The Royals with Roya and Kate - BREAKING: Andrew, Royal Lodge and royal property revelations

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

As police widen their inquiry into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, a major National Audit Office report has disclosed new details about his dealings on Royal Lodge, including that he sublet three cottages on the estate for 20 years. On The Royals this week, Roya Nikkhah and Kate Mansey analyse what the report reveals about royal property arrangements – from grace-and-favour homes to rents paid by members of the Royal Family.They are joined by The Times chief reporter Fiona Hamilton to look at the latest developments around Andrew, including reports that Buckingham Palace was handed an archive of emails in 2020 relating to Andrew’s time as trade envoy. Andrew denies wrongdoing and has not been charged with any offence.Will this trigger a turning point for royal transparency?Get in touch: [e-mail]: GettyProducer: Robert WallaceExecutive Producer: Priyanka DeladiaRead more: I fear the royal family will never let Andrew end up in court Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to the Royals, the podcast where we discuss what happens behind Palace walls. I'm Royneika. And I'm Kate Mansy. Now today, the scandal surrounding Andrew Mountbatten, Windsor, is moving in different directions all at once. As the police widen their inquiry, new details from government files, palace archives and now a national audit office report, are raising further questions about Andrew's role and his privileges. And in the latest developments, the report has revealed details about Andrew's lease on Royal Lodge, including that he sublet three cottages on the estate for 20 years,

and that he could be entitled to a major payout under a unique early surrender clause. And it lands, as other documents raise further questions about the institution around him, particularly the recent revelation that the palace was handed, an archive of over 30,000 emails related to Andrews' trial. Trade envoy role six years before the current police investigation began. Andrew denies all wrongdoing. But as more material comes to light, the central question is getting harder to avoid. What did the palace know? And when? And is this becoming an institutional reckoning for the monarchy and not just a scandal about Andrew himself? Well, to help us dig into all of this, we're delighted to be

joined by the chief reporter for the Times, Fiona Hamilton. Welcome, Fiona. Thank you. Before we dig into some of the Andrew and police inquiry, which we know you've been very, very across. The sort of breaking news this morning is this. This quite meaty, weighty, national audit office report called Investigation into Residential Property Arrangements

with members of the Royal Family. That's a title that the palace are not going to be loving, are they? It's not very kind of attention-grabbing, but yeah, I mean it's 50 pages of details about property, the royal families, property arrangements. And there's quite a few nuggets in there. There are some corkis.

What are your picks? So what we found out are that Andrew, as we know, was at Royal Lodge for many years, as the Times revealed, on a peppercorn rent. Now, what sparked all this investigation was the Times report last year about that and how little he was paying on the property. Huge investigations forthcoming by the Public Accounts Committee. But in the run-up to that, we've had this huge report land today by the National Audit Office. And what we found in that, where there's quite a few things. But one interesting thing about Royal Lodge was that Andrew was subletting three cottages within the grounds of Royal Lodge. This is a vast estate.

There are three cottages which were lived in by staff over the years. And they were paying him rent to live there. And we don't know how much. Now that went into his private pocket. We're not told how much the palace and the Crown Estate, who's the ultimate landlord of Royal Lodge, they haven't revealed how much that was. and until April they were still paying that rent there. I mean, to me, that is quite extraordinary. I agree.

But this is just the icing on the top of so many layers. Now, we've also found out that Andrew's daughters, princesses, Beatrice and Eugenie, were able to live in royal palaces at no cost to themselves. I find that for me, one of the most extraordinary things of this report. The king has been paying their rent for years as far as we know. but not just from his own private pocket. They are non-working royals, Beatrice and Eugenie. So it's not like other members of the royal family we found out from this

who are given accommodation on royal estates in exchange for sort of their duties. They're both non-working royals, but also the report shows that it wasn't anywhere close to market rent that the king was paying. And in fact, for Eugenie, her rent was set at 50% of the 2018 market value. It increased to 55% in 2022, 60% in 2023, 63 and 2024. 64% in 2026. Similar numbers for Beatrice. So these are people who don't have official roles for the royal family.

They're living there, from their perspective, rent-free. There is some rent paid for them to live there, but it's barely kind of, it's just over half of market rent, ultimately. And then that money is funded by the King and some public money as well, which goes into funding that. That money then goes back into the sovereign grant to fund the working life of the royal household. But I think people will be really shocked to learn that.

Meanwhile, Dad, Andrew, is charging his staff rent to live at his house. The interesting thing about Andrews stuff as well is there's always been this question mark in a lot of reporting, even before the Epstein files dropped last year, how did he afford his lifestyle? Because we were always told, weren't we, that the late Queen didn't fund him to huge extent and hadn't left him a massive windfall in her will. He had a £20,000 a year naval pension. How was he affording his lifestyle? Well, the questions that the palace haven't answered yet, and this may change, you know, after we go out, is how much were those tenants paying? Now, usually if you get household staff, royal palace staff, and their afforded accommodation, it's on a reduced rate. But it's sort of part of the deal.

So they are paid quite poorly compared to other private sectors. But the deal is you get to live on a kind of a lower rent in a nice place that you would never all. normally get it's part of the package if you like. But the fact that that money was then going back, Andrew was a landlord ultimately subletting some of that property. It's interesting if you look at Kate and Williams lease, they're referred to in the report as well. There's lots in their lease that says that they shouldn't be subletting.

So obviously someone at some point has thought, well, hang on, this isn't a good look. They feature in the report. We know that the Crown Estate paid 400,000 pounds to help repair their new home at Forest Lodge before they moved in. in. Now, the Crown Estate is a public private body. Essentially, it is a huge landowner takes rent. That money then goes back to the Exchequer. So I think it's safe to say that any money that goes to the Crown Estate is ultimately public money. That's profits that would

go to the Crown Estate. They're spending £400,000, £400,000 repairing that property for King William. That's a question as well for Kensington Palace. It's not just Andrew as well, because we've also discovered, we knew this. What Stuskham Mount is Bagshot Park where the Edinburgh live, Prince Edward and his wife, Sophie, they were able to sublet property there, bonds there. And when this emerged, the palace had been vacated since April 2026. But we still don't know what income was generated from those sublet there,

where that's gone, where that money has gone. And I think all of this, a lot of this detail in this report will cut through, and it will cut through to people and I think it will anger a lot of people and it will feel why on earth are members of the royal family it's one rule for them and one rule for other people. There is some justification, I'm sure there will be from the palace, that for working members of the royal family,

you know, there's an arrangement. But for non-working members of the royal family, like Beatrice Eugenie, you know, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, why are they living rent-free in palaces? Also, the lack of scrutiny on all of this is extraordinary that this is only coming out now. He was still being paid rent while he's under active police investigation.

And the fact that we don't know the details of the money and exactly what the arrangements are and it's only coming out because of the huge scandal that Andrew's found himself in is something I think the public will also be asking questions about as well. Andrew's brought so much of a spotlight, hasn't he, onto the royal family in that respect. Now, it's important to say that the palace has responded to the report. They say we're grateful to the National Audit Office for this report, which is in line with the royal household's commitment to transparency. We hope that the findings will help correct, clarify or contextualise a number of points regarding royal properties. Now, they went on to say,

as a report notes, arrangements for properties managed by the royal household vary based on number of factors to ensure residences are filled appropriately depending on their location, tenants and purpose. So that's what they've come back with. There are still a lot of questions. I think it's fair to say that the palace have not answered yet. In terms of, we're going to talk to you, Fiona, shortly about the developments on Andrew in the last couple of weeks, of which there have been many. But in terms of just the general look, the headlines are all going to be about Andrew, and I suspect about Eugenie and Beatrice, Andrew, the arrangements. How bad a look do you think this is for sort of the wider royal family and the monarchy? Well, exactly. I mean, it's that point about the lack of transparency about the arrangements that are going on, that the public just aren't a,

of where the money's going, who's getting these grace and favour deals. And at the moment, it's just such bad timing for the Royal Family because they'd only just got Andrew off the front pages because of the recent police appeal and all the developments in the police investigation. And now he's back on there now during that police investigation, taking rent from people in a place he no longer lives because he's been forced to move out in disgrace. That is an extraordinary, isn't it? Let's just say that out loud again. He was still receiving private rental income from properties on Royal Lodge

after he'd been booted out up to Norfolk and after his titles had been removed and he was sent into basically Royal Exile because of all the information that came out in the Epstein Files which of course he denies any wrongdoing. Now, there has been

a lot of developments in the last couple of weeks on Andrew, the police investigation, the Thames Valley police investigation into him. We've heard from them about widening the scope. Can you just bring us up to date

on what's been going on because there's been a lot? Yes, well, of course, they arrested Andrew back in February under great publicity on his birthday. Happy birthday, Andrew. Happy birthday, Andrew. Quite a way to spend it being questioned. And Thames Valley Police had really kept their powder dry, working behind the scenes, detectives doing scoping work on this allegation of misconduct in public office. Came a couple of weeks ago, and we had the quite extraordinary development of a very public appeal for information, saying we're interested in investigating anything at all in relation to Andrew

and developments from the Epstein Files, although of course the police force themselves don't name Andrew because of their privacy rules while they're investigating suspects. And essentially saying to the public, come forward, we will listen to you and we want all the information that you have. And so that was splashed all over all the newspapers, that idea that the inquiry is actually widening. So the police began their inquiry because of revelation,

in the Epstein files that Andrew had appeared to have passed on confidential information while he was a trade envoy to Jeffrey Epstein. And I got a real sense from Thames Valley Police that they wanted to change the narrative about their investigation, that it's not just focused on that. That's a very narrow point in a wider umbrella offence of misconduct in public office. And detectives are really making the point that they'll look at anything people send in to them. And of course, the big elephant in the room, too, is what the US authorities are going to do. So we've all read the Epstein files and we've seen those documents, but those are not the original documents. And for any prosecution to mount in the UK, they need those original documents.

And they do not have them. He's asked to them and he's not been given them. He's pressed the flesh because, of course. This is the Met Police, Chief of the Metblies. Yeah, he's the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Of course, his detectives are separately investigating Peter Mandelson on. the same offence. And they're in the same bind that they really need those original documents. And now so far, the Department of Justice has refused to release them. Now, when we ask about

this, we get told that there's procedures of making official requests and having documents released. And they do take time. And that is true. It can take months. But there must be some real nervousness there about what happens if they can't get those documents. And of course, Peter Manelson has, we have to say, Peter Manil has denied all wrongdoing as well. So he was arrested on misconduct in public office and released under investigation with no charge. Again, denies all wrongdoing. Tell us a bit about what they're looking at there without arrest. What is misconduct in public office?

Tell us a bit about what they're looking for because it seems that they've kind of broadened out the remit to explain a bit better to the public about what they're investigating. So I think we can assume and you don't know what you don't know, but I think it is right to think that the catalyst for them making the arrest in the first place was the Epstein documents and that crucial piece of information about peering to pass on details of trade envoy trips. And so that is an aspect of misconduct in public office which relates to being a public official and the release of confidential information. So they probably started from that point and what they are trying to say now is we are interested in other areas of the investigation. So misconduct in public office, as I'd say, it's an umbrella offence. So it does include passing on confidential information, but it has a lot of other elements

that could make up the offence as well. You only need one of them or you can have several of them. So they also can involve willful neglect of duty, corruption, sexual misconduct, and so on. So there's lots of different. So it's not just financial, it's broad than that. It's broader than that, but it's a really complex offence and it's actually not massively well understood. So first of all, to even consider it somebody has to be a public official. But there's no list of public officials. Now, most criminal offences are set out pretty clearly. But in misconducting public office, there's not a list that you can go to and go,

oh, trade envoy, tick. It's not on there. So you have to be able to prove he's a public official in the first place. And when he was appointed as a trade envoy, it wasn't a real open public process that you would get for most jobs. It was no process, too. A little bit more about the queen wanting him to have the trade envoy job. And we say trade envoy as a kind of short. short form, don't we? But he wasn't an official trade envoy, as you would understand it, in Westminster.

He was a roving kind of general royal ambassador. Yes. But we say trade envoy, but, you know, they could argue, his lawyers could argue that he wasn't an official public servant in that respect. And I'm sure they will if this ever gets to the stage of prosecution. So you can't just commit one of these offences because you are a public official, get charged with a crime. You have to be using your status as a public official to commit the misconduct in order to have committed the crime. So say you went and this is a very crass anecdote, a suggestion for it, but say you went and committed a burglary while you were a trade envoy, you're not going to get charged with misconduct in public office because you didn't need to be a trade envoy in order to commit that

burglary. So it has to be very, very clearly linked to your role. There has to be a very clear nexus there. And then even at that point, the test is not done. It has to be a really serious misconduct, has to be something very significant that really impacts upon the public interest. And so it's a three-level test that is really significant. High threshold. The police have got their work cut out for them at the moment. And obviously taking their time in the investigation, Andrew continues to deny everything and all one doing. But the scope is widening.

Coming up, as new evidence emerges, can the palace ever separate itself from the Andrew problem? As well as all of that, as well as those developments, we've had another massive development with Andrew. And that emerged with a report from the BBC that Buckingham Palace had been handed an enormous archive of around 30,000 emails in 2020. The archive was said to have related to Andrew Mountbatten Windsor's financial dealings and contacts and reportedly includes material about this time as trade envoy. Now, it's come out in high-call documents that these emails were handed to the Lord Chamberlain, who's a very, very senior courtier in the Royal House at Buckingham Palace, effectively sort of runs the show. What we don't know is what the Palace did with any of those emails. We don't know who reviewed them.

We don't know who saw them. We don't know whether any of that information that was in there, which suggested apparently classified information around the Icelandic banks to some of his contacts, who were involved in the Icelandic banks. We don't know whether or not the palace sat on that, whether they forwarded that to the police, whether anyone else externally reviewed it. What are the implications there, Fiona? Well, I think it's just another example

of the palace being given information and being accused really of not taking robust action and potentially turning a blind eye. I know that we don't know the answers to exactly what happened, but let's face it, Andrew remained in his position as a rule for a very long time. doesn't look like that anything was particularly done. I mean, the Palace's official line is, when the BBC put this to them, because of the ongoing police investigation, it would be inappropriate for them to comment on this.

It didn't actually respond to any of the specific questions about whether anything at the time was done. Well, even if there weren't a police investigation, I don't think the Palace would be commenting on anyway, because that has been their strategy and stance for many, many years. I can see their position of not weighing into this stuff at such a feebral time, actually. You can imagine any intervention whatsoever from the palace at this really crucial point of a police investigation would carry such weight and would be such a huge story

that potentially it could be used by Andrew's defence in the future it could potentially skew things. So I can see the difficulty there. And the idea that detectives will absolutely want them to be cooperating behind the scenes as they have said they will do, but not saying anything publicly. But even before his arrest, I mean the palace were quite close-lipped. I remember writing back in February and we were in Saudi before Andrew was arrested about the, it's time for the palace to say, to wake up and say what they knew and when. They weren't even saying we've looked into it or whether they'd gone through his old emails, what measures had been put in place around Andrew at the time.

Now they're saying they can't say anything because of the police investigation. Then we've had this really interesting intervention from Jess Michaels. She's accused Buckingham Palace of protecting Andrew by failing to act on possible evidence. Now, she's interesting because she is a victim of Geoffrey Epstein. So this criticism is our widening, isn't it, towards the palace? I mean, how important do you think that sort of criticism is when it comes to somebody speaking from a very personal perspective?

Oh, I mean, it cuts through massively. It's incredibly powerful because, you know, these women, they speak to the power of the institution and the establishment that has been railed against them when they've tried to get justice for Epstein and all these related issues and they have just come up to brick wall after brick wall. And I think that the police investigation in that sense,

it's very unhelpful for the palace in very many ways, but in that sense to be able to say we're not saying anything, it's quite helpful to them at the moment. But these questions are not going to go away. We've all known, and for 20 years that this was a problem, The Metropolitan Police interviewed Virginia Jafay in 2016, 2017. They've continually reviewed lots of evidence on this. They never launched a full investigation,

which is another area that I think is worthy of further scrutiny. We can't possibly believe that they weren't in touch with the Palace a very low issue. Do you know what contact the police have had with the Palace or what do you understand? I don't know. But if you're a detective who is being asked to look into allegations, of sexual improprietary and sexual allegations, and a victim comes to you and says, this happened on this date and they give an account to you,

you need to test that account. So they never interviewed Andrew, who was always denied wrongdoing on the Geoffrey matter, but they would need to have tested with diaries, engagements, all that sort of material evidence. And you must think there would have had to be liaison, certainly with Andrews people, but potentially with the wider palace as well.

the Queen would have needed to have been kept in the frame. The Queen would have needed to be kept in the know if a police investigation or scoping inquiry had anything to do with her son. And the other way around, of course, as well, that the Palace presumably had a responsibility and a right if they knew something or knew of anyone doing to raise it with the police, surely. Surely, yeah.

I mean, it speaks to the whole issue of and the suggestion by some people that the Palace have known more for a while, there's some sort of protection of Andrews, some indication of or suggestion of a cover-up, which is what Jess Michael seems to be suggesting when she gave her interview to the telegraph. And she said six years ago, the palace knew Andrew wasn't just a problem. He could face a criminal investigation. This is what institutions do. They protect powerful men and leave the people they harm to carry it. So she is directly responding to the fact that this huge archive of emails was handed to the palace six years.

ago, we're only just finding out about it now. She is saying, in her own words, the palace knew all that. It had the information at its fingertips. It seemed to do nothing with it at the time. And she's essentially saying it was an institutional cover-up, is what she's alleging. And that's why I think we're at the point. This goes far beyond Andrew's reputation. And Andrew's future now is such a crisis at the heart of the monarchy. The never complain, never-explained mantra is gone. I mean, it is absolutely gone. You can see how, We seem to be finding a little bit more about how much they've tried to deploy that over the last few years with information that we didn't know about that's only coming to light now, but it's not going to stick beyond this point going forwards. It just won't. If you only would be unsurprised to know that Buckingham Palace has also declined to comment on this matter as well.

But their statement today, if we read out at the beginning of the episode, was that they welcome the report, that is part of their transparency around it. But it does feel now that we're at this kind of pivotal moment where they will have to kind of actually step outside their comfort zone and be more transparent, truly. I mean, what do you think, well? I mean, it does seem to be kind of a, like we're just cracking open as journalists, this kind of a bit of a nut. We just need to kind of crack it fully open. I'm not, I'm not sure they will voluntarily change tack. We've seen a slight changing of tack with William in terms of putting in the public domain his rental agreement, which you wrote. about in his new house, Forrest Lodge, and that was done with a view to being more transparent.

We talked about that and that came just before, interestingly, we've seen the same information in this report now. He made some changes to the Dutchie arrangements in terms of charging Wren and all of that on certain organisations' charities, but that was really only after the Sunday Times investigation with Channel 4 dispatches. So a lot of it feels very responsive, a lot of it feels very reactive. Do I think that the palace are going to start volunteering lots of extra information we want to know apart from an NAA or a public accounts committee investigation?

No, I think they're going to continue to take the position where they respond to things and they react to things, but I don't think they're going to get ahead of the curve and start putting stuff out there because I think that that would be opening a kind of worms for them. But at the moment, they're not even responding to a lot of things. I think that's the thing, isn't it, that they will be forced to kind of actually address some of their stuff head on. And just imagine the glare of a, if there were to be a prosecution and a trial.

of the information that would be put before that call. That would be terrifying for the palace, wouldn't it? Disclosure, everyone would imagine? Well, so many twists in terms of this story already, aren't there? I'm sure it will continue to fascinate and new things will come out. Thank you in the short term for joining us and I hope you come back when there's more to say. I'm sure you'll be back very soon. Well, that's all from us for this week's episode of the Royals.

Thank you so much to Fiona Hamilton again for. joining us on today's show. Now, we'll continue to follow the details in the Andrews story and remind you that you can follow updates as and when they happen by subscribing to the Times.com. And please subscribe to the podcast wherever you're joining us so you don't miss any episodes. And you won't want to miss next week because we'll be doing a full audit and reaction to the Royal Property Report. And it is a landmark one. Royal rents, grace and favour homes, and what these arrangements tell us about privilege, transparency, and the cost of the monarchy.

And we'll be joined by our colleague George Greenwood, Investigations Reporter for the Times, who helped break the story on Royal Lodge. Until then, thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next week. Bye for now.