Epstein Haunts the House of Windsor

“O TEMPORA, O MORES!” exclaimed the Romans. “O Andrew!” exclaim we Brits.

The scandal currently surrounding Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known, continues to ramify and shock in ways that are increasingly difficult to control. He stands eighth in line to the British throne, but he is now under threat of investi­gation by Thames Valley Police for the crime of “misconduct in public office”, an offence which, if proven, could land him in gaol. King Charles has let it be known that he will, if asked, cooperate fully with any inquiry. Even more egregiously, Andrew faces the possibility of being grilled by the US Congress in pursuit of the truth about Jeffrey Epstein. This is a scandal without national or judicial boundaries.

In modern Britain, the only true defence of royal privileges has been the Windsors’ willingness to act as public servants. For that, they have been allowed a little leeway in the way they choose to relax, though even that has been an ever-diminishing circle. Blowing birds to bits is not as popular as it once was, and is not what average Brits aspire to do when away from their workplaces. But Andrew’s conduct has made the whole concept of a royal family seem absurd, with its well-guarded immunities from taxation, scrutiny and public accountability.

Andrew’s conduct has fallen so short of any standard of behaviour considered acceptable that his reputation is now damaged beyond recovery, and the only question is how many people will go down with him. He has revealed how the most talentless and arrogant among us can behave if they believe they are secure in private and can run to the end of their basest desires, either sexual or financial. There is a watershed moment looming here.

We are looking at the greatest royal scandal in a century, with doubts about the future viability of the monarchy, which now enjoys support from only around half the population, and talk of a struggle between King Charles, who wants to soft pedal on Andrew, and Prince William, who wants to take a hard line. But this is not a new dispute, it is merely a resurfacing of old issues.

The stink of association with Epstein was not the first of Andrew’s public offences. For years he was known as a loose cannon, overconfident and ungov­ernable, and when he was given a roving role as a ‘special trade envoy’ for British industry, in an attempt to occupy him in an area where he was likely to do the least harm, the suspicion of dodgy dealing that surrounded his activities became so strong that he had to stand down in 2011. So, we are not just dealing with a man who had an eye for young girls, he couldn’t see a pot of money without trying to find ways to share it.

But the trouble got really serious after 2014 when he was named in court by a young woman named Virginia Giuffre as part of an action for sexual abuse against Jeffrey Epstein. A photograph emerged of Andrew with his arm around Giuffre’s waist, supposedly taken upstairs in 2001 at the London home of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s right-hand woman. Giuffre claimed that the photograph was taken on one of three occasions when she had been pressured by Epstein into having sex with Andrew.

Andrew denied he’d ever met her and claimed that the photograph was faked. But his undeniable contact with Epstein, even after the latter’s conviction for child sex offences in 2008, left a question mark over his potential culpability.

Eventually, in 2019, Andrew decided to bare his soul before the nation, and agreed to an interview with the BBC to clear the air. This is widely considered the worst decision by a British royal since Richard of York gave battle in vain, at Bosworth Field in 1485.

Andrew then proceeded to shred his own reputation in front of the cameras, with a total lack of empathy for Epstein’s victims accompanied by some feeble attempts at establishing alibis and supposed details that discredited Giuffre. Sadly for him, nobody believed a word he said, and he was forced to stand down from all public duties shortly afterwards.

Even more sadly, any doubts about Andrew’s credibility finally vanished in 2022, after he paid Giuffre a settlement in the region of £12 million. No one is quite sure where the money came from, and if it came from his mother, the late queen, as seems likely, the question remains what she thought the money was for.

 It got worse. The release of Epstein material in the US produced a tranche of emails and photos that are beyond embarrassing. Among the hammer blows was an e-mail from Ghislaine Maxwell confirming that the photograph with Giuf­fre was real, along with a mass of evidence that Andrew had not broken off contact with Epstein after 2010, as he had claimed, and the release of a disturbing series of photographs with An­drew on all fours, hovering over a woman stretched out on the floor, probably in Epstein’s New York flat.

The king was eventually forced to strip Andrew of all his titles and honours. He is technically still Duke of York, a title that can only be removed by act of Parliament, but he has agreed to forswear its use, and the styles of His Royal Highness and Prince have been officially removed. He no longer holds any honorary military rank or the patronage of charities that once numbered over two hundred.

His disgrace is now complete, topped off with what amounts to a life in internal exile, in Britain’s own version of Siberia – Norfolk, after the king finally threw him out of a large mansion in Windsor called Royal Lodge, and granted him use of a small house on the Sandringham estate, which is a private royal possession and not a public property.

As a man who allegedly keeps 72 teddy bears on his bed, this is actually rather worse for Andrew than it might seem. He had a large number of domestic servants in Windsor, and when they were offered a move to Norfolk, they all declined. Arranging the teddy bears every day had, apparently, ground them down. In an attempt to re-establish some kind of personal staff for him, royal servants at Sandringham were reportedly offered places in his household. Thus far, we are told, none have accepted. This has left Andrew in the extraordinary position, for a man born at the height of our social pyramid, that in his new life he may actually have to answer his own front door.

The other great loser from the recent revelations is Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, whom he divorced in 1996. Since then, they have been sharing the house in Windsor; the former duchess says they are divorced ‘to each other’, not ‘from each other’. She has always been a rather more attractive character than Andrew, who tends to look surly on public occasions, whereas she has a kind of flighty silliness about her, which has led most people to forgive most of her indiscretions, which are largely financial. Now her emails to Epstein, which show her as needy and greedy, have de­stroyed her reputation as thoroughly as her ex-husband’s.

But the extraordinary develop­ments do not end with the damage done to these two popinjays. The Epstein revelations have also discred­ited Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior Labour party grandee, co-architect of Tony Blair’s New Labour project, and former UK ambassador to Washing­ton, where he was sent in early 2025 to sweeten relations with the new Trump administration. Mandelson has now been shown to have supplied government secrets to Epstein when he was Trade Minister in the 2000s, and to have persistently misrepresent­ed, to the level of outright falsity, the nature of his relations with Epstein.

But the buck hasn’t stopped there, and has landed firmly in the lap of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who sent Mandelson to Washington specifically because his mastery of the political dark arts supposedly made him a good match for the demands of schmoozing Donald Trump, only to sack him when his close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was revealed. The UK commentariat is now ablaze with speculation about Starmer’s future, with many prepared to claim that he is either last night’s chopped liver, or in ‘freefall’.

Appointing Mandelson may not have been Starmer’s most egregious political mistake, but it is highly embarrassing, and comes after the loss of his Deputy Prime Minister to a tax scandal, a string of high profile policy reversals, and persistently low poll ratings, which make him the most unpopular premier since records began. Many of his own MPs want him gone, and although he may have survived the immediate danger, he is not in the clear. At the same time there is a palpable distancing between Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street which for once are not in lockstep. Andrew, King Charles and Starmer are suffering different kinds of damage, and have different potential routes of escape.

To sum this up in all its horror, the various activities of the late Jeffrey Epstein have placed both our royal family and our current government in real jeopardy, mostly for the sin of poor judgement, but also for personal failings that ill befit anyone with a leader­ship role in our society. This is bone jarringly shocking, and even more so because on the other side of the Atlantic, none of the male powerbrokers who clustered around Epstein for access to girls and money have, as yet, been called to account for their activities. So far, Ghislaine Maxwell, a woman, has served prison time, and Andrew and Fergie have suf­fered career terminations. Brits all.

American ‘royalty’, it seems, is immune, while ours is not.

Power most certainly corrupts, as the ac­tivities of Epstein himself, Mandelson, Max­well and the ex-Yorks amply testify. But power also protects, for as long as you can hold onto it, and a great many prominent figures, it seems, still have enough of it to avoid retribution.

So, should we feel sorry for Andrew? Was his great sin that he got caught, or that he wasn’t bright enough to appreciate the risks he was running? After all, he’s only the last in a long string of royal personages who would never have risen above middle management in any of the organisations they patronised. No. His greatest failing has always been not a lack of talent but his persistent, unshakable sense of entitlement.

British author Andrew Lownie meticulously chronicled this unattractive quality in a blockbuster biography called Entitled:

The Rise and Fall of The House of York, published in 2025. Ominously,

Lownie has accumulated so much unused material that the paperback edition, due to be out shortly, is set to be much longer.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is as finished as finished can be.

His fate gives new meaning to the phrase ‘royal descent’. But there

are further questions, which are very alarming for the royal family.

As a senior royal, Andrew had royal protection officers by his side 24 hours a day, and though they would not have followed him behind every closed door, they would have known where he was and whom he was with at all times. They would have known that Andrew was at Maxwell’s house that evening, and who else was in the building. Lownie has said in interview that MI6 took evidence of Andrew’s alleged corruption to the late queen, but she would not act upon it. This is potentially highly damaging, as it now seems possible that he may prove to be as guilty of leaking national secrets as Mandelson.

By implication, the security services and senior royal officials knew about everything Andrew was up to for years. The ques­tion, therefore, is whether they protected the late queen from full knowledge of what was going on, or whether she chose to protect the man who was, by all accounts, her favourite son.

Who, if anyone, will publicly dare to ask, let alone answer, that question?