‘We’ve
been paying for happy endings for Andrew for years’: the inside story of a
royal disgrace, by his biographer
Andrew
Lownie spent years investigating the greed and excesses of Andrew
Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson for his book Entitled. Here, the writer
reveals the barriers he faced in getting to the truth
Zoe
Williams
Tue 24
Feb 2026 05.00 GMT
The
Saturday morning I meet Andrew Lownie, the author of “the most devastating
royal biography ever written” (according to the Daily Mail), the front page of
every newspaper carries the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Some have
aerial shots of the police arriving to search his home, most including the now
infamous photograph of his face in the back of his car. He looks hunted,
because he literally has been, but his expression is curiously blank, its most
legible emotion grievance. One journalist, Lownie says, reported late on the
night of Friday’s arrest that: “Andrew still can’t see what the problem is. He
thinks he’s been hard done by. He’s obsessed with other details – whether he
can take his horses up to Norfolk, who’s going to get the dogs, where he’s
going to park his car. It’s a sort of disassociation.”
Lownie’s
office, in his home a stone’s throw from parliament, is a monument to the
success of his book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York (along
with his other books: one on the Mountbattens, one on Guy Burgess, one to come
on Prince Philip). One desk is piled high with books about Andrew and Sarah,
some of them by Ferguson herself, others warts-and-all, kiss-and-tell accounts
from confidants and clairvoyants. Lownie has stacks of rejected freedom of
information requests, from UK Trade and Investment; the Foreign, Commonwealth
and Development Office; the Information Commissioner – “They sometimes took so
long to respond that they haven’t even downloaded the request before it
expires.” He approached 3,000 people from all the way through Mountbatten-Windsor’s
life; only a tenth of them would speak to him, which to me feels quite
unsurprising, and yet Lownie is indignant. “I wrote to ambassadors, and they
said ‘not interested’. This was a matter of public interest. Others, very
cheerily when I wrote to them a third time, said ‘nice try’, as if it was some
sort of joke. These are the guys I want in the dock, in parliament, on oath.
This is the thing that makes me upset. I, perhaps naively, expect standards in
public life.”
Entitled
was published last year, after four years of research. It builds a
cradle-to-police-station picture (he is now updating the book for a new
edition) of a royal whose long association with a known child sex offender may
look like the nadir of his behaviour, but is also completely congruous with a
priapic, exploitative and money-grubbing life in which nothing was ever refused
him.
Before
her death by suicide last year, Virginia Giuffre stated that she had been
trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Mountbatten-Windsor, and raped by him on three
occasions as a minor (under US law) when she was 16 and 17. The third time was
an orgy on Epstein’s island at which girls were present whom she believed to be
underage, but didn’t know for certain because they spoke no English. After a
review, the Metropolitan police said last December that it would not be
launching a formal criminal investigation into Giuffre’s allegations about
Mountbatten-Windsor, which he has denied. He claimed first that he had “no
recollection of ever meeting this lady”; then, after a photo emerged of them
together, that he was “at a loss to explain this particular photograph”. She
brought a civil case against him in 2021, which he settled out of court the
following year on no admission of liability. There has been no transparency
over the amount, though the figure of £2m to Giuffre’s chosen charity, fighting
sex trafficking, is known to have come from the queen. King Charles’s office
has always denied that he contributed to Giuffre’s own settlement – estimated
at between £7m and £12m – but “since he was running the show with the queen [by
2022], he must have been aware of what was going on,” Lownie says. If 2022 was
an obvious moment to strip Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal title, it was by no
means the first.
There was
a complaint going back years from a royal protection officer on the north gate
of Buckingham Palace, who said, as Lownie describes it: “We were concerned that
prostitutes were being brought in; we weren’t being given names.” (This
witness, Paul Page, was himself found guilty of fraud, “but that doesn’t
invalidate what he says”, Lownie continues). In 2006, representing the British
monarchy at King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s diamond jubilee celebrations in Bangkok,
Andrew was said to have had more than 10 girls a day going in to his room at
the Grand Hyatt Erawan. “Often, as soon as one left, another would arrive,” the
Reuters correspondent reported, “and this was all juggled amid official
engagements.” Throughout Mountbatten-Windsor’s time as special representative
for international trade and investment, ambassadors would feed back that he was
a liability, rude and visibly bored at official engagements. His staff often
requested attractive women be invited to events, to which “one consul replied,
‘I’m a diplomat, not a pimp,’” according to Entitled. “One bean-counter had
complained about Andrew’s expenses,” Lownie says, “querying whether he could
put massages on the taxpayer’s tab, and it was pushed through. We’ve been
paying for happy endings for Andrew for years.” These warnings were unheeded:
“There was a safe at the Foreign Office to keep all this stuff,” Lownie says.
There
were so many moments that “should have been alarm signals, in the palace, the
government and the police”, he continues. An unrelated trial of a former
banker, Selman Turk (who is appealing against his jail sentence for fraud), in
2022 unearthed in passing a £750,000 payment made to Mountbatten-Windsor by one
of Turk’s clients, who claimed that he advised her to pay the sum to the prince
in return for assistance with a UK passport application. (Turk said the money
was a wedding gift for Princess Beatrice; Andrew repaid the £750,000 roughly 16
months after he received it and it remains unclear whether he was aware of the
money entering his personal bank account, or what it was for.)
“That’s
what the Chinese and Russian secret services realised – that the easiest
vulnerability of the British establishment is the royal family,” says Lownie.
“There’s no scrutiny. They’re greedy. They’re short of money.” And in Andrew’s
case in particular, “they’re kind of immoral because of the way they’ve been
brought up. And they mixed with lots of important people.”
Mountbatten-Windsor
went to Heatherdown, an aristocratic prep school, and then to Gordonstoun,
where King Charles also went. Lownie mainly met a wall of silence from the
public school, except among people he knew personally. (Lownie went to Fettes
College, another Scottish public school, and one of his friends from prep
school went on to Gordonstoun as a scholar and used to do Mountbatten-Windsor’s
homework. Lownie is very much part of the establishment, and isn’t driven by
radicalism. “What drives me is that I just hate bullies. I describe myself as
Winslow Boy meets Erin Brockovich,” he says, drolly.)
Mountbatten-Windsor
at school was known for being a bully, a loner, supercilious, entitled,
indulged. One story from Heatherdown says that he took someone’s exotic stamp
collection, simply crossed their name out and wrote in his own, and was never
punished. This foreshadows a toe-curling incident 30 or so years later,
described in Entitled, quoting Tim Reilly, a former risk management executive.
On a museum visit in Russia, Andrew “was angling to be given a Fabergé egg”,
Reilly told Lownie. “Even they were stunned by his undisguised avarice … Putin
could finish Andrew any time he likes with photos, tales and evidence he no
doubt has on Andrew in Russia.”
Anyone
who remembers the short marriage of Andrew and Sarah Ferguson will have bits of
their lifestyle filed away. The tabloids were salacious but forgiving towards
him, calling him “Randy Andy” one minute, then overwhelmed with patriotism when
he appeared in uniform. Towards Ferguson, they pulled fewer punches, reporting
on her ex-boyfriend Paddy McNally’s “cocaine castle” (in a News of the World
headline), her endless holidays, her excessive luggage. Over time, it was
priced in that Ferguson’s charity dabbling might not be entirely altruistic,
but also attention-getting. Entitled details the hotel suites she leveraged
from charities for visits of dubious usefulness, the organisations she
affiliated with that never saw any of the money she’d promised, or only saw
part of it, the rest going on the fundraising event itself, or on her staff or
costs. At the time it seemed par for the course; this is how high net worth
philanthropists operate. When you read about the conditions in the orphanages
that she was ostensibly fundraising for, you think: who would use that hardship
to fund their personal luxury?
The sheer
extravagance of the couple, meticulously noted, is bizarre: £150,000 on
flowers, scores of thousands on personal trainers Ferguson rarely troubled, him
never using a car when a helicopter was faster (which is always), her demanding
“a whole side of beef, a leg of lamb and a chicken, which are laid out on the
dining room table like a medieval banquet” every night, even when it was just
her and the kids. They’d often end up eating crisps anyway (as told by a
departing member of staff). They were both having affairs. One of Ferguson’s
highest-profile liaisons, with Steve Wyatt, a US multi-millionaire, appears to
have started when she was five months pregnant with Eugenie.
They both
often claimed to be broke, Ferguson regularly announcing bankruptcy, but it
never seemed to dent their spending. In the maelstrom of their divorce in 1996
were questions about what it might mean for the queen, for the constitution,
for Charles and Diana, for the royal family. There was also, I suppose, a
collective astonishment at the dissonance between the monarchy’s
self-fashioning (restraint, duty, asceticism, higher purpose) and this
completely trashy couple who would renovate their Berkshire residence,
Sunninghill Park, with teddy bears, a helipad and a swimming pool when they
were both half out of the marriage anyway. Amid all this, the questions that
really mattered were pushed to the margins. Where was the money coming from?
What were its sources getting in return?
“It
remains a mystery,” Lownie writes in Entitled, “how Andrew has been able to
enjoy such an extravagant lifestyle without any obvious sources of income
beyond his naval pension, family money he may have inherited and handouts first
from Queen Elizabeth and now King Charles. He travels by private jet, has a
collection of watches and expensive cars – including a £150,000 Patek Philippe
watch, a £220,000 Bentley and a brand-new £80,000 Range Rover … An acquaintance
told one paper, ‘I would compare Andrew to a hot-air balloon. He seems to float
serenely in very rarefied circles without any visible means of support.’”
The
couple’s relationship with Epstein is revolting on its own terms. “They have no
real moral boundaries,” Lownie says. “They go and see sex offenders not because
they’re concerned about their crimes, but because [these people] might be able
to pay some bills for them or introduce them to some useful people.” But what
we know of the Epstein files, as shocking as they must be to institutions
accustomed to making scandal go away, is only the beginning.
“I know
that Epstein was a Soviet asset,” Lownie says. “Robert Maxwell, of course, had
strong connections not only with Mossad, but also with Russian intelligence. He
had made his money with these textbooks, which he bought cheaply with Russian
money.” Ghislaine (Maxwell’s daughter) and Epstein were introduced in the 80s
by the grandson of another Russian asset, Armand Hammer, and the relationship
between them and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor goes back to 1985. “There’s a huge
national security scandal here of penetration,” Lownie says.
Since
Entitled was published, people contact Lownie all the time with more
information: the day Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested, Lownie received 760
emails. He was passed a letter, dated last December, from the Metropolitan
police reminding royal protection officers of their duty towards “the privacy
of the protected” – it’s ironic to hear the Met now reminding those officers of
their duty to report what they saw.
Lownie
had lunch recently with Epstein’s brother, Mark, who doesn’t believe the
suicide verdict and has brought in an expert coroner who increasingly doesn’t
believe it either. “However incompetent the correctional facility was, it is
the prime correctional facility in New York; it’s their most high-profile
prisoner; he’s on suicide watch; you take a cellmate out; you don’t make sure
the cameras are working; at a key moment, both the guards conveniently fall
asleep; you panic and get rid of the body so there’s no proper autopsy – it
just doesn’t make a huge amount of sense,” Lownie says. The FBI debriefed
Epstein’s cellmate on what he’d said. “Now, Epstein did make stuff up, so you
have to take it with a pinch of salt,” Lownie says. But he reeled off a list of
names before he died, one a high-level British politician, present at an orgy.
The
palace is in damage-limitation mode, it seems. “Keep it to the sexual side –
everyone understands that bit – and certainly not go anywhere near the national
security scandal,” Lownie says. “The plan [of the palace], I think, at the
moment, is to throw Andrew to the wolves.”
Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of
York, by Andrew Lownie, is published by HarperCollins. To support the Guardian
buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
This article was amended on 24 February 2026.
An earlier version said the recent photo of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was of
him in a police car; however, he was in the back of his own car.
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