There are twenty million articles about who gets credit for what in regard to the degenerate formerly known as Prince Andrew, who is now Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. I don’t know who or what to believe anymore, especially with Queen Camilla, Prince William and even the Princess of Wales all demanding credit for what happened. What’s even funnier is that… they still haven’t done enough to punish Andrew! He’s heading to his family’s private estate, where he’ll have to make do with only a couple of servants and a lifetime of funding from his brother! The rush to claim credit belies the Windsors’ eagerness to pretend that Andrew is being seriously punished and that everyone can and should move on from here. Anyway, this Daily Mail piece was interesting, because columnist Barbara Davies actually has some information about when the palace got their hands on Virginia Guiffre’s posthumous memoir, and how the palace has also compiled a dossier on Andrew, full of even worse sh-t which has never come out. Some highlights:
Prince William & Camilla were upset by Andrew’s statement three Fridays ago: In the end, His Majesty the King came to realise what those closest to him have been whispering in his ear for weeks. The Andrew problem was not going to disappear. It was time to grasp the nettle and wield his power. Prince William, in particular, a royal insider told me this week, has been ‘smouldering on the sidelines’ ever since the release earlier this month of a pompous, self-aggrandising statement by Andrew in which he used the royal ‘we’ to conclude he would ‘put my duty to my family and country first’ and ‘no longer use the honours which have been conferred on me’. Queen Camilla, too, it is understood, was ‘really riled’ by that earlier half-hearted statement and had been urging her husband to take decisive action against his younger brother or risk irreparable institutional damage to the Royal Family.
William called for Andrew’s banishment for a while: Inside the family, no one has been calling for Andrew’s banishment more than William. ‘He was fuming that the King had previously fudged dealing with Andrew and allowed him to make an earlier statement making him seem very honourable,’ says a royal insider speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail.
William & Charles’s meeting in Scotland: Sources have told the Daily Mail that Charles and 43-year-old William met in Balmoral in September and had agreed to wait until the publication of Ms Giuffre’s book before deciding what action to take. But then the Palace got hold of advance copies. Queen Camilla, a long-time campaigner against sex abuse and domestic violence, is said to be among those who read it. Palace officials were also briefed that a whole new tranche of Epstein documents, some implicating Andrew, were about to come to light in the US. Some of those leaked emails, as the Mail on Sunday exclusively revealed last month, exposed Andrew’s ongoing secret friendship with Epstein despite his insistence that he had ended it in 2010.
Charles believed in Andrew’s innocence: While the King was then persuaded action needed to be taken – in the form of the less stringent statement released by Buckingham Palace last month – he still clung onto the idea, as did his late mother, Queen Elizabeth, that his younger brother was ‘innocent until proven guilty’. ‘The late Queen went to her grave believing in Andrew’s innocence in the Epstein scandal,’ says the royal insider. ‘It doesn’t fit well with the King to have to treat Andrew as harshly as he has to. William and Camilla take a harder line which has caused a lot of family angst.’
Why Charles kicked Fergie out too: According to the insider: ‘It would be a PR disaster for the King to help her. If she really has nowhere to go then Andrew should let her move in with him in a private arrangement as has happened for the past nearly 20 years. Or maybe one of their daughters has a granny flat.’
The York princesses: Suggestions this week that William put pressure on his cousins to get Andrew out of Royal Lodge are not true, although he is said to have met with Beatrice and been in contact with her and Eugenie by phone over the past fortnight. ‘He would never target them for the sins of their father,’ says the royal insider.
The dossier: If there’s any future trouble from [B&E’s] shameless parents, officials could resort to using that secret dossier. Currently under lock and key in a safe, it has been added to since the 1990s with the help of servants, security officers and embassy staff overseas and is seen as an ‘insurance policy’ should the former Duke and Duchess ‘decide to try their luck’. While it is said Andrew would never turn on the institution in which he was raised, particularly given his daughters are still inside it, that ‘luck’, in Sarah Ferguson’s case, might be seen to refer to the potential threat of her writing a tell-all memoir or, as she has in the past, giving interviews to the likes of Oprah Winfrey. Fergie, it is said, is ‘rocked’ by the speed with which their fates have been sealed. ‘To see it all taken away so swiftly and brutally has really set her on the edge,’ says the insider.
Charles still let this fester for too long: As the royal insider puts it: ‘The King may have left it too late for the Palace to stay above the fray. If he hoped to draw a line under it, he is heading for a big disappointment.’
Andrew’s tough life in Norfolk: He is unlikely to have room in his new abode for anything more than a cook or housekeeper. He will also lose the luxury of meals delivered from the kitchens at Windsor Castle. It’s unthinkable that he will join the King and the rest of his family when they congregate at Sandringham next month to celebrate Christmas. It goes without saying, too, that he will never be welcome at nearby Anmer Hall, the country home of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
The secret dossier just sounds like the palace/government compiled decades’ worth of kompromat on Andrew to use in case of emergency… when that information should have been used to prosecute Andrew in real time. This is where I’m left wondering just how much QEII knew and how extensively she protected Andrew. Clearly, they began compiling the dossier during her lifetime, but that doesn’t mean she knew what was in it. But she could be such a sly old lady sometimes, you never know. But once she died, surely they should have shown the fakakta dossier to Charles, who was already well aware of some of it??
As for William and Camilla pushing Charles to act… sure. It was actually hilarious to watch Charles dither in real time, to see Charles and his “side” try and fail to make excuses for why Andrew could not be punished any further. I actually hope William and Camilla were both trying to tell Charles that he needed to do something. Also: do we believe that palace officials got their hands on Virginia’s memoir before it was released? I know many members of the British press got advance copies, maybe someone slipped it to a courtier. It would make the timing of Andrew’s York-relinquishment make some kind of sense.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
