Not only was Queen Elizabeth II probably aware that her son Andrew had 40 Thai prostitutes delivered to his luxury hotel suite during a taxpayer-funded trip to Bangkok in 2006, she also knew about his regular trysts with prostitutes in Buckingham Palace, the former prince’s biographer said over the weekend.
“He brought in prostitutes to Buckingham Palace for years,” historian Andrew Lownie, author of “Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, told NewsNation. “It was done on a regular basis. People who worked there complained to people in command, but nothing was done — the security that complained were told, ‘If you would like to go back on the beat Brixton, you have that choice, but otherwise you keep quiet.”
”Of course, the Queen knew (about Andrew’s proclivities),” Lownie continued, according to NewsNation. “But he was her favorite son, and he got away with everything. They brushed it under the rug. Until now.”
This revelation from Lownie adds to the growing belief among palace insiders that the queen, who died in 2022, left her heir, King Charles III, with “an unexploded bomb” in the form of his younger brother, the former Duke of York. Late last month, Andrew lost all his royal titles, including that of prince, as the years-long controversy over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein finally became intolerable to his brother and to the British public.
‘It seems to me that Queen Elizabeth has quite a lot to answer for,” a palace source told The Times UK.
“The thing about the queen was that everyone always said she was so dutiful, and she was — but this was a terrible dereliction of duty. She indulged Andrew all the time and always avoided confrontation.”
Last month, Lownie told the Daily Mail’s Deep Dive podcast that Andrew, as the U.K.’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment from 2001 to 2011, used his official trips to “line his pockets,” play golf and “chase women” — including when he allegedly had 40 prostitutes brought to his five-star hotel room while on a four-day trip to Thailand.
Andrew’s trip was ostensibly to represent his mother and the British government at the 60th anniversary celebrations of the reign of the late King Bhumibol, Lownie told the Daily Mail. Andrew insisted on staying in a hotel rather than at the embassy residence, which was typical of him, Lownie said.
“Andrew had 40 prostitutes brought in the space of four days,” Lownie continued. “This was all enabled by diplomats and others.”
At the time, Andrew was in his 40s, but the once-dashing royal, who had once been dubbed “Randy Andy,” was going through “a mid-life crisis” and used his international trips as trade envoy to schedule personal vacations.
“He always puts in two weeks of ‘private time,’” Lownie told the Daily Mail. “So, we pay for his holiday and then he goes off and does things.”
According to Lownie, “the whole system protected and enabled” Andrew, starting at the top. Yes, Lownie said that the queen would have known about her son’s leisure-time activities on his international trips, including his sexual exploits in Thailand.
“No, no. She knew exactly what was going on,” Lownie told the Daily Mail. “I know that the PPOs, the police protection officers, always report(ed) back to the monarch if there’s anything. … I know people went and complained to the queen. I had talked to two permanent undersecretaries who complained to the queen’s private secretary, and they were basically sent away with a flea in their ear. ”
Daily Beast royal reporter Tom Sykes reported that he had independently confirmed Lownie’s account of the prince’s “industrial-scale sexual consumption” in Bangkok, “carried out under the auspices of royal diplomacy, with the full apparatus of the British state behind him.”
Lownie is pushing Britain’s National Archives to release its files on Andrew’s time as a trade envoy, now that he has been stripped of his royal titles and asked to surrender his lease on Royal Lodge, his 30-room mansion near Windsor Castle, and move elsewhere. Andrew is now known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. Rather scathingly, the palace statement said the censures against Andrew were “deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him.”
Meanwhile, American lawmakers also pushing for the U.S. Justice Department to release its investigative files on Epstein. The American financier, with friends in high places, was first investigated for sex trafficking in the 2000s and convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 after being arrested on new sex trafficking charges.
Andrew has denied allegations from the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, that she, as one of Epstein’s trafficked teen-age girls, was forced to have sex with Andrew three times in 2001. Both Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, also continued to stay friends with Epstein, even after they publicly claimed that they had cut ties.
Lownie told NewsNation that he continues to get “more and more information every day from people who worked at the palace and in the government,” about Andrew’s activities and who knew what when. People in the palace and in government ” are no longer scared to talk or come out and tell the world what really happened now that Andrew has been removed from power … and now that he is no longer protected by the queen.”