PRINCE ANDREW has two issues to confront if he wants to be taken seriously — his golf clubs and his travel, for which he has earned the tag of “Airmiles Andy”. Not surprisingly, he has an answer to both.

First the golf clubs. He said that when he flies abroad in his capacity as a roving ambassador for British business, he does pack his golf bag. But he quickly added: “Don’t think anybody else doesn’t. They get away with it because they’re not as accountable or under the same level of scrutiny. Yes, I travel with my clubs because there may be a time when I can play. As it happens, I don’t have the time to play much.”

Now to the travel. He has learnt to live with the criticism but that doesn’t mean he likes it. It stems from his time as captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St Andrews five years ago, a role that lasted 12 months.

“All I did was to fly up and down to Scotland for regular sessions of meetings and I did three overseas trips — one to the US Masters, where I was representing the R&A as captain and I was the joint chairman of the tournament — and to the US Open, where the captain of the R&A is one of the rules officials. The third was to Ireland.”

Andrew is addressing the two criticisms because he wants to be taken seriously. Over the past seven years he has become the royal family’s business champion, a role that has required him to travel the globe to help promote UK business and wherever possible to open doors that are not so accessible to others.

Whatever his critics might say, Andrew insists extensive travel is part of his job. He could do teleconferencing but it wouldn’t work, he said. “My role is to build personal relationships with people. Nothing can improve a relationship more than for somebody to see your body language and for you to see his or her body language. And if I am passing them information that they don’t know, it may well be that it shouldn’t be on a piece of paper. It’s a fact of life [that I travel]. I don’t have to do it, but that is the way I do business.”

His difficulty is that his successes are not made public. His fingerprints on big international deals go unseen and it is clearly a point of frustration for him. The public know everything else about his business affairs, other than his achievements. His mother gives him a £249,000 annual grant to run his office and last year he spent £436,000 on travel expenses picked up by the taxpayer.

When he goes overseas, he usually travels with a small team and stays in embassies or the Hilton and the Hyatt. He doesn’t stay in the cheap rooms but neither does he have the presidential suite.

Andrew believes he is making a difference and gives examples of how he has helped to facilitate big deals for BP, Serco, Rolls- Royce, BAE Systems, Lloyd’s of London and International Power among others. He doesn’t write letters but he talks and opens doors that are not always so accommodating to big business. Last year he travelled to 25 countries on 15 visits, taking in Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. So far this year it is 15 countries on 11 visits.

One of his present projects is in Jordan, a country that wants to mine its valuable uranium deposits to help in future with its own nuclear power generation. That is of interest to a number of British parties, and Andrew — who is a personal friend of King Abdullah — is trying to ensure that Britain’s voice is heard.

“In an ideal world you’d have the ability to measure my performance with a figure, which I know quite a lot of journalists would love me to do,” he said.

“I can’t win any contracts for companies but I can access for them the ability to be able to win the contract that they are bidding for. The best thing is to go and ask the companies what figures they have been successful with.”

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