Prince Andrew was outraged. It was May 2011, and Scotland Yard had informed him that his two daughters, Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, fifth and sixth in line to the throne, respectively, were to be stripped of their twenty-four-hour police protection after rising tensions about the £500,000 annual whammy to the taxpayer.
Andrew had fought ferociously to keep his girls’ security detail. His rationale was that with HRH before their names they should be treated accordingly, but he found himself on brittle ground. Princess Anne’s daughter, the soon-to-be-married Zara Phillips, had no police protection despite her high profile as an Olympic equestrian. (Nor did she have an HRH: her mother’s choice, so that her children could lead a more normal life.) A Scotland Yard cost review looking to prune the £50 million annual security bill for the Royal Family found no clear reason why the government should pay £250,000 a year apiece for two full-time bodyguards to protect twenty-one-year-old Eugenie in her first year at Newcastle University, or for her twenty-three-year-old sister Beatrice, studying in London.
The Queen made it clear that her two granddaughters, of whom she was personally very fond, should expect to get jobs when they left college rather than be supported as working members of the Royal Family. Andrew lobbied hard to reverse the decision. He wanted Beatrice and Eugenie to be designated as working royals. At a dinner in June after the annual Hillsborough Castle garden party in Northern Ireland, he solicited a private drink with Tory MP Hugo Swire to ask him to “have a word” with Prime Minister Cameron about the decision. “He is desperately concerned,” Swire’s diarist wife, Sasha, wrote. “[His] argument is that they move around in the age of Twitter and Facebook and instant messaging, and that an antagonistic force could be mobilized against them in a matter of minutes.”
Unfortunately, those same platforms often showed the sociable young princesses tottering out of expensive London nightclubs in the early hours with protection officers in tow. A purring official SUV waited outside restaurants to ferry them back home, not so much to forestall a kidnapping but as a glorified Uber service.
A year later, Andrew had further reason to feel snubbed. Shortly before he boarded the number two barge—an insult in itself—at the Diamond Jubilee river pageant, he learned that he and his daughters had been cut from the iconic royal photo finish on the Buckingham Palace balcony. Nor were they on the list for the lunch for seven hundred dignitaries at Westminster Hall just beforehand. (It couldn’t have been fun for Andrew to hear from staff that he hadn’t made the cut and know the decision would have been run by his mother.) Another guest on the follow-up barge heard him whingeing noisily about it with Sophie Wessex, whose invite was also lost in the mail.
Buckingham Palace balcony shots were first initiated by Queen Victoria in 1851, when she waved to the public during celebrations for the opening of the Great Exhibition. Over time these appearances evolved, as the preservation of indelible Royal Family moments in the national photo album. After the Trooping the Colour to celebrate the Queen’s official birthday each year in June—done to minimize the risk of bad weather, a practice dating back to George II—the extended Royal Family could be seen with their necks craned, gazing skyward to watch the festive flyby of the Royal Air Force. From the jubilant waves of the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret with the King and Queen and Winston Churchill on VE Day, to the newly wedded Charles and Diana and then William and Kate exchanging their first kisses before roaring crowds, getting your face into the balcony shot—or even a straining brim of an ostrich-feathered hat at the back—is the ultimate affirmation of royal belonging.
Not this year. For decades, the Way Ahead Group—the inner cabal of senior royals who meet regularly to discuss big-picture issues facing the monarchy—had discussed slimming down the number of second- and third-generation royals freeloading on the monarchy. Prince Charles had even sent a memo to his private secretary looking for ways to do it twenty years earlier. In George VI’s day, it was only “us four” who appeared on the balcony, but as minor members of the family gained their own profiles and procreated, it had become an increasingly unkempt crowd scene.
It wasn’t a financial issue alone. Charles was firmly of the opinion that minor royals going rogue provided the media with embarrassing stories that dimmed the monarchy’s halo. Always apprehensive about the direction of public mood, and alert to economy since budget slasher Michael Peat joined his household in 2002, Charles was now more eager than ever to reduce numbers.
So was Christopher Geidt, who was always quietly looking ahead to ensure a seamless transition to the next reign. What more appropriate time to start erasing minor royals from the public gaze than the year when everything was being done on the cheap? So in the 2012 Jubilee photo, the Queen, in a mint-green Angela Kelly ensemble, had her usual place of honor in the center of the balcony. But you could count the rest of the royals on one hand: Charles, Camilla, William, Kate, and a pre-Meghan Harry. (Prince Philip was still in the hospital.) That’s it. Like newspaper graphics depicting the space for missing members of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, everyone else was erased from the photo op. “I hear there were people literally restraining members of the family trying to get onto the balcony,” a former aide told me. One who didn’t care the least bit was Princess Anne. “Anne just storms on,” said the aide. “Publicity isn’t important to her. Sometimes you have to remind her that the charities she visits actually want the press there.”
The image of a curated Royal Family struck the right note at a time of austerity. The cost of sustaining them was an issue that reared up regularly in the House of Commons at difficult political moments—such as when the Labour government decommissioned Britannia in 1997, a move the Queen regarded as akin to amputation.
National treasure though the Queen Mother was, in her last days her profligacy was tolerated with less goodwill than in more subservient times. She liked to present herself as charmingly skint: “Golly, I could really use £100,000, couldn’t you?” she asked a lunch guest, the writer A. N. Wilson, after a morning spent with her bank manager. But when she died in 2002, she left an estate of around £50 million to the present queen. A cantankerous national debate ensued about whether it was time to end the royal privilege of not paying death duties on sovereign-to-sovereign inheritance. The privilege relieved the Queen of paying £20 million in taxes on her mother’s bequest, which might have forced her to sell either Balmoral or Sandringham to pay them.
By the time the Cameron government took over in 2010, few people realized that the royal finances were in a parlous state. Historian Andrew Roberts attributes this to the long-term impact of a deal struck by King George III in 1760. In return for giving up rights to the extensive and lucrative Crown Estate, which includes huge swathes of property in the golden mile of Regent Street, Regent’s Park, and St. James’s, the monarchy was accorded an annual sum by Parliament known as the Civil List. It turned out to be a rotten exchange. In 2001, for instance, while the Crown Estate made a plump post-tax profit of £147 million, the Queen’s Civil List came to a stick-figured £6.6 million. The monarchy, opined Roberts, had been “disastrously diddled since 1760.” (The Windsors’ personal wealth is another matter. In 2019, the Queen’s net worth alone was estimated at £390 million.)
Three treasurers oversee the royals’ money—the prime minister, the chancellor of the exchequer, and the keeper of the privy purse, who is appointed by the Queen. The chancellor is deputed to oversee royal raises in consultation with the monarch. The Civil List was set as an annual amount in 1952 for the rest of the Queen’s reign, but high inflation arrived in the 1960s, and so at the start of the 1970s it was decided to move to setting ten-year budgets. That worked until the 1990s, when the amount set in 1991 proved to be too much. Inflation had fallen sharply. So in 2001 the Palace decided just to spend the surplus they’d built up in the decade before. By 2010 the money had run out—and at an awkward moment. The Cameron government’s budget cuts made any raises for the royals a political minefield.
Chancellor George Osborne decided to work up an elegant if characteristically vague idea proposed by Prince Charles. In 2012, Osborne replaced the Civil List with something called the Sovereign Grant, which was based on how the Crown Estate was performing and therefore loosely linked to the economy. That is, as a commercial property company, it would probably be doing well when the economy was doing well and badly when the economy was weak, a concept much easier to sell to the property-obsessed British public. The change was well received by the press and Parliament. It was widely framed as the family sharing in the tough times, though in practice Osborne was using tough times to create a lasting reform that would set their finances right for decades. A Peter Brookes cartoon in The Times showed the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh coming out of Westminster underground station in their state robes saying, “Bloody Osborne,” which was exactly the right kind of PR for the Cameron government—and the Crown. A win all round.
The Sovereign Grant funds are spent on the Royal Family’s official duties, entertaining and upkeep of royal palaces (but not Balmoral and Sandringham, the Queen’s personal homes). It covers such critical needs as staff salaries or, say, repairs, such as those needed in 2007 when Prince Albert’s mausoleum was falling down at Frogmore. Though the ten-year refurbishment of Buckingham Palace now under way will cost taxpayers £369 million, the Queen’s frugal instincts are known to all. A 2021 Sunday Times review of Her Maj’s economies noted that “old newspapers are shredded for use as horses’ bedding. String from parcels is saved to be tied again. Frayed sheets and dusters are darned and reused. At Balmoral any damage to the walls is patched up by wallpaper bought more than a century ago by Queen Victoria.”
Prince Charles and his sons are financed by the income of the Duchy of Cornwall. Philip received a separate annual stipend of around £359,000 that never changed. The Queen personally supplements the stipends of Andrew, Anne, and Edward, as well as those of her now-elderly cousins the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent, and Kent’s younger brother Prince Michael and Michael’s controversial wife, Marie-Christine. The cousins occupy spacious grace-and-favor apartments at Kensington Palace that they hang on to by their fingernails. KP has housed so many elderly royals in its time, it was once dubbed the Aunt Heap.
The Queen has always been ready to help members of the family, such as her cousin Margaret Rhodes, at straitened moments. “The Queen was just so lovely about helping Mummy when my father was so ill,” Rhodes’s daughter Victoria Pryor told The Telegraph. “Suddenly she said: ‘Gosh, Margaret, could you bear to live in suburbia?’ ”—meaning take possession of a grace-and-favor house on the grounds of Windsor Castle. Margaret gratefully accepted.
The Queen discusses the family allocations of the Sovereign Grant with her keeper of the privy purse. The way she doles it out is remarkably personal. Members of the family wait in trepidation to hear if they are going to get a raise. The Queen meets annually with the chancellor of the exchequer alone, at a small table in her second-floor receiving room with the corgis running around, and produces a piece of paper on which she has written her list. Often, she will make irreverent asides about how people have performed. “The Duke of Kent will get five hundred and fifty thousand and Wren House to use….The Wessexes should get another two hundred—Sophie really is trying….X is hopeless with money and hardly does anything….I think fifty will do,” etc. The chancellor scribbles away and takes the list back to the Treasury, which handles royal finances, and the funds are transferred to Buckingham Palace.
In 2002, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee raised a stink about the five-bedroom, four-reception-room KP apartment allocated for the past thirty years to the impecunious Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. They performed minimal royal duties, yet paid a rent of only £69 per week. That’s less, the Daily Mirror pointed out, than a lot of people pay for lousy public housing in a council house. And a hundred times less than they would pay for such a property on the open market. The Queen had to step up and personally fork over the commercial rate of £120,000 annually to cover the cost, until 2009, at which point it was decided the problem was theirs.
The younger Kents’ money woes have long been a thorn in the monarch’s side. The Queen could, in theory, cut them off, but she is rather attached to the affable seventy-eight-year-old Prince Michael, if less so to Marie-Christine, his towering Wagnerian wife, with her pretentious pronouncements and Brunhild braids.
Always strapped for cash, Prince Michael manages a dubious consultancy business that trades on his dynastic connections in Russia. In 2012 it was reported that he received at least £320,000 over six years from the exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky to pay his staff. Another business chum was the journalist-snatching despot President Lukashenko of Belarus.
In 2020, the Prince was caught on a Zoom call greedily swallowing the bait of a £200,000 cash-for-access fee in a sting by two Sunday Times reporters. The enterprising muckrakers pretended to represent a South Korean company called House of Haedong, seeking Prince Michael’s help to break into Putinista circles. The Marquess of Reading, Michael’s partner, old school friend, and upper-class bonehead, was recorded assuring the fictional House of Haedong reps that “we’re talking relatively discreetly here. Because we wouldn’t want the world to know that [Michael] is seeing Putin purely for business reasons, if you follow me.” The business wiz added that one of the reasons the Prince enjoyed such privileged access was because of his royal status. “He is just generally regarded as Her Majesty’s unofficial ambassador to Russia.”
Clearly the Michaels were a low-boil money-grubbing embarrassment, and should be the first to be disappeared in any royal load shedding. But their antics milking the royal brand paled when compared to the sordid depredations of Prince Andrew.
The Duke of York was a coroneted sleaze machine.
As the UK’s special representative for international trade and investment, a role that allowed him to swan around the world at government expense playing golf, Andrew was the despair of the British Foreign Office. He insisted on flying private, and traveled with an entourage of servants, including a valet who lugged a preposterous six-foot-long ironing board through the lobby of five-star hotels. He described his travel expenses as a “little tiny spot in the ocean by comparison to many people.” But that didn’t stop the criticism—or the Prince’s profligacy. The Daily Telegraph reported that in 2010 the Duke of York had spent £465,000 on flights and £154,000 on food and hotels on his trade missions.
International diplomacy rarely offers encounters with angels. The Queen herself has sat down with despots like President Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and if the president of Italy is the licentious charlatan Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of the UK has to dunk biscotti with him. In countries that have a royal family like Saudi Arabia, or an authoritarian government like Turkey, the ability of the Foreign Office to deploy a member of the royal family who is not the Queen or her direct heir can be useful to grease the wheels. But Prince Andrew’s adhesive contacts with reprehensible foreign riffraff went far beyond what was explicable or acceptable.
A string of international lowlifes, who had nothing to do with British diplomacy and everything to do with unsavory personal deals that he was pursuing on the side, filled the Duke of York’s otherwise sparse calendar. In 2011, just three months before Tunisia’s regime collapsed in the Arab Spring, he was the proud host at a Buckingham Palace luncheon for Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s billionaire son-in-law Mohamed Sakhr El Materi, later sentenced to sixteen years in prison for corruption and property fraud. When Stephen Day, the UK’s former ambassador to Tunisia, learned about the lunch, he sent an aghast memo to Downing Street: “Materi was, as we all know, the worst of all the crooks in the presidential family,” wrote Day, adding, “Thank goodness there was time for the press to be told it was not done on official advice.” In an email published in The Telegraph, Andrew’s press secretary Ed Perkins scrambled for backup support. “[I] am deploying the line that [Materi] was vice-chairman of the chamber of commerce. Will the UK Trade and Investment Office stand behind [Andrew]? We need some government backing here,” he flailed.
One of Andrew’s most insalubrious lunch partners was Saif Gaddafi, son of Libyan tyrant Muammar Gaddafi. Saif, who holds a doctorate from the London School of Economics (and whose thesis is not universally believed to have been written by him), was soon to be a fugitive, wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Tarek Kaituni, a convicted Libyan gun smuggler, was Andrew’s guest at Princess Beatrice’s twenty-first birthday party in 2009 at a private villa near Marbella, presenting her with a $30,000 diamond necklace at the same time that he was pushing to get hired as a consultant to a British company with dealings in Libya. Apparently oblivious to the perils and unseemliness of such connections, Andrew invited him back—this time as a guest at the Windsor Castle wedding and black-tie reception of Princess Eugenie in 2018.
A favorite destination of Andrew’s was Kazakhstan, best known as the fake birthplace of Borat. Andrew accepted goose-hunting invitations in 2008 with then-president Nursultan Nazarbayev, who was “reelected” for twenty-nine years, and preemptively passed a law granting himself legal immunity from any criminal charges.
In a questionable transaction typical of Prince Andrew’s business affairs, his white-elephant house Sunninghill Park was sold in 2007 to Nazarbayev’s baby-faced billionaire son-in-law Timur Kulibayev, for £3 million more than its £12 million asking price, even though there were no other bids on the property. This was doubly puzzling to the press, because the only enhancements to the house since the Yorks’ occupation was a new zoning designation under the direct flight path for incoming aircraft at Heathrow Airport. There were so many questions from the press that the Palace felt compelled to protest: “The sale of Sunninghill Park was a straight commercial transaction between the Trust which owned the house and the Trust which bought it. There were no side deals and absolutely no arrangement from the Duke of York to benefit otherwise or to commit to any other commercial arrangement. Any suggestion otherwise is completely false.”
Leaked emails from 2011 in the Daily Mail gave credence to a report—strongly denied by Buckingham Palace—that Andrew acted as a middleman in helping a Greek sewage company and a Swiss finance house pursue a £385 million contract in Kazakhstan. Andrew was allegedly going to be offered nearly £4 million to convince a Kazakh oligarch to support the bids. Unfortunately for Andrew, the deal fell apart when Kazakh police opened fire on a group of striking oil workers and his partners got spooked. He later tried to get Kazakh associates hooked up with Coutts, the Queen’s bankers, but that deal didn’t fly. A source at Coutts explained: “Kazakh oligarchs are the sort of people we generally don’t touch with a bargepole.”
Many who encountered Andrew on trade missions felt the same way about him. Simon Wilson, who hosted him regularly as Britain’s deputy head of mission in Bahrain from 2001 to 2005, recalled that much of what the Prince said was “absolute twaddle,” and that he was derided by the British diplomatic community in the Gulf as HBH: His Buffoon Highness.
It was the same on his own turf. At a lunch with London Assembly chair Darren Johnson and London mayor Boris Johnson, Andrew made a muddled pitch for such city improvements as fewer traffic lights so that there would be fewer red lights, and a larger Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. (“If it’s too small it’s your mum’s fault,” Boris allegedly said.) After Andrew was escorted from the lunch, Boris turned to Darren Johnson and commented, “I’m the last person to be a republican but fuck. If I ever have to spend another lunch like that, I soon will be.”
Former foreign minister and Labour MP Chris Bryant told me that “it was common parlance that the last thing the FO wanted was Andrew on a trip, because he didn’t know the difference between private and public. He’d offend half the people at the dinner table, go off on secret missions and return laden with gifts, and on top of that he was a nightmare because he insisted on more support, more acreage in hotels than any other member of the royal family. When he went to Davos he had a bigger chalet than everyone else, and everyone went, ‘Why?’ His sense of entitlement was off kilter.” In March 2011, Bryant broke parliamentary rules prohibiting attacks on members of the royal family in the House of Commons. “Isn’t it increasingly difficult to explain the behavior of the special ambassador for trade, who is not only a very close friend of Saif Gaddafi, but is also a close friend of the convicted Libyan gun smuggler Tarek Kaituni?” he demanded, startlingly, from the floor of the House. “Isn’t it time we dispensed with the services of the Duke of York?”
The Speaker instructed Bryant to sit down, but the MP’s explosive comment made headline news. A senior Tory told The Guardian in 2011: “There appears to be no discernible mental activity upstairs as far as the duke is concerned. I feel sorry for him. He has no friends and so is surrounded by these vile people.”
Unfortunately, it was true. Andrew’s life had been hurtling downhill since he left the Royal Navy in 2001. He peaked at age twenty-two when, on September 17, 1982, he strode down the gangplank from the battleship HMS Invincible in Portsmouth Harbour with a red rose between his teeth, after acquitting himself with honor as a Sea King helicopter pilot in the Falklands War. The Queen and Prince Philip and Princess Anne were there to greet him. Jubilant crowds swarmed the Royal Naval dockyard waving Union Jacks. The Queen was so excited she whipped out her camera and snapped away like a tourist. Her son presented her with the rose, a dashing gesture that fueled ecstatic write-ups in the red-tops. “Nobody called him ‘Randy Andy,’ a prince whose only claim to fame was his preference for blue-eyed blondes,” one tabloid noted. “Now it’s Andrew the Warrior Prince, a hero home from the wars.”
Like his nephew Prince Harry nearly twenty years later, Andrew had found his métier in the armed services. Or at least his experiences there kept him out of trouble. At the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth as a sub-lieutenant at age twenty-one, he was given the Best Pilot award, bestowed on the school’s behalf by his father. Nine months after serving as best man at the wedding of Charles and Diana, Andrew, to the envy of his older brother, found himself sailing off for five months aboard an actual battleship for an actual war.
Few people had heard of the Falkland Islands, a tiny fleck of British Empire off the coast of Argentina, with almost as many sheep on it as people. That is, until April 1982, when Argentina’s president, General Leopoldo Galtieri, decided to help himself to the islands. Sending British troops to defend the Falklands provided an opportunity for Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher to earn her Iron Lady legend, and the British tabloids to go into jingoist ecstasy with headlines in The Sun like “Stick It Up Your Junta.”
The possibility of Prince Andrew being killed in action made the British government apprehensive and added to the young Prince’s aura. The cabinet requested he be moved to desk duty during the conflict, but Andrew was determined to see action. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all served in the navy, and the Queen backed him all the way, releasing a statement that read, “Prince Andrew is a serving officer and there is no question in [my] mind that he should go.” Andrew’s service did Her Majesty proud. It included flying his helicopter as a decoy target to divert deadly Exocet missiles away from British ships, as well as search and air rescue, and anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare. He witnessed from the air the terrifying sight of the Argentinian attack on the SS Atlantic Conveyor, which was hit by two air-launched Exocet missiles, killing twelve sailors. The Prince piloted the helicopter that rescued the surviving British crewmen who’d been thrown into the sea.
Andrew had another brief reputational surge during the Windsor Castle fire ten years later. The thirty-two-year-old prince was the only royal home on November 20, 1992, when a spotlight set a curtain on fire in the Queen’s Private Chapel, igniting a blaze that spread to 115 rooms and caused the roof of the magnificent fourteenth-century St. George’s Hall to collapse. When Andrew saw the smoke he organized a bucket brigade with some of the resourceful spirit he’d shown in the Falklands. The human chain of the Windsor household salvaged much of the castle’s priceless contents, amassed during nine hundred years of royal history: Sèvres porcelain, eighteenth-century furniture, paintings by Van Dyck, Rubens, and Gainsborough from the Royal Collection. Andrew was interviewed outside the eerie scene of flame-lit castle windows as the hero of the hour. It was the first time he had looked really on his game since he returned from war.
There is no doubting the Queen’s especially soft spot for Andrew. “Whenever she hears that Andrew is in Buckingham Palace, she’ll send him a handwritten note, and he always goes to see her,” a former Palace aide told Geoffrey Levy and Richard Kay of the Daily Mail. “If he’s in jeans, he’ll change into a suit. And he always greets ‘Mummy’ in the same way—bowing from the neck, kissing her hand, and then kissing her on both cheeks. It’s a little ritual that she adores. Believe me, he can do no wrong.”
He had always received much more of her attention than his siblings. Born in the Queen’s second batch, ten years after Princess Anne and four years before Prince Edward, Andrew had a mother who was well settled by then into her sovereign duties. She sometimes allowed herself the time to pick him up from his prep school, Heatherdown, and drive him home herself, or let him play quietly in her study while she received official visitors. He was the first to be christened with the surname Prince Philip fought for, Mountbatten-Windsor.
An ex-girlfriend of Charles told me that when she was staying at Windsor Castle one weekend, she heard the Queen on the phone to one of Andrew’s teachers at Gordonstoun, talking worriedly about his academic performance like any mother. Philip liked to say that his second son was a “natural boss.” Andrew’s temperament—hearty, robust, disruptive (at Heatherdown he loved mixing up everyone’s shoes in the dorm)—was more compatible with Philip than Charles. He was less vulnerable to his father’s casual Teutonic insensitivities, and undaunted by the rigors of Gordonstoun. The Scottish boarding school took females by the time Andrew got there, reducing the culture of hazing. He didn’t make head boy like Charles, perhaps because his classmates didn’t like him much. They found him big-headed, arrogant, and deluded about his own intelligence. His penchant for off-color jokes, at which he laughed inordinately, earned him the nickname “the Sniggerer.”
One senses that there was always a hollowness in Andrew’s personality. That’s why he laughed louder and boasted so much and tried to seem important. By the time he went to Gordonstoun, he knew that for all the palaces he lived in and the servants who Sir’d him, he was the second son whose childhood parity with Charles was a mirage. Only the monarch’s firstborn wakes up every morning knowing that to advance to the ultimate prize, all he has to do is stay alive. Only the firstborn son is invested as Prince of Wales. Only the firstborn son becomes the Duke of Cornwall, which includes being handed a vast private estate that generates around $30 million in annual income—all of which went to Charles. The winner-take-all calculus has been baked into every generation of the British monarchy. While there are ships, schools, peninsulas, and even a nursery rhyme named for the Duke of York, the title throws off neither an income nor even a stately home. The only certainty for the second son is that, as the years go by, his importance will decline as he slides inexorably down in the line of succession.
The dissonance for Andrew between early promise and actual destiny was heightened by the media excitement round his early years. As a child, he had been seen very little by the public. The Queen and Prince Philip felt Charles had been overly tormented by the press in his young days, and by the time Andrew was school age there was a constant fear of an IRA bomb. Security forces once had to surround his prep school when there was credible intelligence of an imminent execution plot. As a result, Andrew experienced more coddling than Charles.
By his teens, Andrew was one of the Royal Family’s burgeoning assets—debonair, lighthearted, and manly, with a toothy, Kennedyesque smile. When he accompanied his parents at the age of sixteen to the 1976 Montreal Olympics, a Canadian newspaper described him as “six feet of sex appeal.” Even Prince Charles admitted his younger brother had “Robert Redford looks.” Returning to Canada the following year, he found girls gathered at the Toronto airport to greet him screaming, “We want Andy!” Back in the UK, as Andrew flipped the switch on the Regent Street Christmas lights on live television, girls in the crowd below swooned and even fainted in the frenzy over the young prince. People magazine regularly ranked him among the world’s best-looking men.
The press were as fixated on Andrew’s girlfriends as they had been on Charles’s. Andrew preferred minor models and starlets to the Burke’s Peerage types his elder brother bowled his way through. His first true love was the sprightly twenty-four-year-old-brunette Koo Stark, an American actress whose oeuvre had featured scenes of lesbian shower sex, masturbation, and sexual molestation by nuns. She met him on a blind date a few months before his twenty-first birthday party at Windsor Castle—“the world’s quietest disco,” as party guest Sir Elton John put it, “because the Queen was present.” They were mutually smitten on sight. “He walked into my life and that was it: He was my life,” Stark said in a 2015 interview.
Koo was waiting for Andrew in his rooms at Buckingham Palace when he returned in triumph from the Falklands, and she joined him for a romantic week at Balmoral. The Queen found the actress bright and congenial. She later entertained Koo and Andrew for tea at Windsor Castle, and Her Maj’s only comment was, “Oh, I do wish they would call you Kathleen [her real name] and Andrew,” remembered Koo. Alas, while the couple was holidaying in Mustique in 1982, topless photos of Koo playing the seventeen-year-old heroine of the modestly erotic coming-of-age movie The Awakening of Emily were discovered by the news media. The curtain-twitching tabloid custodians of Middle England love nothing more than to act as the arbiters of who is appropriate as a royal romantic partner. “Overnight, my career and my reputation were irrevocably damaged,” Koo said. She could never rub off the porn-star stain. The press made Koo’s life hell. Photographers on motorbikes rode into restaurants to try to get a shot of her with Andrew. She was told she was on an IRA hit list. For two years, she moved homes each time her address was published.
Ultimately the pressure was too much for both of them. “I was desperately fond of Koo,” Andrew later told a friend, “but marriage would have been an awful mistake. I was terribly immature in those days.”
Some people who know Andrew believe that it was ending things with Koo that was the awful mistake. They were genuinely in love. Koo was a smart, creative woman with a credible parallel career in photography. She turned her own camera on the paparazzi when they started to pursue her, and became a protégée of the legendary fashion lensman Norman Parkinson, publishing photo books of her own. For thirty-three years she declined to sell Andrew out, reportedly turning down an offer of a million dollars to spill her secrets. Such was her discretion that she says, for a time, the Palace advised family newcomers seeking advice on how to handle the savage press scrutiny to follow the Koo Stark Rule and simply say nothing. Andrew is the godfather of her daughter. In 2015, she even defended him against “assassinations of character” in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. She would have probably made an appealing and accomplished Duchess of York, but this was 1983, not 2018, when a divorced American actress married the Queen’s grandson at Windsor Castle. Koo’s life descended into a sad tale of bankruptcy, a ruinous legal suit against the father of her child, and a bout with breast cancer. Finally, in 2021, to pay her legal bills, she at last seemed to be at work on a tell-all book deal.
Sarah Margaret Ferguson, Fergie as she was known, blew into the twenty-five-year-old Prince Andrew’s life with her boisterous laugh and exploding mane of Titian-red hair in June 1985. They were introduced by Princess Diana, who wangled Fergie a seat next to Andrew at lunch at the Queen’s Ascot weekend house party at Windsor Castle. She and Diana were fourth cousins, and their mothers had gone to school together. Fergie’s father, Major Ronald Ferguson, was the Prince of Wales’s polo manager, a well-known figure on the fringes of aristocratic society. Andrew and Fergie had once met as children playing on a polo field. “Where else do people meet?” Sarah’s mother once remarked.
At the time of the Ascot lunch, Fergie had just been dumped after three years by a rich divorced man twenty-five years older than she. The introduction to Andrew was a godsend. By the end of the lunch, the Prince was coaxing Fergie to eat chocolate profiteroles—and the romance took off from there. The press, beginning to tire of Diana’s fashionable supremacy, embraced the breezy, horse-riding country “gel” Fergie as “a breath of fresh air.” The Queen was relieved that at least this future daughter-in-law could talk with authentic enthusiasm about horses and dogs and the joys of the English countryside.
“Diana may take a better picture,” commented The Washington Post, “but Fergie is more fun.” A new magnet for the media was useful for Diana. She knew her raucous soon-to-be sister-in-law would never offer any real competition. “Fergie lightens the load,” she told her ballet dancer friend Wayne Sleep. The press loved it when the two of them tried to gate-crash Andrew’s stag party dressed as policewomen. On July 23, 1986, there was great national joy when the two twenty-six-year-olds, Sarah and Andrew, were married at Westminster Abbey as the Duke and Duchess of York—with a global audience of five hundred million.
In a sense, the new royal couple were matched not only in their exuberant temperaments but also in their unexpressed anxieties. Like Andrew, Fergie was emotionally stunted by her upbringing. Her noisy, irreverent personality disguised the fact she always felt uncool, overweight, and financially insecure. Her mother, Susan, like Diana’s mother, Frances, left home for a coup de foudre—in Susan’s case with a charismatic Argentinian polo player named Hector Barrantes. She had reasons to leave. The Galloping Major, as the press called Ronald Ferguson, was a priapic old goat who finally got his comeuppance when the press caught him at an erotic massage parlor in 1988, and he was fired from his royal sinecure.
He had raised Fergie and her sister with the help of an unfeeling housekeeper at the family home of the unfortunately named Dummer Down Farm in Hampshire. “Her mother leaving Fergie had a massive effect on her,” one of Fergie’s closest wingwomen, Kate Waddington, told me in 2006. “It really dictated how she is: her insecurity. Even today if she phones you and you don’t phone back she’s in a terrible state about what she’s done wrong.” (In another strange affinity with Diana, Susan Barrantes died in a car crash in September 1998. She was decapitated in a head-on collision on an Argentine provincial highway.) Fergie relays in her memoir an unwittingly tragic scene when her mother briefly returned to Dummer to tell her she was going to Argentina for good. Ever the people pleaser, Fergie told her mother she really liked Hector and hoped she would be happy. “Oh good, so you don’t mind then,” Susan replied, with that denial of emotion so quintessential to the upper classes.
The York marriage eventually collapsed not because of infidelity, but because of the gloominess of life with Andrew. Or rather, life without him. The Duke of York was home only forty days a year for the first five years of their marriage. Prince Philip refused to let Fergie join her husband in Portsmouth on the grounds that she would be too much of a distraction. Andrew, afraid to take his father on, didn’t put up a fight. For all his courage as a warrior, he was a pusillanimous son.
Fergie waited around for her fairy-tale prince in the six doleful rooms of Andrew’s former bachelor pad in the East Wing of Buckingham Palace—“damask curtains, pleated lampshades, bland carpeting, brownish wallpaper…and sad electric fireplaces,” as she described it in her memoir. Her child-man husband’s bed was blanketed with fifty stuffed teddy bears, many dressed as sailors, that maids had to place in the exact spot Andrew had ordained. After their marriage, his rambunctious spirit, so manifest in their courtship days, disappeared. He was a couch potato who wanted only to watch TV and golf. His decreasing relevance to the Crown drained his vitality and self-esteem. Former US ambassador to the UK Walter Annenberg’s wife, Lee, was appalled when Andrew made a private visit in 1993 to Sunnylands, their magnificent Palm Springs estate in California, and the Duke holed up in his bedroom for two days apparently watching porn.
Fergie performed her royal round with notable gusto, but she was essentially living alone in a huge fusty hotel, where any social spontaneity was curtailed by the need to give a whole day’s notice to security and a menu summit with the master of the household. She longed to do something ordinary, like make herself a cheese sandwich. “My solution was simple—for a time I just stopped going out. I would sit and eat my lukewarm supper for one.” In 1989, she succumbed to a very public two-year transatlantic affair with a hunky Texan oilman, Steve Wyatt, which Andrew seemed to scarcely notice.
The biggest problem in the Yorks’ union was—and always would be—money. Fergie was a crashing spendthrift married to a natural cheapskate who also happened to have much less cash than she had expected. Although far from broke, Andrew was not a rich man (before he sought out unsavory deals to compensate), and he was entirely dependent on the Queen’s bounty. Now fourth in line to the throne—the demotions having kicked in with the births of William and Harry—he received £250,000 annually from the Civil List for his official activities, and a Royal Naval pension of about £20,000 a year, plus an unspecified allowance that followed the vagaries of the Queen’s goodwill. He had no other capital and no further assets other than a life insurance policy worth £600,000.
“The ridiculous thing was that even when she was with Andrew she paid for all the house decorations herself,” Kate Waddington said. “She was always informed, ‘There is no money.’ Andrew would arrive on a skiing holiday and he’d have no stuff and she’d have to buy it.” In an attempt to rake in some funds, Fergie, who was a qualified helicopter pilot, wrote a series of not-bad-at-all children’s books about the adventures of a jaunty blue helicopter named Budgie, which she promoted furiously. They were a credible business success, with an animated Budgie the Little Helicopter TV series in the United States, but the money was never enough.
She spent with abandon—on expensive vacations, restaurants, jewelry, wardrobe, and grandiose gifts. Dresses “on approval” from couture designers were rarely sent back. Fergie was nothing if not bighearted to her friends, and was always issuing invitations she couldn’t pay for. By the time the Yorks separated in March 1992, Fergie was £4 million in debt to Coutts bank. It was clear that, embarrassed though he was by his wife’s infidelities, Prince Andrew was reluctant to divorce her. He never really has. The ex-royal maid Charlotte Briggs claimed Andrew still held a torch for Fergie after he returned to live with his mother at Buckingham Palace after the divorce. Briggs told The Sun, “Although [Fergie] did not live there, her make-up was still laid out on the dressing table….Even her wedding dress was still hung up in the wardrobe. It was creepy.” Four months before their separation, Woodrow Wyatt recorded in his diary that Angus Ogilvie, husband of the Queen’s cousin Princess Alexandra, told him at a dinner party, “Prince Andrew, poor fellow, is still in love with Fergie.” When his father told him she had to go, he simply took the path of least resistance.
It was the Daily Mirror that did Fergie in. The pictures of her Texan “business manager,” John Bryan, sucking and fondling her toes in the south of France in August 1992 irreversibly branded her as a royal deplorable.
“I joined Fergie’s staff immediately on the Monday after the pix appeared,” Waddington said. “She was shell-shocked, a broken woman.” There was little consideration in the press—or the family—of the fact that Andrew and she were separated at the time, or that the pictures were taken by an Italian paparazzo who had brazenly invaded the Duchess’s privacy.
Unluckily for Fergie, she was staying at Balmoral with her two daughters when the story hit. An adamant Queen told her to pack her bags and leave immediately. “The redhead is in trouble,” Diana paged the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay. Prince Philip never spoke to Fergie again. If she walked into a room, he walked out of it. His rage, though theatrical, was genuine. Her pariah status was especially distressing to her on occasions like Kate and William’s wedding. Banned from attending the royal event of the decade, she fled to Thailand. “The jungle embraced me,” she told Oprah in a 2011 interview. Unprotected by the Palace, she bravely endured years of cruel tabloid misogyny, routinely mocked in the gossip columns as the “Duchess of Pork.” “I remember one headline when a newspaper had run a poll and claimed that 82 percent of people would rather sleep with a goat than Fergie,” she recalled in an interview in 2021.
Fergie mishandled the terms of her divorce with the same unerring naïvety with which she mishandled everything else. Diana, who knew she would soon face divorce herself, regarded her sister-in-law’s negotiations as the road map of how to mess it up. Mistake one was hiring an establishment lawyer, rather than an outsider to royal circles, a mistake Diana avoided when she hired Anthony Julius, who cared nothing for their approval. Mistake two was essentially the same as mistake one. Fergie desperately wanted to claw back a relationship with the senior royals, failing to understand the Windsors’ long-practiced art of pulling up the drawbridge irrevocably.
“When I met with Her Majesty, she asked, ‘What do you require, Sarah?’ ” she told one interviewer.
“ ‘Your friendship, ma’am,’ ” Sarah said she replied, “which I think amazed her because everyone said I would demand a big settlement. But I wanted to be able to say, ‘Her Majesty is my friend’—not fight her nor have lawyers saying, ‘Look, she is greedy.’ ”
Her Majesty graciously accepted Fergie’s offer of friendship and allowed Andrew’s lawyers to make a stingy deal. After ten years of marriage and two children, Fergie wound up with a £350,000 settlement, and for her daughters a £1.4 million trust fund and £500,000 toward a house. Her debts remained unsettled, and she chose to stay on with the girls in a suite of rooms at the Sunninghill house until it was sold in 2007. She became a Flying Dutchman Duchess, pursuing a series of publishing and merchandising deals and TV talk shows in the United States—all of which inevitably cratered.
It’s not as if she didn’t work hard. A contract with Wedgwood china required her to visit—in twelve months—forty to fifty mid-market American malls, where royalty-struck shoppers turned out to hear her talk up the table settings. And she gamely turned her years of being fat-shamed into a business opportunity. A job as spokesperson for Weight Watchers in the United States at $2 million a year was her most lucrative venture and eventually paid off her debts. In 2006, she sank £700,000 she had saved into Hartmoor, a lifestyle brand with fancy offices on Madison Avenue. It was supposed to be an umbrella company for her publishing, media, and public speaking efforts, but in 2008 Weight Watchers dumped her, and Hartmoor folded from mismanagement and overspending. She was the Real Housewife of the House of Windsor.
In May 2010, she made one of her most personally damaging mistakes when she fell for the sting by the News of the World’s undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood, who was posing as a businessman seeking to buy access to Prince Andrew. This was the very same Fake Sheikh in the bogus burnoose who’d gulled Sophie Wessex ten years earlier. He got Fergie on tape promising to grant access to her ex-husband for £500,000. She told the “businessman” to wire the money to her HSBC bank account, assuring him: “That opens up everything you would ever wish for. I can open any door you want, and I will for you. Look after me and he’ll look after you….You’ll get it back tenfold.”
One former business associate of Fergie’s told me that it became impossible to close a deal for Fergie because of the incompetence of the people she surrounded herself with. She blew countless bona fide opportunities because of chaotic follow-up or a headstrong lack of it. Like her husband, she had appalling character judgment. Her advisory circle was as full of flakes and fools as his was of iffy oligarchs.
But Fergie was also in a position that would continue, in varying degrees, to haunt all the minor royals. They are like creatures in a Middle Eastern harem, captives of luxury everyone resents, but without the wherewithal or expertise to pursue successful lives beyond. If they try to do so, they are branded as vulgar and embarrassing and accused of exploiting their royal status. And yet, what else do they have to sell? Weight Watchers wasn’t interested in just any jolly zaftig redhead. They were interested—and invested—in the ex-wife of the Queen’s second son, a royal duchess who had lived in palaces.
Fergie’s parsimonious settlement may have felt like a win for the royals—especially when Charles had to borrow money from the Queen to shell out £17 million three months later for Diana’s divorce bonanza—but it was also shortsighted. Just as their failure to pay off the gabby butler Paul Burrell and lock down his secrets offered open season for every tabloid with a checkbook, so, too, were Fergie’s ever-rising debts a dangerous vulnerability for the Crown.
Whenever she went on an American TV talk show, they asked her one obligatory question about Weight Watchers, and then, to her chagrin, pivoted to pressing for juice about her life as a royal. The sound bites would bounce eastward across the Atlantic, generating more scorn, sleaze, and tarnishing of the House of Windsor’s mystique. And they didn’t even get rid of her. In 2008, Fergie moved back in with Andrew at the Queen Mother’s former home, Royal Lodge, the thirty-room eighteenth-century jewel-box house on ninety-eight acres in the grounds of Windsor Castle, for which he pays a peppercorn rent. Where Andrew got the £7.5 million to renovate it remains a mystery. They reside there to this day, living in uncoupled coupling as each other’s supposed best friends, devoted parents of the two princesses, and proud grandparents. “I stand by him and always will. The way we are is our fairy tale,” Fergie told the Daily Mail in 2018.
An American media executive who came to see her at Royal Lodge about a project in 2015 paints a different picture one only hopes was an aberration. “We were having lunch,” the media executive told me, “and Andrew came in and sat down and said to me, ‘What are you doing with this fat cow?’ I was so stunned at his level of sadism. I thought, ‘What an asshole.’ She has to sing for her supper. She’s afraid of him.” Whatever the undertow of their curious arrangement, the deal seems to be that he bails her out when she’s in trouble, and she backs him up when he’s assailed by scandal. It is the symbiosis of sheer survival.
As William and Harry became the heartthrobs of the aughts, Andrew descended into the royal round of rent-a-uniform gigs and booming-voiced business dinners, where he usually embarrassed himself or his host.
Andrew, unfortunately, exhibited classic symptoms of what is scientifically recognized as the Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias in which people come to believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. The combination of minimal self-awareness and dim intellectual wattage leads sufferers of this condition to overestimate their own capabilities. Years of enjoying unearned obeisance to his royal position allowed Andrew to bang on with a combination of overweening self-confidence and unchallenged ignorance. It made him an easy mark for con artists and crooks.
His position as Britain’s trade ambassador could not possibly last—and it didn’t. In February 2011, Andrew’s unsavory private life suddenly blew up, threatening to eclipse William and Kate’s wedding just when all was sunny in the royal enclosure.
In February 2011, the New York Post published a picture taken the previous December of Andrew strolling in Central Park with the American financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew appeared to have resumed the friendship with this squalid individual five months after Epstein was released from a Florida jail for procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute. These revelations were compounded by news in The Telegraph that in 2009, when Fergie had been skirting dangerously close to bankruptcy, Epstein, at Andrew’s request, had given money to one of her personal assistants to satisfy a paltry debt of £15,000. When the flak hit, Fergie contorted herself with apologies. “I abhor pedophilia and any sexual abuse of children,” she told the Evening Standard on March 7, 2011. “I am just so contrite I cannot say. Whenever I can, I will repay the money and will have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again.”
Ironically, Epstein tried to sue her for libel for referring to him as a pedophile.
Enough was enough. It was one thing for Andrew to broker nefarious deals for Kazakh strongmen and party at their homes with big-breasted beauty queens, another to blatantly consort with a convicted American sex offender and his seraglio of underage girls. In July, the Foreign Office and Christopher Geidt had a quiet word. After which the Duke of York, now drowning in sordid allegations, resigned as Britain’s international trade ambassador.