One of the reasons why King Charles dramatically “unroyaled” Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is because Andrew’s degeneracy could no longer be contained and dealt with within the family. It was scandal on top of scandal, from Andrew’s lies about Jeffrey Epstein to Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir to Andrew’s sketchy lease agreement for Royal Lodge. The prime minister and various MPs were starting to make some real noise about Andrew and about ALL of the shady royal finances. There were wider questions about what King Charles knew and when, and whether Charles signed off on QEII providing the settlement money to Virginia in 2022 (he absolutely did).
The focus of a lot of that ire was for Andrew’s Royal Lodge lease. MPs began asking questions about all of the royal leases and whether the Crown Estates were providing lavish properties free of charge for royals with very little oversight. Well, now there’s an official government inquiry into the Crown Estates, with a lot of focus on Royal Lodge. What they’ve found is a mixed bag. While Andrew will not receive a “public payout” for breaking his lease, he also doesn’t legally have to leave Royal Lodge until October 2026. LMAO.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor will not receive a public payout when he leaves Royal Lodge due to “dilapidation” on the property, it has been confirmed. He will, however, have a full year before he is required to move out, as the minimum notice period required is 12 months.
The information was revealed when the Crown Estate was forced to respond to questions submitted by the public accounts committee (PAC) after The Times reported that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had not paid rent on his Royal Lodge property for two decades.
MPs will now use the answers provided by the Crown Estate and the Treasury as a basis to launch a public inquiry into the royal family’s property agreements and its various “peppercorn rent” deals.
While a date is yet to be set for the inquiry, evidence sessions for “The Crown Estate, Property Leases with the Royal Family” are expected to start next year. It means that royal finances will face fresh scrutiny in 2026, a year when a wider review of the public funding of the monarchy will also take place.
It is understood that there is no bar on who a House of Commons committee can invite to give evidence, including members of the royal family, but the committee will only consider which witnesses to call once they have established a remit for the information to be covered in the evidence session. In reality, it is unlikely that members of the royal family will be called to speak.
In responding to written questions from the PAC, whose remit is to assess the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of public spending, the Crown Estate said that while Mountbatten-Windsor was due to receive £488,342 in compensation for giving up his lease early, he was expected to forfeit that sum as the property was in a state of disrepair. The body said that this would pay for “end of tenancy dilapidations and repairs required”, although it added that they were “not out of keeping with a tenancy of this duration”.
In a briefing to MPs on the PAC, the Crown Estate said that this “will mean in all likelihood that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor will not be owed any compensation for early surrender of the lease… once dilapidations are taken into account.”
A meeting took place on November 12 between the Crown Estate and Andrew’s representatives “to begin to discuss the process for the formal surrender of Royal Lodge.” The Crown Estate confirmed that Andrew had now served 12 months’ notice on his lease, the minimum period possible, which means that he can stay in the property until the end of October 2026.
Here’s the thing: back when Andrew was unroyaled and Charles made a big show of forcing Andrew to give up Royal Lodge, we knew that a deal had been made between the brothers. The deal is not with the Crown Estates. The Crown Estates will not be providing whatever payout (or “payoff”) to Andrew to get him out of Royal Lodge. Charles will be the one bankrolling this through his “private” cash reserves, aka the Duchy of Lancaster. While it’s still a PR nightmare for the Windsors and King Charles in particular, I do not believe that Andrew will still be languishing in Royal Lodge for the next eleven months. Now, I’m not sure Charles has decided where Andrew will go, and Tom Sykes insists (on his Royalist Substack) that these details are still being negotiated between brothers, and that Andrew has a long laundry list of demands. Charles has no real choice here – he has to give Andrew whatever he wants, just to get him out of Royal Lodge and stop this PR hemorrhage.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
