Entitled, his unauthorized biography of Andrew and Sarah, appeared shortly before Andrew’s precipitous fall from grace and will undoubtedly be a bestseller. (There is more up-to-date information, and perhaps less speculation, than in Nigel Cawthorne’s 2020 book Prince Andrew: Epstein, Maxwell and the Palace.)
“I think there’s lots more still to come, lots more, and it will be even more damaging material,” Lownie said last week of the ongoing revelations about the former prince, now Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.
A historian, journalist and literary agent, Lownie has specialized in writing about royal scandals. Entitled seems an obvious next step for an author whose last book was about the Duke of Windsor, whose 1936 abdication to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson was the biggest crisis for the monarchy in the past century.
Even for those not interested in royal gossip, Entitled is a fascinating read. As Lownie writes, “It is a tale of childhood trauma, infidelity, lust, betrayal, corruption, greed, extravagance, arrogance, entitlement, Establishment cover-up and hubris.”
Reckless and corrupt
We have known for most of the past 20 years that ex-Prince Andrew was both reckless and corrupt. We have also known Sarah Ferguson (Fergie), his former wife and apparently continuing housemate, at least until now (she has announced she will be moving into her own separate home), was equally so. There is no suggestion, however, that her contact with Jeffrey Epstein involved seeking sexual favours.
It was the couple’s closeness to convicted sex offender Epstein that brought them down. Lownie writes that “Randy Andy” was not only close to Epstein, but apparently shared young women with him. Epstein claimed “he likes to engage in stuff that’s even kinky to me — and I’m the king of kink”.
In 2019, Andrew famously resigned from royal duties (at his then 98-year-old father’s instigation, writes Lownie) after his disastrous hour-long interview with BBC Newsnight. In it, among other things, Andrew denied meeting Virginia Giuffre Roberts, the self-described Epstein “sex slave” who said she had sex with Andrew three times and was photographed with him and Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
The infamous BBC Newsnight interview that had Andrew removed from royal duties in 2019.
The tragic April suicide of Giuffre, and the publication last week of her memoir Nobody’s Girl, finally forced the palace to take significant action.
Though Andrew had denied Giuffre’s accounts of having sex with him, he paid her out a large sum, then lied about his continuing association with Epstein. Court documents released in January reveal a “member of the British royal family”, believed to be Andrew, emailed Epstein saying: “Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”
A BBC producer told Lownes the team “found personal email discussions between Ghislaine and Andrew discussing Virginia” and “they worked together to build a dossier about Virginia to leak to the media”.
Dubious deals
Andrew equally deserved to lose his position because of years of dubious deal-making with an extraordinary series of crooks and tyrants.
After a long career in the British Navy, including time as a helicopter pilot in the 1982 Falklands War, he was found a position supporting British trade and investment abroad. At this point, any sense he might have had of the distinction between royal duty and personal advancement vanished.
Even before this, Andrew had shown a disregard for restraint and a willingness to use his royal privilege at enormous cost to the state, demanding helicopter flights to take him to private golf games. But with the imprimatur of the Foreign Office, he appears to have spent considerable time with a series of deeply unpleasant regimes – Libya, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan – in pursuit of his own financial interests.
I lost track of the many complex ways in which Andrew sought to use his position to make money, some of which, such as his dealings with a Chinese businessman with close ties to the Chinese government, caused considerable concern for the UK government.
It remains something of a mystery why the king is now apparently prepared to provide Andrew with an income, given the amount of money he has reputedly earned over the past decades.
Sarah’s spending ‘literally staggering’
As a commoner, one assumes Andrew will continue to enjoy expensive watches and cars, even if he is confined to racing them around the Sandringham estate. He might emulate his wife and appear on the US television and speech circuit. Back in 2007, Lownie writes, Sarah was paid half a million dollars to give five speeches, plus the cost of transporting her entourage across the Atlantic, a group of at least ten.
But Sarah’s involvement in murky deals is also problematic. She appears to be a woman of enormous energy, whether in spending money at a rate only the Kardashians could match or flying off to yet another all-expenses-paid holiday courtesy of rich friends.
Sarah’s father had been a polo manager for Prince Charles, and she had a friendship with Princess Diana that preceded their respective marriages. Once a member of “the firm”, as the royals refer to it, she took to heart Gore Vidal’s dictum that “in the world of stars, no-one is a stranger”, and moved into the world of celebrities and the ultra-rich.
The amount of money Sarah has earned and spent is literally staggering. Over her time as Duchess of York, she was paid millions for her childrens’ books, television appearances and her work with Weight Watchers. She engaged in considerable charity work and apparently showed a genuine capacity for empathy with disabled and orphaned children.
At the same time, many of her charitable ventures seem to have rewarded her and her friends more than the causes they were meant to support. She may well be big-hearted and generous; she is also imperious and wasteful. Like Andrew she treats servants, of whom they both appear to need large numbers, with a striking lack of courtesy.
Comparisons to Trump
Reading about the Mountbatten Windsor family, as they will now be known, I was struck by the comparison with the Trump family. (Trump himself has just commented on King Charles’ decision to strip Andrew of his titles: “I feel very badly,” Trump said. “It’s a terrible thing that’s happened to the family.”)
When they built and furnished their first home, Sunninghill, it sounded remarkably like something Trump might construct: “One entered by the thirty-five-foot high stone floor hall, which rose to a glass dome and minstrels gallery through a lobby adorned with a medieval soldier’s helmet from Windsor Castle and the head of a North American buffalo — a gift from a royal tour.”
Trumplike, too, is the way their children, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, have been gifted profitable access to some of the Middle East potentates who befriended Andrew, though Lownie tells us remarkably little about the princesses. (He does not even comment on the fact their royal titles are not shared by their cousins, the children of Princess Anne and Prince Edward.)
Lownie is an engaging author, and his book is a compulsive read. He is skilful in dropping in a casual comment that becomes relevant later. The best example is several accounts of Andrew seen dancing at nightclubs and sweating profusely; those of us who watched his fateful television interview will recall his protestation that the stress of his service in the Falklands War cost him the ability to sweat.
Among the many people whose reputations are soiled in this sorry tale, that of the late Queen Elizabeth is most striking. While others in the family – Prince Phillip, Prince William, even Princess Margaret – were appalled by the couple, the queen remained blind to Andrew’s dealings and consistently bailed him out. After the BBC interview, she was deliberately photographed riding with Andrew in the grounds of Windsor Castle, Lownie writes.
Lownie remains discreet in his discussion of the queen and is on record as a supporter of the monarchy. (Though he told an interviewer last week: “I think the queen has to take some responsibility for the monster she created.”)
If there is a gap in this book, it is his reluctance to question how far the sense of entitlement, carried to the extreme by Andrew and Sarah, is common to others in the family.
Can the monarchy survive?
Lownie ends his book warning of the harm this story has done to the British monarchy. He finished it before King Charles acted to decisively exorcise Andrew from “the firm” and banished him to what the royals call “a cottage” on Charles’ private Sandringham estate.
I suspect this has saved the monarchy in Britain, at least for now. Charles has proved to be a far more effective constitutional monarch than most expected, as he demonstrated when he very carefully hosted Trump’s state visit. That the Canadian prime minister invited Charles to open the nation’s parliament earlier this year suggests he is seen as a valuable political asset.
Whether exile to Sandringham will prevent further moves against Andrew is unclear. With royal status removed, he is vulnerable to other possible accusations emerging. I would not be surprised were he to end up in Dubai, where he could share reminiscences of royal splendour with the disgraced Spanish king, Juan Carlos. Or in Abu Dhabi, where he has reportedly been offered the use of a lavish royal palace by the country’s ruler.
Reading Entitled, it is hard to feel monarchy is justified. But I return to the dilemma that led me to write my book God Save the Queen: many of the countries we regard as most democratic – Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands – are constitutional monarchies.
In the end, Britain’s monarchy will survive because its political leaders are trusted even less than its hapless royals.
Dennis Altman, Vice Chancellor's Fellow and Professorial Fellow, Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.