The Royals with Roya and Kate - Andrew & Epstein - The King acts

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

He will now be known simply as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. The man formerly known as Prince Andrew is being stripped of his titles and removed from his mansion, Royal Lodge, on the Windsor estate. Last month The Times obtained a copy of the leasehold agreement for Royal Lodge which showed that while the prince paid £1 million for the lease plus at least £7.5 million for refurbishments completed in 2005, he has paid “one peppercorn (if demanded)” in rent per year, since 2003. Andrew's links with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein brought increasing public and political demands for action. It is a seismic moment in royal history – but is it enough? Roya is joined on the podcast by Aubrey Allegretti, the paper's chief political correspondent and George Greenwood, investigations reporter for The Times.Presenter: Roya NikkhahContributors: Aubrey Allegretti, Times chief political correspondent and George Greenwood, Investigations Reporter for The TimesProducers: Sophie McNulty, Priyanka Deladia, Robert Wallace, Stephen TitheringtonPhoto: Getty Images Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, I'm Roya Nicar. Thanks for joining me on the Royals from The Times and the Sunday Times during what has been an extraordinary 24 hours. On Thursday evening, Buckingham Palace released a statement about the man known until just a few weeks ago as Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, Knight of the Garter and Inhabitant of Royal Lodge, his mansion on the Royal Estate at Windsor. In full, the statement said the following. His Majesty has today initiated a formal process to remove the style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew. Prince Andrew will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten, Windsor. His lease on Royal Lodge has to date provided him with legal protection to continue in residence.

Formal notice has now been served to surrender the lease and he will move to alternative private accommodation. These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact, he continues to deny the allegations against him. Their majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been and will remain with the victims and survivors

of any and all forms of abuse. And that was it. It's said that a week is a long time in politics, and the demand for action from the king has come from politicians and the public alike. And now the king has active decisively. A move like this by the king towards his own brother is unique in the modern history of the royal family, but it had to happen. The king's brother has come under increasing pressure, following the revelations in the posthumous memoir of Andrew's accuser, Virginia Dufray. Her family has released their own words about last night,

describing her as an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family who's brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage. It is an extraordinary fall-fum grace for Andrew and an unprecedented action by the king. But will it be enough to quieten the public mood against Andrew? And will it stop questions about his links to the paedophile, Geoffrey Epstein?

With me to discuss all of this is the Times as chief political correspondent, Aubrey Allegretti, and George Greenwood, the investigations reporter for the Times. Welcome to you both. What an extraordinary development. I want to just recap a little bit more about what else we know, because with that statement last night, we had some sort of background guidance from the Palace answering a few more questions. So the formal sort of process has begun. We know that now Andrew is going to move not to Windsor, somewhere else in Windsor, which he wanted to, but he is going to move to Norfolk, to the Sandringham Estate, to a small residence there that the King is going to privately fund.

We know that Sarah Ferguson is also out on her ear. She's not staying at Royal Lodge. She can continue to live with Andrew if she wants, but the palace have said they think she's going to make her own arrangements. It is an extraordinary development. I think Parliament has had a part to play in it, and we'll talk about that in a moment, because you have been reporting all week that there was more pressure building in Parliament. We had that development, didn't we, just midweek, of the Public Accounts Committee, writing to the Treasury, right into the Crown Estate, asking for an explanation about that lease,

what has been described as a cast iron lease. Tell us how that played into it, do you think? Certainly. So, I mean, there have been a number of routes through which parliamentarians have been seeking to apply pressure to the royal family in really an unprecedented way. By convention, MPs do not get involved in the affairs of the royal family. They barely even pass comment on them, you know, in public in things like the broadcast media, let alone within the chamber of the houses of parliament. So the public accounts committee had written this quite detailed three-page letter, both to the Treasury and to the Crown Estate, demanding a set of explanations about. Andrew's circumstances and raising concerns and questions about the value for money of those

arrangements. Separately to that, you had a bill that was going to be published by a backbench MP, Rachel Maskell, next week, which was designed to start trying to strip Andrew of his titles because, of course, there needs to be legislation because this hasn't been done since 2019. And she was preparing as the MP for York, Andrew obviously being the Duke of York, to try and start that parliamentary process and press Downing Street into agreeing. Now obviously the government has tried to maintain an air of neutrality in this situation.

They've said this is a matter for Buckingham Palace and the palace didn't seem to want to take up parliamentary time by debating this issue when obviously there are lots of other pressing ones. But behind the scenes, ministers have certainly been very frustrated by Andrew. They've branded him privately to me, an idle disgrace. And the government can give a sort of wink and a nod to MPs that it doesn't want to do certain things.

if it thinks they're acting out of line, it doesn't seem to have done that in the case of MPs who have been agitating over the last few weeks. So there hasn't been an attempt to stop or suppress this effort. George, you wrote a piece last week that, again, there was an enormous reaction to when you managed to get hold of Andrew's lease with the Crown Estate over Royal Lodge. And it really felt at that point that the public mood, it just sort of went into a different sphere, didn't it? And that's fed into the kind of the pressure from Parliament too. I think that's very true. I think as we've been reporting on for years and Andrew, there has been

scandal after scandal, new details about how long he knew Epstein for, how long he kept in touch with him, other people completely separate to Epstein who there are questionable, how do I put it, it's politely questionable views on whether he should have maintained those relationships. But I think that what really hit home to people was a bit of one rule for them, one rule for us, which with any royal family is the risk. And the lack of transparency over the whole issue has been so notable, hasn't it? And that's been something that Parliament has picked up on too. Precisely.

And this is something that comes with all royal finances as has been written. While the public element of royal funding is very well established, i.e. we have the money from the Crown Estate that goes to fund the Royal Public Works. A lot of money the royals have is privately held, but privately held. basically because the historic role as monarchs, there's very little transparency around that. We don't get to see the royal wills about how money's passed down with generations.

We don't get to understand the structure, the trusts that fund their operations. We don't know their full property assets in the same way as any company. And I think, therefore, the Andrews story was really a risk for the royals because it started to draw attention to this lack of transparency

around how they operate. I mean, we were beginning to look into, for example, Prince Edward's lease, at Bagshot Park this week, the key details on what the value of that lease was and how he was being charged for it was redacted by royal lawyers in the public version of that lease that's on the land registry, and that raises question. There was pressure growing. What on earth would, you know, if that public accounts committee thing had gone further,

what could have been revealed? Could Andrew have been summoned to Parliament to give evidence before it? I think the timing of this is really interesting. And I think both the King and, you know, possibly the Prime Minister as well, have taken the temperature of public mood because just you and I sat here two weeks ago and we had a conversation about the fact that he had had his titles removed but not stripped that that statement had been put out by Buckingham Palace in Andrew's name. There was disdain in that statement saying I continued to put my family and my duty to my country first. It clearly didn't go far enough.

It was very clear within moments of that statement being issued by Buckingham Palace two weeks ago that that was not going to sort of stem the flow of public fury. And I think the time is interesting because this week we've seen the king out and about on engagements at Litchfell Cathedral being heckled, admittedly by a member of Republic, an anti-monarchy group, but still being heckled and being shouted out, what did you know about Prince Andrew? And that, you know, will have sent shockwaves through the palace. It will have, you know, rammed home the point to the king that this was just continuing

to distract from the public work. I think the other really interesting thing is we've got. the Prince of Wales about to travel to Rio. I'm about to go with him. Kirstama is about to go with him to the Earthshot prize. And I think there was a risk and there is still a risk that this was going to completely hang over all of that. So I think it feels to me like the King has watched how things have gone for the last week and with the Queen and the Wider family. And we're told that the king has been supported by the Prince of Wales and the wider family. But it feels like they have perhaps a bit more slowly than everyone else realised that two weeks ago that's

statement was not going to cut the mustard. Well, maybe it was when the Pope himself had a discussion with the king about having a bad week that might have, you know, had that sort of impact, we understand. I mean, I think that the key thing here is that the Royals value to the UK is around their soft power. You know, there's a reason why Will is doing so, Prince William's doing so well with his climate work, because he can bring people together by having that name, by having that soft power to do his great works on environmental campaigning.

And the problem with Andrew is if you're not seen to be clamping down this kind of behavior by somebody's ultimately, you know, living on what maybe not exactly public funds, but certainly things the public does not consider to be purely privately held and should be handled in that way, it's a stain on the monarchy. And it then starts people to ask questions, well, why do we do it this way? Yeah. You know, if we can point to all the great works of the royals, if we, you know, if they can point to bringing the country together, being part of our culture, you know, a core part of our country. culture, there's a much stronger argument for keeping the royals. But I think that there will be a consideration with the royals at this that a bit like, again, as we talked about last week, a bit like Diana in 97, if you start to fall too far away from the public mood on this stuff, you are starting to put yourself a risk of other conversations coming in around republicanism, which again,

the polling shows is not popular in the UK. But if you had Andrew continuing to be in Royal Lodge at an effective public subsidy, more people might start to question, well, why are we doing it this way? I think people close to the King say that they feel that he has read the public mood and acted accordingly. But is it enough in terms of sort of parliamentary action and other MPs sort of wanting to ask more questions, will it draw a line under that now, do you think? Or does it raise even more questions about what's been going on for the last 15 years? I mean, it probably takes the heat out of a lot of this for most parliamentarians that I've spoken to, they had been doing this probably really to help apply pressure, fearing that the

king wasn't going to take any further action and that it was therefore sort of up to them to be able to step into that breach. Because there was this push and pull between Parliament saying it's a matter for the king and the King saying he doesn't want to take up Parliament's time. Yeah, certainly. So I suspect that, you know, for example, the bill to remove Andrews titles obviously sort of falls away into nothing. The Public Accounts Committee might continue its work, but no sort of formal inquiry has been

initiated, really. It was a sort of list of questions and a threat that they might continue to do that work if the answers weren't satisfactory. So broadly speaking, I think most MPs will be pleased with this. A lot of them are staunch monarchists as well and were really concerned that the failure to act over Andrew was starting to impinge on the idea of the monarchy itself and starting to damage King Charles's reputation. So they were doing this really out of sort of desire to help and improve his image. And protect him, protect the king. his legacy and protect the institution. Certainly.

So I think that now that this sort of big, drastic action's been taken, they'll feel as though they don't really want to go after a sort of unseemly blood-letting exercise, which seems gratuitously sort of kicking the institution and, of course, the head of it, the king, I think they'll be largely content to let this take place and continue behind closed doors.

Will it raise other questions, though, about other members of the royal family, you know, living in Crown Estate properties? I mean, you mentioned, you know, Prince Edward, the lease there. We don't know what rent he's been paying since 2007. It's redacted. You know, some other members of the royal family are living in crown estate properties. Has it just sort of brought to the fall that perhaps people haven't been asking the right questions about the royal family

and the royal family and the institution has been relying on the fact that people haven't been answering asking the right questions or any questions really for a long time and just accepting the status quo? I think there's a risk. And I think this is part of the understanding for why more drastic action has been taken is because, certainly, you know, more people were starting to think, well, why is it this way? Why is the Royal Lodge not being used in a more public-spirited way? And I think the risk is if you don't try and stem the bleeding on this issue, it stems into other areas. But why don't we get to know about Prince Edward's lease? Why don't we get to know about all the royal leases that exist?

Is there any justification for any royals to not be paying market rent on their properties or the equivalent? which I think will continue now, because I think this has sort of slightly prepared the ground for it. But I think that the risk of not taking action in this regard would create a much stronger focal point around this issue. And, you know, the demand to transparency would have been even stronger without this. I still, as one of those people making those demands, you know, I'm still very much going to, you know, try and campaign for more access to this information because I think it's in the public interest and actually helps the Royals to some extent because it justifies their existence and can show what they're doing for the country. But I think it's created this. It's taken this focal point out of the sort of debate.

What is interesting, I think, about last night's development is that the difference in tone of the statement, I mean, it's a clinical 109 word statement where the tone had completely shifted from the statement two weeks ago in Andrew's name and in his words effectively to a statement from, you know, effectively from the king saying, this is what I'm doing. this is where you're going. We had been told the briefing over the last two weeks was that if Andrew was to leave Royal Lodge, he wanted to stay in Windsor to be close to his daughters, Eugenie and Beatrice, who by the way remained princesses and H.R.Hs because they are daughters of the son of the sovereign,

and that is the way the law goes. He's being banished to Norfolk where he didn't want to go. He's being effectively sort of shut up in a cottage. The king will pay for him privately. The king will become now his brother's keeper. Do you think, Aubrey, that this will be enough to, I suppose, satisfy the public mood. We've talked about Parliament mood, but the public mood,

because there are likely to be more and more revelations coming out about his links to Geoffrey Epstein with what may come out of the US Congress Epstein files. The Palace hopes this will draw a line under it, will it? I mean, Andrew has for 15 years really been a sort of millstone around the royal family's neck and this attempt to sort of cut him adrift in probably the most severe way that, has been attempted is really significant, but it will not stop and prevent politicians in the US and in some instances, possibly the UK, but also a lot of journalists from continuing to scrutinise his private life. And I mean, it will be interesting to see whether or not the threat of him

potentially being called before Parliament ever materialises. There were suggestions that MPs on the Public Accounts Committee were planning to effectively summon him to appear before them. And that would have given them almost unprecedented ability to be able to quiz him on some of those sort of rogue different parts of his life. You know, we talked about the links to the alleged Chinese spy, his work as the trade envoy. Again, it would have potentially been a can of worm. So him being able to sort of slide back away, away from public life and out of the public view, is not necessarily going to contain those questions. I think what's, again, what's really interesting about that statement was that line at the end where, you know, it brought the queen into it. Their majesties, that's the king and the queen,

wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been and will remain with the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse. And, you know, from my discussions with people around the king and queen last week, what was made very clear to me was the queen and the Duchess of Edinburgh, both long-standing campaigners on raising awareness around victims of sexual abuse, both of them. It's been a huge part of their work for many years. Having Prince Andrew still hanging onto his titles, still in Royal Lodge, still in the background, with all these issues going on, would have made their public work on those things incredibly difficult. And, you know, as someone said to me last week who knows the Queen very well, you know,

The palace wouldn't tell me last week if Queen Camilla had asked to see Virginia Dufre's book or expressed an interest in it. And someone who knows so very well said, knowing her, she definitely will have done. There's been a suggestion, and this may come to pass, that the family of Virginia Dufre may be invited by the queen to the palace or to see her to meet privately. And I think, for me, that bit at the end at the statement, that's what's been missing. from Andrew's statements, from his Newsnight interview in 2019, from all the previous statements from the palace on this, there has not been until now an announcement or statement talking about the victims and the survivors.

And to hear that sort of effectively in the words, the king and queen was extraordinary. What we have to remember is just how much time, especially raw women, spends on this issue. And having Andrew there, it must have been tough, to put it mildly for them, to look people in the eyes who have gone through horrible things. And obviously, Andrew denies all allegations, but, you know, that he was at very least hanging around with someone who abused women and girls repeatedly. To have that

in the same royal institution, I think, really hampered them in what they could achieve. And I think that I'm speculating here, but it seems likely that part of the reason for this decision to come down so hard and put that statement in must have been influenced by the Royal Women because the reaction that the Royal Families had to go through in the last week following the initial statements, I think they will have taken that quite personally. And I can see a situation where they have put their foot down and said, no, we have to do something. And this may be part of the explanation for why it's gone as far as it did. You know, Andrew, as he is, I keep having to stop myself from calling him Prince Andrew, as he

no longer is. Andrew has always denied all the allegations against him, which of course this statement makes clear the censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact he continues to deny the allegations against him. But even though he's now banished, you know, out of sight, we believe he's going to move up to Norfolk relatively soon. We don't know what will happen to Sarah Ferguson. She'll make her an arrangement. you know, his daughter's face, I would imagine, a very difficult time will probably stay out of public limelight. The monarchy has changed, as we discussed last week. In all my years of covering the royal brief, I have never seen a story like this or scrutiny like this turned on the royal family. And while, you know, people have said today, the commentators said today that the king will be praised for this decisive action, there will be many questions still being asked and still to be answered about why it has taken fifth.

15 years, 15 years to get to this point. What do you think about that and how that's going to play out? In politics, certainly, you usually have a situation where prime ministers, when they are faced with a scandal, desperately want to jump to the end. They don't want to go through the pain. All the stages. They want to find, you know, how do they get to the sort of jumping off point? How do they try and put as much information out into the public domain as possible or forced the resignation of a politician who's disgraced or accused of acting improperly, which obviously Andrew denies in this instance. And so they are trying to avoid the days, weeks, months and sometimes even years of pain.

And in this case, it's no different. I mean, people will ask why it's taken 15 years to get to this point. And obviously, there have been incremental moments to get here, obviously. Andrew was sort of took some distance in 2010 when his mother, who was said to sort of view him as her favorite child, tried to sort of reduce his services and duties, but it's still taking a significant amount of time to gradually detach him from the royal family completely, albeit obviously rewriting some of Britain's obviously unwritten constitution. And there will be lots of questions about why didn't this happen sooner? Okay, Charles has only been the king for, you know, two years or so

now. But why has it taken so long to recognise the pain of these victims to show an element of contrition, moving away from the language of that Andrew said he remained close with Epstein because he was too honourable to do otherwise. This statement is almost sort of slightly tin-eared because it risks sort of ignoring the 15 years of hurt that people like Virginia Jafray had suffered. I think the King and Queen have made clear for the first time, as we said, that they are thinking about the victims and survivors. As someone said to me last week and I reported it in my piece last weekend. It feels like the late queen left Prince Andrew, as he was then, as an unexploded bomb for Charles to deal with. And Charles is now paying the

price because we know that he did that role as UK trade number for 10 years. But then in 2011, he actually had to step back from that role because of the ferroari over his links with Jeffrey Epstein. And at no point, seemingly in 2011, did anyone at the palace or the family or even government sit down with him and the palace and say, what has been going on here? We then fast forward to 2019 in that extraordinary disastrous news night interview, which was the beginning, sort of the start of the domino effect to his downfall. The late queen then, you know, forced him to step back from public life. But he was still there in the background. Three years later in 2022, when he reached a settlement with Virginia Jifrey, which we believe was partly funded by the late queen and

Charles, without admitting any liability, the Queen removed his military honours and said that was it. You can't use her HR styling anymore. But she couldn't go any further. She wouldn't strip the titles. She didn't suggest he move out of Royal Lodge. And so he lingered in the background, turning up to family events, turning up to things like, you know, the Duchess of Kent's funeral, turning up to Prince Philip's Memorial Service in the car with the Queen. Charles is paying the price and his legacy and his reign are, however you look at it, damaged by really damaging. by this because it wasn't dealt with for the last 15 years. And I think that will be a very difficult thing for the king to deal with going forwards, however he tries to rehabilitate

his reign. I think that's very true. I also think to some extent we can't ignore the role of William in this. He made very clear in his recent interview that he wanted reform. Changes on my agenda, he said. Precisely. And this decision, again, it seems to have come from the families as a whole, but it must bear at least some of his fingerprints that you can imagine being him, you're trying to do all this great work or trying to really live both in the embodiment of what a heir does, works on public interest matters, campaigns, also having to raise a family which has gone through such a terrible thing with the cancer diagnosis of his wife, and then you have this to deal with. And you can see him coming to the end of his tether on this.

and then gently going to his father, this has to stop. Well, the role of William has been very interesting because as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, just after that first statement where his titles were removed and put into events but not stripped, I wrote a piece that was not denied by anyone close to William that he did not feel that went far enough. He was very, very dissatisfied with the fact

that Andrew retained his titles, was staying in Royal Lodge and made it clear he would be more ruthless and he would go further when he was king. He would ban Andrew from his coronation. He would ban him from all family events. And he made it very clear that he took a slightly different view from his father than what had been done. And two weeks later, the rest of that action has happened. The other thing that I think is interesting is, you know, when I wrote a big profile of William ahead of his 40-foot third birthday this year, the language that was being used from people very close to him was, he will make big changes.

He wants to check when he's king, the monarchy is fit for purpose. he has felt, I think, for the last few weeks and months with all of this swirling, that the monarchy possibly has not been fit for purpose in the direction it was going on the Andrews stuff. And I thought, you know, you mentioned the Eugene Levy Apple TV interview the other day. One of the lines that really stood out for me then was him saying, I want to make sure that, you know, if this comes to George, I hand over something to George when he's king that he's proud of. And I think for the last few weeks, there's a feeling possibly that the institution is not something

that the nation has been proud of while this continued with Andrew. So I think he will feel this is, you know, hopefully a cleaner slate than we've had for the last few weeks. What do you think? I mean, it just strikes me how so much of this talk mirrors almost what politicians try to do when there's a sort of change of government, you know,

this promises of some changes on my agenda. Sounds like a manifesto, doesn't it? Exactly, not fit for purpose. These are things that I hear from politicians who are sort of trying to contrast what's gone before, you know, and the associations of negativity with it, with their sort of bright, positive, optimistic visions for the future. And it would be absolutely fascinating on this trip with William that you're going on

to see how the Prime Minister and him interact. Because if there's one thing I have learned about, Kirstama, from travelling with him on political trips normally, it's that he's so motivated by and intrigued almost by pain, by family, hurt, grievances, the sort of fractures in family relationships. And obviously it's something that he experienced a lot of, And his own family, he lost his brother last Christmas, and his parents were very ill and he talked about caring for them. So I'm sure that him and Prince William will have a huge amount to talk

about, if indeed they do talk on the plane, but during the trip, about the importance of family and this being almost the most important part of this story for William, because it's about how he prepares for the legacy that he wants to inherit and then bequeath to his own son. Well, I will be on that plane with the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales next week, travelling from Rio to Belem for COP 30s, so I'll do my best report back, Aubrey, on those conversations. Huge thanks to you, George, and to Aubrey for joining me on this week's episode of the Royals. So, a momentous time for the royal family, unprecedented in modern history. The king has stripped Andrew of his prince title and ordered him to leave his home at Royal Lodge.

King Charles's brother will now be known as just plain Andrew Mountbatten, Windsor. He'll surrender his lease on his Windsor home and effectively be banished to a property on the Sanjama State in Norfolk, where he'll be privately funded by the king. Throughout this saga, the palace has looked reactive rather than active, but now, on the front foot, the king has acted. Will it be enough to quieten the public mood again? against Andrew and his links to Epstein. Let's see. Thanks for joining the Royals. Next week, Kate's back and we'll be in Rio with Prince William as he hopes to put all the attention back on, his father's campaign and his campaigns about the global environment and away from the Andrew saga. Andrew, who is no longer a Duke or a Prince.

Thank you. Thank you.