of performing still confronting him.
When he did get up, he made not a bad fist of his speech, which was probably written for him and was shot through with mind-numbing statistics and trite sentiments about the greatness of both Britain and America.
The surprise was the most unexpected aspect of Andrew's speech: his accent. Unlike his two brothers, who have the chinless drawl of a Harold Macmillan, Andrew's accent is middle-class grammar school. Odd, as like Charles, he attended Gordonstoun school and his breeding is impeccably aristocratic even if the vile calumny is true and his father is Lord Porchester. (The ten-year gap between him and his sister Anne was bound to foster gossip). Maybe it was his years in the Royal Navy, gunning down Argy battleships, but if you didn't know it was a son of the Queen you would have thought it was a middle-ranking management executive delivering an exhortation to a sales conference. So it went down very well with his audience.