Could things get any worse for Prince Andrew, the late Queen Elizabeth’s second son, whose infamous Newsnight interview in which he claimed to be unable to sweat and refused to renounce his association with the now-dead sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein saw him stripped of his royal duties and more or less shunned wholesale from public life? Apparently, yes.

Last week, a new biography of the Duke of York called Entitled, by the historian and author Andrew Lownie, was released in the U.K. It’s a joint portrait of Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, once the Duchess of York, and it’s become a No. 1 bestseller here. As Lownie puts it at the start of the book, in an understatement so huge as to be laughable, the Yorks would have “preferred this book not to have been written.”

No doubt. This is the kind of book you can write about a member of the royal family only after they have been thoroughly disgraced, and it is not usual that a member of the royal family has fallen so decisively. (Lownie previously wrote a book about Andrew’s great-uncle Edward VII called Traitor King.) So that in itself makes Entitled an interesting document. When the jig is as entirely up as it is now for Andrew, how many people are willing to dish the dirt on a royal despite that not being the “done thing”?

Plenty, it seems. Lownie reportedly approached about 3,000 people for this book, of whom he says only a tenth replied, but that is enough. And what these people—drawn from Andrew’s love life, his professional life, his staff, and his sometime friends—have to say about him is damning beyond belief. Here follows just some of the claims Lownie makes about Andrew, all of which are backed up by testimony from people who know or knew the prince, but still just allegations, I suppose: He had a member of the royal staff moved from his job for wearing a nylon tie, and another because he had a mole on his face. He had 40 women brought to his hotel room in Thailand over a five-day visit. Aged 26, he had dozens of stuffed animals on his bed, one of which wore a vest that read “It’s tough being a prince.” He missed his daughter’s 12th birthday party to hang out with Epstein at his Miami beach house. He ran up a bill of £325,000 on helicopters and planes in 2005 alone. He let a Libyan gun smuggler pay for a holiday he took to Tunisia and accepted a present of a bugged MacBook Pro from an attractive woman who turned out to be a Russian spy; he later tried to get himself a free Fabergé egg on an official Kremlin tour. In his role as a special representative for the United Kingdom, he earned, in the diplomatic community, the nickname “His Buffoon Highness” by refusing to follow his briefs and perhaps even read them in the first place. Once, driving his £80,000 Range Rover to Royal Lodge in Great Windsor Park, he found that the gates’ sensor was broken, so, rather than taking a 1-mile detour, he rammed them open, causing thousands of pounds’ worth of damage.

Name an undesirable trait a person might have, and this book will demonstrate Andrew having it. He is, supposedly, in addition to being a sex offender, cruel, easily enraged, stupid, boring, naive, attention-seeking, unfunny, childish, arrogant, and out of touch, as well as a misogynist, a liar, a thief, a bully, a pervert, a bad lover, a bad husband, a bad father, a brat as a child, a brat as a teenager, and a brat as an adult. Just when you’re thinking that surely every possible slight has been leveled at the prince, and that there can surely be no greater depth to which your opinion of him can sink, Lownie relates that staff at Buckingham Palace used to have to clear away collections of “soiled tissues” in his bedroom.

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Character assassination feels too light a term for what Lownie has done here. Apart from anything else, Andrew’s character has been dead and buried for a while now. This is taking a thousand daggers to a corpse. There is truly no stone left unturned here under which something denigrating to Andrew’s reputation might be found. You come away from reading Entitled convinced that Prince Andrew is not only the most hideous member of the royal family but perhaps even the worst person in the British Isles. There can be no coming back from this for Andrew, no return to public life, no reinstatement of royal duties. I’m not sure how the man will leave the house.

The book’s title references the fact that Andrew seems to think he was untouchable with regard to the Epstein scandal—that he had no need to apologize, as he famously did not, during the infamous Newsnight interview. (In the book, Lownie also gives credence to the rumor that Epstein introduced Melania and Donald Trump, contra the popular version of the story. This week, the publisher announced that this detail would be stricken from future copies after a lawsuit threat from the first lady herself.) But what comes across most consistently and most infuriatingly in the book is his sense of entitlement when it comes to money. Listen, I can’t recommend anybody actually read Entitled, unless you have a burning need to know the precise amounts Prince Andrew has spent on private jets each month over the course of his lifetime. The bombardment of pound sterling figures and luxury holiday destinations visited and high-end purchases and debts outstanding does have a cumulative effect, however. These were not people who splashed some cash a little too lavishly and made a few dodgy investments here and there. Practically every one of its 400-odd pages includes a reference to the way they wasted and wasted and wasted money. I felt actively pissed off by the time I finished, which is no accident. Terms like cost to the taxpayer and public money come up over and over, hammering home the fact that much of Prince Andrew’s lifestyle has been funded by, well, me, and every other person paying taxes in the United Kingdom.

The biography is a double portrait of Andrew and his ex-wife, Ferguson, who doesn’t come off much better, particularly in terms of her spending. She allegedly does things like demand “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” each night, but then touch almost none of it, defraud charities, travel with 51 pieces of luggage, spend thousands of pounds consulting psychics and flog hair straighteners in “royal purple” on QVC to cover enormous debts she’d racked up on, for instance, designer clothes and stays at ski chalets.

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Of course, everyone in Britain knows that our taxes pay for much of what the royal family has. But to see it laid out like this, in pound amounts, again and again and again, packs a punch. What people who read this book or read about this book will take away from it anew isn’t the details about Andrew’s connections with Epstein and his alleged sexual involvement with underage girls, because that has already been pored over in the public eye. It will be the money.

Lownie doesn’t explicitly call for abolition of the monarchy anywhere in the book, but Entitled as a whole offers a pretty conclusive argument for it. One would be hard-pressed to come away from reading this feeling well disposed toward the institution. Near the end, Lownie quotes one former Buckingham Palace employee on what would happen if the true extent of Andrew’s alleged involvement with Epstein, for instance, came out: “If the unconditional truth is ever released I think the British public would try to impeach the Royal Family.” For what it’s worth, I don’t think the British public would ever have the guts. But a girl can dream.

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