Page 26 of 32 January 17, 2015 Saturday Late Edition - Final Prince, Back in News, Faces Curse of the 'Spare' BYLINE: By STEVEN ERLANGER SECTION: Section A Column 0: Foreign Desk: Pg. 4 LENGTH: 1191 words LONDON — It's not easy being the spare, the second son trained for little except hanging around waiting for your older brother to die. or to have children who then outrank you. Being Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. is a lot like being the vice president of the United States — only for life. As he has aged, and fallen further down the line of succession (at 54, he is now fifth in line to the throne), Prince Andrew has faced the problem of what to do with himself — being public but not prominent — and has not always made the best choices, even he has admitted. To be a spare means to have a vague but unclear purpose in life, said Peter York, a social commentator. "There are lots of things by definition you cannot do, that are potential embarrassments. And there are lots of things you cannot do because you're not trained for them." Prince Andrew is back in the news with the resurgence of old allegations that he had sex with a minor provided by an old. wealthy friend of his, Jeffrey E. Epstein, who was Jailed in 2008 and served 13 months of an 18-month sentence for soliciting a minor for prostitution. In 2011, when the allegations against Prince Andrew surfaced, and again this month, when they re-emerged in a filing in a Florida court, Buckingham Palace issued explicit denials, saying that Andrew did not have sex with the woman bringing the complaint or, for that matter, with any minor. The allegations by the woman, whom the palace named as tare well ventilated in 2011 by the British press and in the magazine Vanity Fair. The controversy over Prince Andrew's continuing friendship with Mr. Epstein caused the prince to resign that year after a decade as Britain's special representative for international trade and investment. The main difference