It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a fortune is usually dead keen to throw it at Prince Andrew.
Because they keep on doing it, don’t they? They just can’t help themselves, from the oligarch son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s then president, who so obligingly paid £3m over the asking price for the Duke of York’s former marital home at Sunninghill Park, to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who so famously lent the duke’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson £15,000 to help clear her debts. Even after King Charles stopped paying his security bills, Andrew is believed to have found what the royal journalist Robert Hardman’s biography of the king delicately calls “other sources of income” related to his contacts in international trade – a phrase that makes you long for the good old days of Fergie gamely doing WeightWatchers ads to pay off her overdraft or Princess Anne’s son-in-law going on I’m A Celebrity to discuss her reaction to his novelty boxer shorts.
And now – what are the odds? – the duke has struck lucky just when he needed it most. A mystery benefactor will foot the bill for him to stay on at Royal Lodge, the 30-bedroom pile in Windsor Great Park from which his older brother had been none too subtly trying to winkle him out, and which was the last remaining perk of what is no longer the forcibly retired Andrew’s job.
And no, don’t be so impertinent: of course the duke will not be naming this public-spirited individual who has spared him the indignity of having to move into Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s old gaff Frogmore Cottage (a measly five bedrooms plus yoga studio). Instead Michael Stevens, the keeper of the privy purse, has reportedly reviewed the arrangement and deemed it to be acceptable, which is the kind of total opacity around large donations to powerful public figures that I think we can all agree has worked out so magnificently in the past. And not just for Andrew, though the time he spent as a “trade envoy” jetting around the world talking to rich people has long been the talk of the Foreign Office, and his ability to maintain a royal-adjacent lifestyle on no discernible income (now that his brother has reportedly cut off his annual allowance) beyond a navy pension must be the envy of many a veteran.
Back in the days when the king himself was just plain old Prince Charles, fundraising hard for his much-admired network of charities, a bit of old-fashioned discretion must also have seemed more appealing than the kind of undignified public fuss caused by Sunday newspaper reports about the prime minister of Qatar handing him £2.6m in cash – some of it stuffed into Fortnum & Mason carrier bags, as one does. (Though Clarence House stressed the money had been immediately passed on to one of the prince’s charities, that didn’t entirely answer the question for those whose concern was primarily about his impartiality when representing Britain on the world stage, not his bank balance.) At the time those reports surfaced, in 2022, the Metropolitan police had already been forced to launch an inquiry into separate claims that a former chief executive of the Prince’s Foundation had allegedly offered to help secure honours and citizenship for a wealthy Saudi donor – though fortunately for all concerned, those inquiries ended with no action being taken and a quiet severing of royal ties with the faithful retainer concerned.
Some might think the Duke of York a rather less attractive investment proposition these days, what with being first publicly tainted by his association with Epstein and then stripped of his royal duties after a ham-fisted attempt to explain it all to journalist Emily Maitlis. Bankrolling him at this stage in what’s left of his career seems the very opposite of the sportswashing phenomenon that has seen China hosting a reputation-laundering Winter Olympics or even the greenwashing of which the oil-rich Azerbaijani regime is accused now that it is hosting the Cop29 climate summit – arguably the last thing you’re securing by keeping the Prince Andrew show on the road is a halo by association. Which raises the much more interesting question: what, exactly, are you getting instead?
Perhaps we’re all simply underestimating the personal charms of the monarch’s younger brother, some of whose wealthy friends seem to have remained touchingly loyal even after he had to pay an estimated £12m out-of-court settlement in the civil case brought against him by Epstein trafficking victim Virginia Giuffre, with whom he has always denied having a sexual relationship. (Come to think of it, has it ever been entirely clear where that money was coming from?) But in a world awash with dirty cash and decidedly murky geopolitical interests, not to mention billionaires looking for back-door ways into the British establishment – well, let’s just say parliament might like to make some urgent inquiries, and make them more strategically than usual.
The mistake MPs have made in the past is to follow public money, demanding to know what taxpayers are being forced to spend on the royals’ upkeep in a cost of living crisis, rather than following the strategic interest and asking who exactly is now bankrolling them instead. Maybe princes still believe in fairy godmothers waving a wand and magicking all their cares away. But the rest of us, sadly, are a bit too old for fairytales.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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