The former Prince Andrew is having “a very nice time” in England, where he is hanging out with “chums,” and generally enjoying the delights of an Edwardian gentleman’s social life.
And it’s all funded by a generous £1 million-plus annual allowance from King Charles’s own pocket, although his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson has fallen out of favor and has been banned from visiting him, according to a new rash of reports in British newspapers.
The portrait of Andrew’s idyllic life in the county of Norfolk comes from The Times of London. For months, the paper notes, the speculation was that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was idling away his days in misery after being ordered out of the palatial Royal Lodge and into the far more modest Marsh Farm on the Sandringham estate.
But now, those familiar with his lifestyle say it is much jollier than that. “He’s having a very nice time, thank you very much,” one well-placed source tells her. He goes out. He goes shooting with friends. The “old guard,” as the paper has it, has rallied around him and is very loyal.
He is, we learn, no longer sitting around feeling sorry for himself.
There are no travel restrictions on him while he remains under police investigation, The Times reports, but those who know him say he has not been abroad, nor taken up the hospitality previously offered by wealthy foreign friends. Why would he? Norfolk is lovely at this time of year.
All of which has prompted a good deal of renewed interest in a simple question: how is Andrew funding his life?
The answer was casually dropped into another story in The Times this week, almost as an afterthought. Andrew is “understood” (code for “the press office told us”) to be receiving in excess of £1 million a year from the King’s private funds, enough to pay for round-the-clock security, a valet, a chef and whatever else he wants in his personal life. He does not have to seek the King’s approval for how he spends it.
Bear in mind that, as a gift from one royal brother to another, this is probably tax-free. And bear in mind the wording: “in excess of.” A million pounds is the floor, not the ceiling. For all we know, it could be two.
Nice work if you can get it, Andy.
As delightful as it may be to sit around condemning him, we know by now what Andrew is like. Nothing has been proven in a court of law, he has not been charged and he denies wrongdoing.
The question now is much more about the King. How has he dealt with this? What does it do to his legacy? These are the questions that inevitably circulate as the larger truth of this frankly very shabby arrangement emerges.
There is, we are told, precisely one string attached. Andrew may spend the allowance as he chooses, The Times reports, provided it is not on his latest legal battle. But predictably, there is no way of enforcing this one modest condition, what with money being fungible and all.
Andrew has used money to come out fighting. He has launched a judicial review against Thames Valley Police and the Central Criminal Court, seeking to quash the search warrants under which detectives raided his home on the Sandringham estate and his former home at Royal Lodge after his arrest in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
The Telegraph reports that he instructed lawyers after discovering that officers had allegedly removed “private and confidential material unconnected to the criminal investigation.” As well as challenging the conduct of the police, his lawyers are asking the High Court to rule on whether a judge was right to grant the warrants in the first place. If Andrew wins, the police could be forced to hand back everything they seized, which would deal a potentially fatal blow to the investigation.
The Palace’s response has been to put out a statement saying that Andrew’s legal defense is a matter for him and his lawyers, that the King “makes some provision” for his brother “from private funds,” and that “it has been made clear that these monies should not be used to fund a Judicial Review.”
I know the King doesn’t carry money, but surely even he realizes you cannot ring-fence it in this context. If Andrew decides he would rather spend £200,000 ($265,000) on lawyers and lose one of the security guards, that is entirely up to him. The King says: please don’t use my money. Andrew says: that’s fine, I’m using my own. I promise!
I get it. The King didn’t want to be bothered. He didn’t want to infantilize his brother by going through his receipts. But it is incredible that Andrew was handed complete control of the whole budget, and it means the King is now, whatever he may say, underwriting a legal action against the King’s police over warrants issued by the King’s court.
What is so appalling is not the pension itself. This family has pensioned off an embarrassment before. But when a pension was provided to Edward VIII in exile, his absence and his silence were extracted in return (he could not set foot in England without the King’s permission, on pain of losing the money). The money was the leverage. This King seems to have been able to extract nothing at all.
It is still extraordinary, though: the weakness of the King, and the fact that no one is afraid of him. No one is afraid to go against him, to disobey him, to humiliate him.
You cannot imagine people pulling these kinds of stunts with Queen Elizabeth. They would have been terrified.
The current situation is that Andrew is strolling around Norfolk, shooting with friends, bringing legal actions, still fighting to clear his name and the best the King seems able to do is ask him nicely not to spend his allowance on lawyers.
It is a ludicrous situation for the King to have got himself into, and he has nobody to blame but himself for his disastrous mishandling of this whole affair.
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