If Prince Andrew were ever to be evicted, I have a suggestion
Another day, another chance to wonder at the miracle that is Prince Andrew. The man who hasn’t put a foot right since the Falklands conflict is at it again, creating terrible headlines with all the ease and grace born of long practice.
This time he’s complaining bitterly via “friends” that he might soon be homeless. The King is minded to stop the £249,000 a year that the late Queen paid Andrew out of her private fortune.
As a result Andrew won’t be able to afford to run his 30-room Georgian mansion, set in 98 acres of Windsor Great Park, with private swimming pool, chapel and driving range.
“It feels as though his brother wishes to evict him,” an aggrieved source told The Sun on Sunday. “This is about Charles telling Andrew he can use his own money to pay for things.” Perish the thought. A not-very-thinly veiled threat duly appeared in a rival paper. Andrew is closely watching the progress of Harry and Meghan in America, The Mail on Sunday reports, and “is looking to pursue commercial opportunities” of his own.
What commercial opportunities he thinks there might be, and what he imagines people might pay him to say or do, is unclear. The question is, what money does Andrew have, where does it come from and where has it gone? And why, at 63, does he think that his own money is to pay for nice things, like chalets in Verbier, but boring things must be paid for by someone else?
Take security. Charles has allegedly been paying £3m a year for his brother’s private security since 2020, after he “stepped down” from royal duties.
A review by Ravec, the committee that decides who qualifies for 24/7 taxpayer-funded police protection, concluded that Andrew did not, any more than his daughters, or indeed his nephew Harry, a private citizen who remains perplexed as to why serving British police officers were not forcibly required to relocate to California on his behalf.
Andrew left his last salaried job, in the Royal Navy, in 2001. Since then he has been the happy recipient of £249,000 a year tax-free from the Queen, plus his navy pension of about £20,000 a year. Over 22 years that comes to about £6m. To be fair, that will not allow him to live like an oligarch. On the other hand, British Gas are not breaking into Royal Lodge to install a prepayment meter.
Then there’s the former marital home, Sunninghill Park in Berkshire, a wedding present from the Queen that she might fondly have imagined would be his forever home. Alas, he sold it in 2007 for £15m to a Kazakh billionaire, who obligingly paid £3m over the asking price for the privilege of owning a home he would later demolish. Andrew described the deal as a “straightforward commercial transaction”.
Then there’s the chalet in Verbier. Nobody knows how he and Fergie stumped up £13m for a seven-bedroom chalet, or what he has done with the proceeds since he sold it for £19m in December. It doesn’t seem to have gone towards the £12m he paid Virginia Giuffre, because the Queen allegedly footed the bill for that, which does at least make sense (see above, “making other people pay for the boring stuff").
He must also have inherited money from his parents, whose wills are not made public, but who surely left the bulk of their private fortunes to Andrew, Edward and Anne. Charles is king, he can fend for himself.
Back at Royal Lodge, Andrew signed a 75-year lease on the house in 2003, for a one-off payment of £1m. Fergie moved in in 2008 for reasons that have never been clear but were possibly connected to her own legendary unwillingness to live within her means.
Andrew is responsible for upkeep and renovation – of the house, not Fergie – and that is now the sticking point. “Friends” say he can’t afford it and will thus “effectively be evicted” by September, showing a typically shrewd grasp of eviction processes. Charles can’t just send over a load of cardboard boxes and hope that his brother starts packing, although it may be worth a try.
Meanwhile Fergie, who once described herself as “continually on the verge of financial bankruptcy”, has embarked on a career as a romantic novelist. Her first, in 2021, was called a boring slog by one reviewer, and ranks at 94,101 in the Amazon bestseller list.
Her latest is out next month, currently available half-price and ranking at 44,499. Nevertheless, she recently paid £4.3m in cash for a mews house in Belgravia, which she can only sell with the written consent of her daughters.
According to The Mail on Sunday “she has bought it very much as a nest egg for the girls”, which is nice and no doubt much needed. There is occasional talk of one of them having a “job” in an art gallery, and the other doing something even more nebulous.
Nevertheless, Eugenie divides her time between Frogmore Cottage and Portugal, while Beatrice recently swapped a four-bedroom apartment at St James’s Palace for a £3.5m house in the Cotswolds.
As for future sources of income, Andrew has reportedly been sniffing around Bahrain looking for something to do or, failing that, playing golf. A passing Swiss billionaire lent him his private jet to get there, and once through Arrivals he was put up for free with his old mates the Bahraini royals.
The mind boggles at rumours that he “fancied his chances” of mediating between the West and the Gulf states over the energy crisis, but then Andrew has always fancied his chances.
The bottom line is that Prince Andrew Albert Christian Edward, Randy Andy, honorary vice-admiral of the Royal Navy and habitue of Tramp nightclub and Pizza Express, might need to downsize and start living within his means and I have some suggestions.
Georgian buildings like Royal Lodge are a pig to maintain, a money pit of damp basements and draughty sash windows. The £4.3m mews house has apparently been deemed unsuitable because there’s no room for their dogs and horses, but mews were built to house horses on the ground floor with grooms above.
A decent builder could put it all back as it was in 1846 in no time. Failing that, I suggest a nice compact new-build. There’s a new Barratt development not that far from Windsor, in Aylesbury, with three-bedroom homes for a very reasonable £400,000.
There are shops and community facilities on site, although no mention of stables or a driving range. Hopefully that won’t be a dealbreaker. I imagine the King would be happy to arrange a viewing.
The Times
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