{"id":331911,"date":"2025-08-10T01:15:25","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T01:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/331911\/"},"modified":"2025-08-10T01:15:25","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T01:15:25","slug":"the-queen-knew-what-was-going-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/331911\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Queen knew what was going on\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Andrew Lownie submitted his manuscript for his incendiary book about Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, he was braced for heavy legal redactions. But in the end there were far fewer deletions than feared. \u201cI was surprised by what the lawyers let through,\u201d he tells me. <\/p>\n

The result of this leniency is among the most lurid, marmalade-dropping, outlandish books published about a senior royal. Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York makes Prince Harry\u2019s Spare<\/a> look positively restrained. <\/p>\n

Over five splashy days of serialisation in the Daily Mail, we learnt that Andrew, 65, was a \u201cserial sex addict\u201d who has apparently slept with more than 1,000 women. We read of him bringing \u201ctarts\u201d with \u201cample breasts\u201d into the Palace to dine with Queen Elizabeth. The priapic prince\u2019s unsolicited hands wander onto knees under tables, or plunge women\u2019s faces into p\u00e2t\u00e9 for a laugh. He calls one staff member a \u201cf***ing imbecile<\/a>\u201d for getting his grandmother\u2019s royal title wrong. His golf cheating reaches Trumpian levels of flagrancy and he is said to have left used tissues, soiled from his own autoerotic exertions, strewn on the floor of his bedroom for others to pick up. <\/p>\n

The book is equally damning of Ferguson, 65, the Duchess of Excess, who racks up unpaid bills like a ruinous Georgian prince. She allegedly spends \u00a325,000 in a single hour in Bloomingdale\u2019s. Her butler has to get into work at 4.30am to put watercress on ice.<\/p>\n

\"Sarah<\/p>\n

The Duke and Duchess of York on a visit to Canada, where she jokingly pretended to throttle him during a speech, below<\/p>\n

TIM GRAHAM PHOTO LIBRARY<\/p>\n

\"Sarah<\/p>\n

The grand constitutionalist Walter Bagehot famously said of the royal family that one mustn\u2019t \u201clet daylight in on magic\u201d by bringing them into the grubby arena of the quotidian. Lownie has taken the opposite approach, applying a UV light to Andrew and Fergie\u2019s Montrachet-soaked, Epstein-sponsored, whoopee-cushioned shagathon of a life. It is not a pretty sight. <\/p>\n

But is it all, well, true? Yes, insists Lownie, when we meet at his chaotic Westminster house. His wife, Angela, brings us a jug of water and we sit down amid towering piles of books and files. \u201cThese are some of the key documents,\u201d Lownie says excitedly, waving a binder at me. <\/p>\n

\"Andrew<\/p>\n

Andrew Lownie at home in Westminster<\/p>\n

JEFF GILBERT\/SHUTTERSTOCK<\/p>\n

The 64-year-old literary agent and author is affable, unfiltered and by now quite familiar with making scandalous allegations about the royal family. His 2019 book about the Mountbattens alleged that Lord Mountbatten had young boys from a home in Kincora trafficked to his castle in Ireland so that he could perform sex acts on them.<\/p>\n

And what of privacy? Lownie writes of Andrew<\/a>\u2019s entitlement, but what of ours? Are we entitled to know the intimate secrets of his bedroom, however boorish? Does the story about the stained tissues really belong in the public sphere? \u201cWell no, well, I think it is quite revealing about the way he behaves, to drop them around for other people to pick up. People have different views on where they draw the line.\u201d <\/p>\n

Lownie makes the point that much of Andrew\u2019s life has been subsidised by the public purse and that many of his escapades abroad happened while he was travelling on the taxpayer\u2019s dime, as special representative for international trade and investment between 2001 and 2011. <\/p>\n

Biographers are \u201cout to make money\u201d, he also acknowledges. \u201cYou\u2019re paid for doing this interview. The lawyers are paid to write those letters. We\u2019re all making a living.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Prince<\/p>\n

On a visit to Thailand, 2006<\/p>\n

SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL<\/p>\n

In fairness to Lownie, his book is not just a catalogue of reckless royal indulgence; it also investigates the funding behind decades of unrestrained York hedonism. He insists that the real scandal of Andrew<\/a> is \u201cfinancial not sexual\u201d and emphasises that he is a staunch monarchist. \u201cI\u2019m not a raving lefty,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m a former Conservative parliamentary candidate. It\u2019s because I\u2019m very keen on the monarchy that I want it to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andrew\u2019s finances have puzzled many an investigative journalist. Where do the millions he\u2019s spent refurbishing and running Royal Lodge come from? Who provided the multimillion-pound payoff for Virginia Giuffre<\/a>?<\/p>\n

The territory Lownie crosses here is more familiar, taking in the \u00a3750,000 from the Turkish millionaire Nebahat Isbilen that ended up in Andrew\u2019s Coutts account, described as a gift for Princess Beatrice\u2019s wedding and later repaid. There are gifts to Ferguson from the multimillionaire scrap metal merchant David Rowland and huge loans to Andrew from Banque Havilland, owned by the Rowland family. Rowland accompanies the duke on some of his special representative trips and, Lownie alleges, Andrew often used these taxpayer-funded jaunts to conduct his own business activities too. <\/p>\n

What surprised Lownie was the \u201csheer brazenness\u201d of the whole thing. \u201cThis is what shocked me, the cover-up from the Palace,\u201d he says. \u201cThey knew exactly what was going on. People are not going to like it, but the Queen was colluding in this. I originally thought she just put her head in the sand. But I increasingly have come to the view that she knew exactly what was going on and allowed it to happen.\u201d <\/p>\n

Unburdened by maternal adoration, Lownie thinks the King has always seen his brother much more clearly. \u201cAs does William<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Prince<\/p>\n

The duke at a Chinese new year party in the 2000s with the costume theme \u201cmystery, vampire and seduction\u201d<\/p>\n

DAVE BENETT\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve only seen the \u201ctip of the iceberg\u201d on Andrew\u2019s finances, Lownie warns. \u201cYou know, there\u2019s money clearly from, we know from China. There\u2019s clearly a lot of money in the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another dubious source of funds for the Yorks was Jeffrey Epstein, the sex-trafficking financier who, according to Lownie, Andrew also invited to Windsor, Balmoral and Sandringham. It is a friendship that led to Andrew\u2019s expulsion from official royal life. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey clearly use each other,\u201d says Lownie. \u201cAndrew gave Epstein respectability. He was able to open doors. And Andrew has admitted \u2026 that Epstein introduced him to people he might not normally have met.\u201d <\/p>\n

Part of the Epstein problem, in Lownie\u2019s view, was Andrew\u2019s loneliness. The prince is not a man who has ever had many friends. \u201cHe has hangers-on people, business contacts or people he transacts with. But there doesn\u2019t seem to be many friends there or anyone who can kind of rein him in.\u201d <\/p>\n

One apparent friend was Ghislaine Maxwell<\/a>, Epstein\u2019s courtesan, and Lownie writes that the two were intimate. According to Lownie, she regularly visited Andrew at the Palace and stayed the night. \u201cSo I\u2019m assuming there was a sexual relationship and they weren\u2019t playing Monopoly,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"Prince<\/p>\n

Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell at Ascot, 2000<\/p>\n

SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL<\/p>\n

Lownie\u2019s attempts to investigate Andrew\u2019s time as special representative bumped up against thick layers of bureaucratic obstruction. He made hundreds of freedom of information requests from the Foreign Office and the Department for Business and Trade. But all too often they were rejected on spurious grounds. \u201cThere is a culture of secrecy which is drilled into the civil service,\u201d he says. \u201cThese are the prefects and this is their power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of Lownie\u2019s information on Andrew comes from speaking to diplomats, the prince\u2019s former naval colleagues and members of his social circle. He was surprised by how many were happy to talk and he names many of his sources at the end of the book. <\/p>\n

The two Andrews are of similar age and attended rival Scottish public schools at the same time. \u201cI used to play rugby [against him],\u201d says Lownie. \u201cWe all gave him a kicking in the scrum because we all hated him.\u201d His wife is of a similar age to Ferguson. \u201cThey were brought up together, they were neighbours,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I knew quite a lot of the stories. For example, the story which no one has picked up on, Prince Philip and Susan Barrantes [Ferguson\u2019s mother] being lovers. That all came from family information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fighting against establishment secrecy has become something of an obsession for Lownie, who was once a barrister. When researching his Mountbatten book, he spent a sum approaching \u00a3500,000 on legal expenses fighting the Cabinet Office, which was blocking the release of Mountbatten\u2019s personal archive, bought from the family by the University of Southampton. <\/p>\n

About \u00a3100,000 of the legal costs were funded by donations; the rest was his savings. The bulk of the archive was eventually released, but Lownie didn\u2019t receive his costs. \u201cIt hit me pretty hard,\u201d he says. \u201cOur house was in jeopardy, all my savings went, a legacy from my mother for the children went.\u201d In the end, the documents that he gained access to were innocuous. Does he regret fighting so hard for them? \u201cYes, to be honest.\u201d His wife, he says, is a \u201csaint\u201d. <\/p>\n

Lownie himself is a strangely English mixture of erudition and prurience, careful archivist and loose gossip-monger. His hope is that this book wakes people up to how rusty our \u201cRuritanian\u201d institution of monarchy has become. To survive, he argues, it must open up and adapt. \u201cThe institution relies on the trust and support of people. We will allow them all sorts of things if we feel that they are value for money and they\u2019re being open and they\u2019re not abusing their position.\u201d<\/p>\n

A theme he\u2019ll come back to soon, no doubt? \u201cI suppose I am a bit of an obsessive nutter,\u201d he says with a grin. \u201cBut sometimes you need that.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Andrew Lownie submitted his manuscript for his incendiary book about Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, he was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7708],"tags":[5105,7710,519,448],"class_list":{"0":"post-331911","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-royals","8":"tag-royal","9":"tag-royal-families","10":"tag-royal-family","11":"tag-royals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115001827415662553","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}