Stay Classy

In the days​ of disco and Aramis 900, when the relationship between entitlement and sleaze could still seem novel, Prince Andrew came across like the more relatable sort of wanker, high on royal privilege but in touch with the inner life of the standard British male. ‘If he wasn’t a member of the royal family,’ the astrologer Russell Grant said, ‘his ideal role would be running a beach bar in the sun – with the odd blue movie being shown at the back.’ Among the prince’s early girlfriends were Koo ‘Starkers’ Stark and Vicki Hodge, an actress whose better-known works include The Stud and Confessions of a Sex Maniac. Hodge had a colourful line in ex-boyfriends, including John Bindon, an actor-gangster who had holidayed with Princess Margaret and was tried for murder. The days of wine and roses for the pre-hyphenated Windsors left a few stains on the carpet, but the royals still acted as if they were beyond reproach.

Mummy loved Andrew, and what Mummy loved, Mummy protected. By 1984, it seemed he’d got the basic point about dropping the floozies and finding the sort of woman who would ‘understand him’. Enter ‘Chatterbox One’, the codename given to Sarah Ferguson by air traffic controllers when she was learning to fly, a woman in happy possession of two O-levels who exuded jolliness and scads of suitability. (Her father was Prince Charles’s polo manager and it was Diana who set her up with the fourth-in-line.) After a few country weekends and acres of japes, Ferguson was installed as the Duchess of York.

Along with that ‘love of fun’ admired by the tabloids, Fergie brought a few money problems and a talent for reaching beyond her grasp, though not beyond Andrew’s grasping. As a couple, they have always been too stupid to understand the vulnerability of the institution that supports them, and they began wrecking it from the inside as soon as they met. Years ago, before it was fashionable, some of the youngsters in the family were calling Andrew ‘the Nonce’, and there was general dismay at the Yorks’ reckless avarice. The British royal fantasy has a few sustaining mythologies, and one of them is dignity, a quality defined, after Andy and Fergie, more by its absence. The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the Yorks, however, enjoyment was everything, and the notion of royal sacrifice, arguably a red herring in the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was finally obliterated by their actions. The writing was on the wall, or on the T-shirt, when Sarah Ferguson appeared in the mid-1980s wearing one that said ‘Piste Again’. The duchess loved skiing and being on holiday and Andrew was addicted to having everything for free. What to do? Eventually, Andrew Lownie records, they were lent King Hussein of Jordan’s seven-bedroomed Castlewood House on the edge of Windsor Great Park. ‘Bored, Sarah started 1987 with three weeks at Sandringham, followed by a fortnight skiing in Klosters, and a ten-day break with Andrew in Barbados paid for by the multi-millionaire Robert Sangster.’ At this point, Sangster had been a tax exile for twelve years. Stay classy.

The Yorks charged Hello! magazine a quarter of a million quid for pics of their ‘homelife’. They took £126,000 from the Daily Express for an interview. She charged £50,000 for her vague involvement in a film, Young Victoria, and signed on to start the second leg of the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race in Montevideo, demanding £38,000 worth of first-class air tickets to get there. While other poor buggers in the family were opening jumble sales in Inverness, Andy and Fergie were sniffing out freebies in the dodgiest corners of the world, as confirmed in Lownie’s remarkable catalogue of half-hidden truths. For Andrew, who served in the British armed forces and was underwritten by British taxpayers, the racking up of personal opportunities and financial favours was treacherous. Among his ‘contacts’ were some of Britain’s enemies and multiple opponents of common decency. It didn’t take long for the braying duo to start cheating on each other, too. Only a few years into their marriage, the duchess became involved with a man called Steve Wyatt, who had ‘extensive commercial interests in the Middle East’. ‘His stepfather was a heavy purchaser of Iraqi crude oil,’ Lownie writes, and was ‘at the time negotiating for Iraqi investment in his own US-based refineries. To help Wyatt and to the consternation of the queen’s private secretary, Robert Fellowes, Sarah hosted a dinner at Buckingham Palace in August 1990, the month Iraq invaded Kuwait, for Dr Ramzi Salman, head of the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation and one of Saddam Hussein’s closest confidants.’

Wholesale corruption takes time, but meanwhile Fergie was trying to make money out of Budgie the Little Helicopter, a story she cribbed (she says not) from an earlier aviation-inspired sentimentalist. She was also flogging boxes of royal teabags, Wedgwood plates and ‘quality’ pillowcases. (Her brand of luxury goods was called Duchess Originals in America, a play on Prince Charles’s charity biscuits outfit, Duchy Originals. Imagine how annoying he found that! Plus: cool it with the tea parties. Hadn’t she heard of the American Revolution?) While Andrew was off shaking hands with murderers, Sarah sweated the small stuff, spending time in Qatar in a suite costing £2650 a night, paid for by the emir. In the morning she was talking to Hello! and in the afternoon she was claiming £50,000 for giving a boost to Rupert Murdoch’s Foxtel cable network, or advertising soft drinks on American TV for $500,000 (she was the first royal to be paid to endorse a product), or accepting £100,000 from an Austrian building magnate to cut the ribbon in a shopping precinct. Fergie always spoke as if she was the tireless workhorse while Randy Andy was off doing his war hero/playboy thing, lighting up the world with big deals and pathetic gropes. ‘You have to understand what I am dealing with here,’ she told a friend. ‘I’m married to a man who has never been inside a supermarket.’ Well, she more than made up for it. Such pressure on a single mother was not to be sniffed at – and she had a plane to Verbier to catch.

There must be something about private jets and presidential suites that renders you incapable of living any other way. The Yorks wanted never to have to touch down in reality, a condition that only billionaires can plausibly sustain, but Andrew’s skewed understanding of his birthright very quickly made him think it appropriate that he should have oodles of everything in a world without bills. Trouble was, the Yorks couldn’t stop saying yes to the odd thousand quid here and there, because, like many addicts, they loved the hit of the low-rent encounter, the scaggy thrill of amping it up. In time, the Yorks’ privilege would be passed down to their children, sociopathic holidaymakers both of them, behaving as if freebies are the only thing that can make you believe you are loved. The family appetite graduated from chalet life and pukka friends to entire kingdoms – the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and China – where opportunities to leverage their royal status were comically abundant. It was all plastic. All sheen. And it took ages for the dodgiest elites in the world to work out that the Yorks were Britain’s most corrupt family and that being close to the queen was their only line of credit.

Thanks to multiple investigations, several court cases and Lownie’s excellent book, their downfall has emerged as an emblematic story of our age. In September 2001, Andrew was given a role as UK special representative for international trade and investment. ‘The appointment came with the support of the queen,’ Lownie writes, ‘and the endorsement of the former trade secretary Peter Mandelson.’ Andrew was a walking category error, perceiving no difference between business and pleasure, between what was good for the country and what was excellent for him, conducting a campaign of international larceny masquerading as public service. Charles thought the job as envoy was a disaster waiting to happen: Andrew was almost certain to disgrace himself in a dramatic way.

Everywhere he went, Andrew was described as rude, arrogant, petulant, shallow, uninformed, unethical, contrary, childish and spoiled. Prince William called him a ‘tosser’, and it’s said, though he denies it, that Prince Harry had a go at punching him out. The Yorks seemed convinced that everybody was just fussing. This attitude could be mistaken for nonchalance, but it’s more like American hustle, devolving to English jollity when the weather turns bad. ‘They were careless people,’ Fitzgerald writes of Daisy and Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, ‘they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’

The Yorks didn’t stay married, divorcing in 1996, but five years or so later she moved back in with him, to the thirty-room Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, where the pair lived for years on a cheap lease. With his envoy status as cover and the Exchequer paying for private jets, he spent more than a decade making forays into the world to net even more cash and suck up more privilege and hurt more people, while she got on with pimping him out to corrupt businessmen. (She was caught on camera doing this in 2010, in a sting operation run by the News of the World.) When you cover capital crime cases, you notice the ways in which stupidity and evil become indistinguishable. With some criminals, it’s when a low-key, almost flippant toleration of wickedness becomes part of their equipage, as if it makes them feel better about who they really are. Thus, when the Yorks’ daughter Beatrice, who was sixteen, brought a boyfriend, a 23-year-old called Paolo Liuzzo, to their borrowed villa in the South of France, nobody seemed bothered that he had been charged with the manslaughter of a freshman when he was at college. (Shrugs all round.) ‘Liuzzo lent Andrew $10,000,’ Lownie tells us, ‘to pay for removal men to move one of the duke’s girlfriends, Angie Everhart, out of the New York apartment she shared with her then fiancé. Afterwards, Liuzzo said, he “was asked to kneel in the drawing room of their Windsor mansion for a mock knighting ceremony”. Impersonating the queen, the Duchess of York handed him a new nickname: “Sir Fixit”.’ A month after the France trip, she asked him to join them on another holiday in Jamaica. Although the kid sold his story to a paper, the Yorks continued to have him around until the couple broke up. Liuzzo died in 2024, aged 42, from a drug overdose in a Miami hotel. But he left behind a vital image of the family dynamic. ‘Daddy loves Mummy more than Mummy loves Daddy,’ Beatrice told him. ‘But Mummy lives for her title and she loses her title if Daddy remarries.’

Angie Everhart, by the way, Andrew’s ‘girlfriend’, was another actress known for sex films and for posing nude in Playboy (she said she was charmed to meet a man who had never put away his own groceries). By this time, his financial and sexual manias were coming together and he was increasingly surrounding himself with the sort of men who shared both interests – and I don’t just mean Jeffrey Epstein. When Andrew was in Bangkok on official business in 2006, staff at the Grand Hyatt Erawan were amazed by the number of women he brought up to his room. Some of the staff spoke to a man from Reuters. It turned out that a mate of Andrew’s, the son of Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa of Bahrain, was staying at the Hotel Oriental. Once they learned of this happy coincidence, Lownie’s source tells him, ‘the two princes began sending their favourite girls to each other, as a friendly gesture.’

Andrew found that he liked the company of men who floated above the clouds and above the law. He seems to have volumised his bad behaviour to match theirs, while hoping, in the fetid conditions of the modern Elizabethan court, that if Mummy didn’t think badly of him it didn’t matter. Every time he disgraced himself the queen gave him another honour. He had just been appointed commodore-in-chief of the Fleet Air Arm when, just before the business of passing girls back and forth in Bangkok appeared in the papers, she made him a knight of the Garter, Britain’s oldest, most coveted order of chivalry. In 2008, he took a four-day holiday in Tunisia paid for by the gun smuggler Tarek Kaituni, during which the two men went on what was Andrew’s third visit to Colonel Gaddafi in the span of a few months. Kaituni later gave Beatrice an £18,000 necklace when he attended her 21st birthday party in Marbella. The Daily Telegraph reported in 2023 that Sarah’s sixtieth birthday party in 2019 was partly funded by the fraudster Selman Turk, who paid Andrew £750,000 to procure a British passport for a Turkish politician. According to further reports, Andrew claims to have paid the money back.

Who knows what his mother was thinking. A lifetime of conformity, perhaps, had made her susceptible to charming ingrates. In any event, like a Depression-era mother in a James Cagney film, Elizabeth couldn’t see the bad in her boy. The worse he got, the more she wanted to camouflage him with medals, rosettes and ribbons. The irony is that he treated her as badly as he treated every other woman, flogging Sunninghill, the house she gave him as a wedding present, to the son-in-law of the president of Kazakhstan for £3 million over the asking price, despite there being no other bidders, an action that only mired the royal family in more shit when one of the president’s other sons-in-law described the money, according to Lownie, as ‘a sweetener’. To this day, the vendor remains unabashed and unprosecuted, despite having negotiated and accepted what was effectively a personal retainer while serving as a British government envoy. What he gave Kazakhstan in return for this largesse may yet emerge, but let us not forget that the president in question, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was a dictator whose regime tortured opponents and whose security forces opened fire on striking oil workers on 16 December 2011, killing fifteen people and injuring a hundred. Ignoring all that, Andrew tried to introduce these people to his bankers at Coutts. In November 2014, Lownie reports, ‘Andrew was in Saudi Arabia – cost to the taxpayer £43,000 – where the liberal blogger Raif Badawi had had his sentence increased from six hundred to a thousand lashes.’ Accompanied by Beatrice, Andrew ‘stayed on for private time’, attending the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. It was all very nice apparently and he met up with people he hadn’t seen since his dinner with the bin Ladens. Meanwhile, back on the white-stuccoed ranch in Berkshire, the Duchess of York, with nary a care for the world and its issues, was selling hair straighteners in ‘royal purple’ on QVC.

With the Yorks​ , a whole new set of rules appear in the royal playbook. Chief among them is that one should seek, when explaining a personal fault, to pay oneself such a large compliment that it effectively kills the perception of the fault as being a fault at all. This was initially crucial for the duchess as part of her rehabilitation journey, or what she calls in one of her many books her attempt ‘to rebuild the brand Sarah’. The duchess blamed her ‘over-generous nature’ for her money troubles (in 2010 she had told the ‘fake sheikh’ she could ‘open any door’ to royalty for 500k with a downpayment of 40k). Her ‘fault’ (if it was one) was to give too much to the people in her life and land herself in hot water (silly old me). Andrew tried to pull off the same trick during his Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019, seeking to explain the reason he’d felt the need to fly to New York and stay with Epstein for three days just to tell him they could no longer be friends. ‘I admit fully that my judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable,’ he said, to the disbelief of the entire world.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre couldn’t make it past all the lies and the abuses. That was her reality, that was her fate – to be the daughter of the guy who maintained the air-conditioning units at Mar-a-Lago, where she met Ghislaine Maxwell. At sixteen years old, needing the money and needing the break, she was soon being trafficked for sex with rich and powerful friends of Epstein and Maxwell, another couple who did what they wanted before retreating into their money or their vast carelessness. There are sadnesses in Giuffre’s book that are too deep to rehearse, but all she really wanted was to be among people who had the kinds of freedom she wanted for herself. ‘In contrast to his appearance today,’ she writes in her posthumously published memoir, ‘Prince Andrew then was still relatively fit, with short-cropped brown hair and youthful eyes.’

He’d long been known as the playboy of the royal family, and as a divorcé ... he was holding tight to that role. That night he wore slacks and a light-blue dress shirt, open at the collar, with French cuffs, and elegant cufflinks. When I noticed that Epstein called the prince ‘Andy’, I began to call him that too.

As we chatted in Maxwell’s entryway, I suddenly thought of something: my mom would never forgive me if I met someone as famous as Prince Andrew and didn’t pose for a picture. Excusing myself, I ran to get a Kodak FunSaver from my room, then returned and handed it to Epstein. I remember the prince putting his arm around my waist as Maxwell grinned beside me. Epstein snapped the photo.

In her memoir she writes that Andrew raped her three times in three different locations. He denies attacking her, but he paid her a reported £12 million to go away. Throughout the process, Giuffre was hounded by the press and eviscerated by those who live with the terrifying delusion that royalty has something to do with virtue. ‘A complete whore’ is the way the victim was described by Lady Victoria Hervey, a socialite who once dated Andrew and later appeared on Love Island.

‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Giuffre writes, ‘but I felt I had to.’ All the pomp, tradition, ceremony and ‘loyalty’ in the world can’t wash away the simple facts. Maxwell took this young girl to Epstein, who abused her a number of times, then they flew her around the world to be abused by their powerful friends, who lived in a universe of deniability. People who know the former prince say that his main concern, after the Newsnight fiasco, was to ensure that his daughters would not be deposed and have to give evidence in support of his lies. (The Pizza Express in Woking will be for ever tattooed on their silent hearts.) A second reason for his ‘falling on his sword’, as they like spuriously to say, was that he wanted to make sure Giuffre didn’t spoil his mother’s platinum jubilee. After the best efforts of lawyers Harbottle & Lewis had failed, and as the plug was being pulled on her favourite son’s charities and his military affiliations and royal patronages, the queen still hoped that he might keep one or two titles, just to cheer him up. Time and Scotland Yard will tell if he can stay out of jail.

With some people, money and sex are the only truths. It’s the ultimate delinquency to believe that gratification itself is power. Bringing down the royal family may be the least terrible consequence of everything Andrew has done. When a lazy aristocrat from a dying dynasty uses a helicopter to travel seventeen miles, the edifice shakes. But when that same man rapes a 17-year-old and calls her a liar, it is the end of days. The gift of Andy and Fergie, which comes at too high a price, has been to bring the antiseptic of daylight to the culture of royal privilege.

These are rough times for the regal character and there may be no way to fix it. ‘The love of virtue, the pursuit of truth, grow stale and dull in the dissipation of a court,’ Hazlitt writes in his essay ‘On the Spirit of Monarchy’. ‘Virtue is thought crabbed and morose, knowledge pedantic, while every sense is pampered, and every folly tolerated ... Is it to be wondered at that courts and palaces have produced so many monsters of avarice, cruelty and lust?’

When I contacted Victoria Hervey to confirm that she had called Virginia Giuffre a ‘whore’, she doubled down on the comment. ‘It’s what anyone with a brain knows,’ she told me by email. ‘I think I did call her a druggie hooker. Not sure the exact wording.’ She then recommended a couple of online commentators I might read, including Jay Beecher, a former Ukip activist who was alleged last year by the Observer to have been paid £80,000 by someone working for Ghislaine Maxwell’s family to ‘investigate’ Giuffre. Lady Victoria, sister of the 8th Marquess of Bristol, is said by Vanity Fair to be a supporter of Reform UK. She admires Donald Trump and collects MAGA hats, telling the magazine that it’s time, this spring, to get one that says ‘Make England Great Again’.