Image: Andrew Mountbatten Windsor/Getty
On 19 February 1960, the day that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor was born, the Daily Mirror splashed “OH BOY!”, gun salutes were fired up and down the land and the Black Arrows of the RAF staged a flypast of 36 Hunter jets.
That was then. And now he’s “that nonce” – this is not official, but the former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner used exactly that phrase about him. On Thursday the US Congress wrote to him requesting that he cooperate with their Jeffrey Epstein investigation by sitting for “a transcribed interview”.
Long after Epstein did away with himself in his bleak Manhattan prison cell, mention in his files remains the touch of death for a whole swathe of the high and mighty. “Victim” is not the right word for the second son of the late Queen of England, but Epstein’s latest trophy is Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, who has lost his titles, his home and the last shreds of his good name thanks to the dead American paedophile.
How come? Five years ago, I made the Hunting Ghislaine podcast for LBC, turned into a book of the same name, which set out the damning evidence that the then Prince Andrew had absolutely no reason to go for a walk in Central Park with the convicted paedo or stay at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in December 2010, and that there was something funny-peculiar about the walk - it looked staged - and his lame explanation to Emily Maitlis on Newsnight: “It was definitely the wrong thing to do but at the time I felt it was the honourable and right thing to do … I admit fully that my judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable, but that’s just the way it is.”
Poppycock.
Andrew could have paid for a hotel in New York, as, I’m told, common people do. Or, perhaps, he could have bunked up on the sofa at the British consul general’s home in Manhattan, which is funded by the British taxpayer for the exact purpose of putting up visiting government ministers and members of the royal family when they come for a bite of the Big Apple. The issue remains: why was it necessary to end the friendship in person? You can split by phone or email. Andrew and Epstein were not lovers. Royal biographer Andrew Morton told me: “Like all the royals, if Prince Andrew falls out with somebody, he just doesn’t get in touch with them. As simple as that. You’re out.”
Melania Trump, Prince Andrew, Gwendolyn Beck and Jeffrey Epstein at a party at the Mar-a-Lago club, Florida, 12 February, 2000. Photo: Davidoff Studios/Getty
In my book, I wrote: “Prince Andrew is, then, either a fool or a knave.”
It turns out he was both.
Worse, my working hypothesis is that he told the Palace, and that includes his older brother, that December 2010 was the last contact he had had with Epstein. He got into hot water in February 2011 when the photo surfaced of his hand around the bare midriff of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, then 17, in the London mews home of Epstein’s pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell. No contact after December 2010 is what he implied to Maitlis when she interviewed him for Newsnight.
This October, the Mail on Sunday and the Sun broke new ground, revealing that Andrew had sent an email to Epstein on 28 February 2011, more than two months after the “walk in the park”, stating: “I’m just as concerned for you! Don’t worry about me! It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it. Otherwise, keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”
Overuse of exclamation marks signifies a moron, some say.
He signed off the message with: “A, HRH The Duke of York, KG.”
KG does not stand for “Kiddy Grabber” but Knight of the Garter. Andrew has always denied having sex with Giuffre but it has been widely reported that he paid her £12m to settle a civil case.
I suspect that the line “we are in this together” is the thing that did for Andrew’s titles and his home. That gave the king and his son Prince William the proof that Andrew should be sent to sleep with the fishes/given a free home on the Sandringham estate, plus a payoff. The Palace knows or suspects that there is more and worse to come, that it is more likely than not that an incoming Democrat administration will publish the Epstein files, and that it is better to get shot of Andrew now than let the poison keep on dripping. When it comes to preserving their own interests, the British royal family can be ruthless. After he abdicated, Tsar Nicholas II wanted to flee to Britain but King George V nixed it, for fear of importing an anti-monarchist revolution.
Who leaked the email from the Epstein files? The prime suspects have to be Team Ghislaine, working to free her from a living death inside the United States’s horrible prison system. We shall see.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, on 15 March, 2005 in New York. Photo: Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan/Getty
But, one more time, why exactly did Andrew go for the walk in the park? A few days after the Mail on Sunday broke the story in 2011 alleging Prince Andrew had sex with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, complete with the photo of his arm around her, there was a hue and cry against the prince. People started to call for him to resign as Britain’s trade envoy. Sarah Ferguson, his ex-wife, who for decades shared a house with him, gave an exclusive interview to Geordie Greig, then editor at the Evening Standard, and an old friend of Ghislaine Maxwell. Ferguson said: “I abhor paedophilia and any sexual abuse of children and know that this was a gigantic error of judgment on my behalf. I am just so contrite I cannot say. Whenever I can, I will repay the money and will have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again.”
What money? Ferguson admitted accepting £15,000 from Epstein to help her pay down her debts. We don’t know whether it was just £15,000. Or a bigger sum. Within four years they could afford to buy a chalet in one of the most expensive ski resorts in the world.
Maitlis’s interview with Andrew was extraordinarily good. But one question was missing: “Prince Andrew, were you paid for the walk in the park? What’s the going rate for a duke?”
Sorry, I’m being vulgar.
I put a series of questions to Andrew, one of which asked him to put all moneys flowing between Epstein, Ferguson and himself into the public domain. That didn’t happen. But a public relations firm working for Andrew’s lawyers did issue this statement: “It would be entirely wrong to characterise the duke and duchess as having shared financial responsibilities following their divorce in 1996. They share a household at Royal Lodge which they have done in order to co-parent the princesses during their childhood and into young adulthood.”
Boiled down, the statement said that Andrew and Ferguson weren’t a financial unit after they got divorced. But the fact they lived together from 2008 until now suggests to me that they had interests in common when Epstein paid down £15,000 of Ferguson’s debts in 2011, had so when they jointly bought a £18m ski chalet in 2014, and do so now. So, if Andrew Mountbatten Windsor does appear in front of MPs or US Congress the big question he should answer is: when he went for the walk in the park, was he using his royal title to whitewash a paedo for cash?
John Sweeney is a journalist who has won prizes for his work both in print and broadcasting including the Paul Foot Award in 2005. His most recent work includes the book Murder in the Gulag (2024) and the podcast and book Hunting Ghislaine.