Prince Andrew must be dead already. Biographies about breathing men have an inconclusive, interim quality. There are years to be lived: decisions to be made; books to be written; marriages to end; wars to be fought. The biographer whose subject is still with us apologetically and necessarily punts real judgements about them into the future. But in Andrew Lownie’s Entitled: The Rise and Fall of The House of York, there is none of this sense of suspension, only the sound of the biographer’s axe falling, again and again, on the ragged bodies of Andrew Mountbatten–Windsor and Sarah Ferguson.
The first subheading in the book, clinically regarding Andrew when he is barely out of the crib, is called “Baby Grumpling”; the second, surveying his years at Heatherdown Prep School, is called “A Tiresome Little Shit”. According to Lownie, Andrew was a bad baby, who became a bad boy, who became a very bad man. We knew Andrew, following revelations about his relationship with the late child-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein and his now imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, was disgraced. Lownie shows us that the Duke’s predicament is even more funereal, a living death.
Lownie claims to have approached “some 3,000 people” during his research for this book. About 300 of them sharpened their own knives to cut a slice from Andrew and Sarah. That is a remarkable hit rate for a reporter, reporting like this, on a still potentially litigious and incendiary subject. There is no dramatic arc in Entitled, no chance of redemption in what almost reads as a nihilistic satire of royal biography itself. The typical Windsorist book that parades birth, boarding, marriage, military service, foreign excursions, second marriage and so on, often written in threatless prose amidst an atmosphere of flummery, is not Lownie’s style. Less a biographer than a mortician, he has delivered a 456-page obituary for the Duke and Duchess of York. It may also prove to be the first line of an obituary for the monarchy itself, if the ominous noises Lownie makes at the book’s conclusion grow louder in the years ahead.
The obituarist, Lownie, a well-lunched looking, jolly-seeming former barrister educated at Westminster and Magdalen College, Cambridge, appears an unlikely English radical. Yet his trilogy of royal biographies, including Entitled as well as The Mountbattens (which revealed Louis Mountbatten’s peculiar interest in young boys) and Traitor King (which damned Edward VIII for his Nazi-philia) add up to a clutch of barrel bombs dropped on the Crown. I cannot be the only reader, confronted with this unforgiving sequence and Lownie’s odd public statements to the effect that he remains a “monarchist”, who will recognise here a sustained if ulterior campaign to persuade the British public that the Windsors must endure the unhappy fate of so many other European monarchies.
Andrew, far more the subject of Entitled than the hapless Sarah Ferguson, stands revealed here as a kind of British Caligula. Read what those 300 sources briefed to Lownie. The Duke is a “pompous git”; “a man with a big bottom who laughed at his own jokes”; “a bully”; “a wally and a tosser”; “boorish”; “spoiled”; “yob”; “a deeply unpleasant man… of low intelligence”. His polo-obsessed mother-in-law Susan Barrentes thought Andrew lacked “character” – short of being called “boring” that is about as devastating a judgment a posh English person can cast on another posh English person. “You have to understand what I’m dealing with here,” Ferguson, then his wife, told a confidante, “I’m married to a man who has never been inside a supermarket.” Andrew, not given to self-analysis, has said little that is memorable about himself, other than his fabulous claim on Newsnight 2019 that “It is almost impossible for me to sweat.”
Lownie claims Andrew once fired a lackey for having a mole on his face. Another fluffer was dismissed for wearing a nylon tie. Then there is this: “At one dinner party [Andrew] sniffed the pâté served as first course and turned to his right. ‘This pâté smells. What do you think?’ His female companion leaned forward to smell it and he promptly pushed her face into the dish.” The common thread between these stories – and Lownie has many more – is gratuitous cruelty. Caligula, Suetonius tells us, once warned a minion: “Bear in mind I can treat anyone exactly as I please.” His words might have been Andrew’s motto.
The duelling leitmotifs in Entitled are money and sex. Ferguson is the money case, Andrew the sex case. The couple were set up by Princess Diana, after Andrew’s heroics during the Falklands War. Prince Philip – who, in one of many startling and unexplained asides, Lownie claims had an affair with Ferguson’s mother – thought she was “a girl on the make”. After their engagement was announced, a crack team from “MI5, the special branch, no one to this day knows” scoured her home, removing everything into vans. Ferguson was effectively being vanished into the royal family, the British equivalent of being disappeared under a 20th-century totalitarian state. Instead of a gulag set in frozen tundra, Sarah moved to Buckingham Palace. She might have been better off in Siberia. Andrew duly married her in Westminster Abbey on 23 July 1986. Their wedding cake cost £10,000. By the time divorce came eight years later, she had settled into a kind of financial bulimia, a binge-then-vomit cycle built from reckless spending on staff, homes, holiday homes, showers of gifts for friends and underlings, followed by dramatic confrontations with creditors and banks, often only settled by the intervention of Queen Elizabeth II. Her father Ronald wondered whether she was “in love with Andrew or in love with the royal family”. He thought it was the latter.
The Windsors and their staff did not love her back. Before Andrew became one of the most hated men in Britain, or Charles and Diana’s 1996 divorce made the Princess a potentially radical free agent in the year before her death, Ferguson worried royal courtiers more. She was “the greatest single threat to the monarchy in the current era”, said the Queen’s press secretary Robin Janvrin at the end of the Eighties. A minor theme of Entitled is how Ferguson endures in the face of such scorn, and the larger scorn of the public and press. “Fergie” as they call her, was a redtop hounded by the Redtops. She is described over the decades a “fashion obscenity who walks like a duck with a bad leg”, “an extra from the Night of The Living Dead”, “completely bizarre” and a “trollop”. She has survived every form of obloquy that the British media can stump up, from being stung by the News of The World’s Fake Sheikh, to hosting a Sky TV Show pertinently called Surviving Life, to being the victim of a telephone poll, conducted by the Sun, that asked: “Would you rather date Fergie or a goat?” Respondents voted seven to one in favour of dating the goat.
As persistent as damp, Ferguson could not be brought down by her affair with the scion of a Texas oil family, nor by hosting a private dinner at Buckingham Palace with Dr Ramzi Salman, the head of the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation, a mere month before Saddam Hussein’s government invaded Kuwait. A slothful Ferguson avoided being turned to dust on 9/11 because she was late for a meeting in one of the towers. Then she brought out a four-part children’s book series called Little Red, based on “the adventures of a red-haired rag doll based on a doll found in the remains of the World Trade Centre”. The proceeds “ostensibly” went to charity. Scandal, embarrassment, humiliation, egregious spending, a key staff member ending up behind bars for murder – Ferguson endured them all, whereas the comparable Diana died in a tunnel and Meghan Markle fled to Montecito. The dubious bounty Ferguson’s victory has secured? Her wall-eyed daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, were able to hold tasteless parties and weddings in some of our ugliest palaces and churches, with guests ranging from Ricky Martin to a Libyan convicted of arms smuggling. She retains her “HRH” title, with all its commercial possibilities, such as selling teaspoons and bed linen to credulous Americans. She still lives with Andrew, in a home in Windsor Great Park that King Charles would dearly love to evict the Yorks from.
Ferguson’s family were close enough to the Windsor’s to give the Andrew match the tang of incest. “Every generation of her father’s family since the 19th century had been commissioned into the Life Guards,” Lownie notes, making Sarah yet another sacrificial body pressed into royal service. The Ferguson family home, the balefully named “Dummer Down” was once owned by George IV, while Ronald, a man of pure, hard, rural 18th-century tastes and character once commanded Queen Elizabeth’s sovereign escort. Fergie was raised in the folkways of her class: a stint at a metal beds and horsehair mattresses school, a familiarity with ski slopes and horses (“She would ride anything” notes Lownie in Carry On-ish fashion), all part of an upbringing that emphasised physical, rather than moral courage. Ronald would later be found in 1988 at the Wigmore Club, a West End massage parlour: “He claimed he only went there for ‘straight massages’ and was said to be more upset by the suggestion he had worn a blazer at Claridge’s than by the accusation of adultery with a nymphet called Babs.” Ferguson’s mother, Sarah, ran off in the summer of 1972 with a polo-playing Argentine called Hector while Ronald was having an affair “with the 23-year-old daughter of a colonel”. Ronald’s class, once pressed into imperial service in the far abroad, and decimated with some honour in the First World War, did not have much to do in the second half of the 20th century. Ferguson’s pratfalls during and after her life as a Windsor are merely one more expression of the uselessness of a class that today no longer has a purpose beyond questing after sexual and financial gratifications.
“Baby Grumpling” – Andrew – was marked out from birth by a lack of intelligence. The Queen called her second son “a bit of a handful”, while Philip – in a famous quote that Lownie doesn’t use – once described him as a “natural boss”. Certainly, compared to the otherworldly Charles, Andrew was loud, stupid, devious, spoiled, rude and cruel. Toddler Andrew followed footmen around tugging their tailcoats, climbed up surfaces to take things placed deliberately out of his reach and pedalled furiously along palace corridors on his tricycle. He developed a passionate interest in watching cartoons and lining up his teddy bears well into adulthood. At Heatherdown, Andrew’s prep school, where there were three toilets at the sports day (“one for the ladies, one for the gentlemen and one for the chauffeurs”), other pupils included David Niven and David Cameron, along with the future King of Bhutan. Gordonstoun followed. In the Charles story, this Scottish boarding school has taken on a bleak significance as the site of the future King’s trials against bullies, muddy games fields and the domineering will of Prince Philip. But for Andrew it was simply another gilded waiting room. His contemporaries called him “Randy Andy” and “The Great I Am”. He was priggish and good at cricket. When Andrew visited Gordonstoun many years later, a teacher showed him to his old digs and said that the Prince mumbled only a few words: “The smell is the same. The smell… I’ll always remember the smell.”
Notwithstanding “the smell”, Andrew’s education was no different to that of his future wife. Running around and hitting things was good. Contemplation was bad. Extreme wealth and fame was impressive. They were channelled into inevitable careers. Andrew the Navy, Sarah public relations. In the early Eighties naval poster boy Andrew helped to create a rosy image of service and duty for the royals; Sarah was used as a posh ornament at an image-making firm, because, as one of her colleagues put it, “she gets on with all sorts of people”. With the exception of the Falklands War, Andrew’s record in the Royal Navy between 1979 and 2001 receives the same demolition treatment from Lownie that everything else in the Prince’s life does. Andrew appears to have cheated on a test to get ahead at one point, while his colleagues largely thought him solitary, strange and stupid.
The Queen was adamant that her spare son should serve in the Falklands. Piloting a Sea King helicopter, Andrew narrowly avoided being murdered by a radar-confusing substance fired out of a ship called “chaff”. When he returned to England with the victorious task force on 17 September 1983, the Prince was greeted at Portsmouth Harbour by “pleasure cruisers filled with bare-breasted women”. His mother and sister, not aboard those cruisers, greeted him in the state room of HMS Invincible. The Prince was lionised by the press that would later become, besides himself, the major antagonist of his life. Even Lownie, though, cannot really quibble with the Prince’s service in the Falklands. Andrew rescued sailors, saving their lives. He survived the war’s terror. Lownie instead notes that Prince William was born on 21 June 1982, while Andrew was returning from the South Atlantic. The birth began Andrew’s slide down the succession. Here began a long process of waning, which would see Andrew winnowed of almost everything that he believed gave him value as a human being. By the time he visited the Caribbean with the Navy a year after the Argentines were packed off, it was clear that Andrew had no idea what to do with the rest of his life.
So, he had an affair with a Page 3 model. Their shagging reached the press, leading an astrologer to tell People magazine: “If he [Andrew] wasn’t a member of the royal family, his ideal role would be running a beach bar in the sun, with the odd blue movie being shown at the back.” Given Andrew’s tastes, the psychic’s imagined beach bar would have needed a large staff of valets, pot-washers, accountants, PAs, sports massage therapists and bum-wipers, as well as a nine-hole golf course and a stables for the Prince to be satisfied with it. Nevertheless, there was something true in the assertion. Andrew was simple, and a simpler life in tolerant surroundings would have suited him better than one where his natural inclination towards laxity chafed against the constraints and attention imposed by his birth.
What would he do with the rest of his life? Andrew did what sidelined princelings usually do: he chased women. Lownie takes readers on what can only be described as a meat inspection of Andrew’s old flames, lovers, girlfriends, one-night stands, paramours, bedfellows, hook-ups, courtesans, friends with benefits, conquests, procured lays and victims. “He is supposed to have slept with over 1,000 women,” writes Lownie, almost mournfully. A source pins down the origin of the prince’s sex addiction to childhood trauma. Lownie does not interrogate this theory, but it sounds like rubbish. Andrew may have lost his virginity at 11 to a sex worker in a West End hotel, but that does not explain his subsequent behaviour. For Andrew, sex is about power and control – as a royal with little chance of being monarch, he is paradoxically short of both in his day-to-day life.
“I’m a diplomat, not a pimp,” said one of the civil servants asked to procure a blonde for the Prince during his time as trade envoy. Luckily enough, Andrew already had Jeffrey Epstein for that. After 100 or so pages where Lownie moves like a basking shark through newspaper archives, consuming what feels like every clipping about the Duke and Duchess in them, we reach Epstein. Lownie says that “financier” was introduced to Andrew by Ghislaine Maxwell, some time in the early 1990s. (In a recent interview with armed men from the US government, the now imprisoned Maxwell said that Ferguson introduced the Prince to Epstein.) The trio become close after Andrew’s divorce, when the Prince becomes an enthusiastic patron of London nightclubs and the massage services offered at various homes owned by Epstein. According to Lownie, they often passed into the orbit of Donald Trump: “Andrew and Trump were overheard at an event discussing Trump’s plans for a golfing complex in the north-east of Scotland, talking entirely about ‘pussy’, with the American producing a list of masseuses for the prince.” Andrew’s seeming escape from the trashy Ferguson into the international party circuit was widely celebrated by the press at the time. Andrew was chosen as number one on Tatler’s “Most Invited Party List” in July 2000.
Lownie quotes at length from an interview between the Prince and Tatler’s then editor Geordie Greig, granted for Andrew’s 40th birthday. Greig found Andrew: “Open, warm and has a surprising moral strength. He is different from the caricature we apply to him… a strong-minded and unconventional young man. Articulate and forceful… there’s certainly no trace of hauteur, remoteness or even noblesse oblige.” This is so wildly off of the mark that it would embarrass North Korean state media. Lownie only quotes Andrew at length once in Entitled, a snippy remark – that the Palace later forced him to retract – that he gave to some enterprising journalists from the Sun who were bothering him in October 1998: “The difficulty now is trying to convince you, the press, that what you are being told is the truth. You cannot believe you are being told the truth because for the last 20 years you probably haven’t been. It’s like the Russians.”
Jeffrey Epstein’s housekeeper recalled a trophy drawer of “newly wrapped women’s pantyhose, lingerie and sandals” that Andrew kept in a cabinet at one of the financier’s homes. When he saw women, he saw prey: Andrew was hunting, a monstrous parody of his forebears’ penchant for boffing tigers in the Raj. His safaris, accompanied by Epstein and Maxwell, would lead him to the 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre in 2001 and eventually bring about his ultimate downfall. Andrew is now referred to in the past tense on the royal’s website. Another form of burial.
The questions that swirl around Epstein – how did he amass a nine-figure fortune? Why did men with much to lose, like Andrew, continue to meet him even after his conviction for soliciting child prostitutes in Florida in 2008? – are not answered by Lownie. They may never be answered. The source of Epstein’s financial power, and his power over elite men, may end up as the 21st-century corollary to discovering who exactly Jack the Ripper was. A source of folk tales, conspiracy narratives and endlessly regurgitated facts, repurposed over and over again in thrillingly new and strange patterns. “You’re talking about a sociopath,” said Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former business partner once. “Every component of his existence was the destruction of other people.” Andrew, who Epstein compared to his very own “Super Bowl Trophy” was destroyed like so many others.
When the prince was six, his parents gave him a “a miniature Aston Martin, an exact scaled down version of the one in Goldfinger with the number plate JB007, complete with toy machine guns and smoke system built at a cost of £4,000”. Reading Entitled, I became convinced that at some level Andrew really believed that he was James Bond. At the very least, he identified with the secret services and was childishly infatuated with their world. This infantile preoccupation bobs up every now and then in Lownie’s book. Andrew tried to appear on the scene of the Iranian embassy siege in 1980, but was shooed away. Lownie reports that he “repeated offers of his services to MI5 head Eliza Manningham-Buller… she turned him down on the grounds he was too high-profile… he wouldn’t let it go and continued to write letters to her”. In the Noughties, Andrew’s mobile ringtone was the theme to the spy show 24.
Jack Bauer, James Bond: men of action who act without restraint in pursuit of a great good, men who believe the ends justify the means; cold, realistic and amoral. They also shag around a lot. Andrew’s problem was that he was a mummy’s boy, not a restless adventurer. Too stupid to be a spy, he acted out his fantasy in a rapidly changing world that no longer had much need of financially and sexually profligate royalty.
Lownie wonders darkly how much kompromat for Britain’s enemies Andrew generated thanks to his bad habits. I am told by a senior diplomat, familiar with Andrew’s time working as the UK’s special representative for international trade and investment, that from 2001 until he stepped down in July 2011, the Prince was never told enough about anything important to do real damage to Britain. They knew – and much of the diplomatic chatter recorded by Lownie about Andrew reflects this – that he was not to be trusted. The only damage Andrew did was to himself and those in his orbit. How much damage he has done to the Crown remains an open question.
[See also: How low can King Charles go?]
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This article appears in the 27 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Gentle Parent Trap