The reckoning for Andrew and Sarah came much sooner than the Royal Family, the media or the public expected.

In August 2025, emails emerged showing that Andrew had not, as he claimed, cut off contact with Jeffrey Epstein in February 2011: he had still been in touch with the sex offender four years later, and as a later release of emails revealed, told Epstein he wanted to ‘play some more soon!!!!’

By November 2025, he had been stripped of his titles. He would now be Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. And in December 2025 he and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson were made to move out of Royal Lodge, their 30-room home in the grounds of Windsor Castle.

Sarah Ferguson was also found to have lied about the length of her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. From the spring of 2011 she had shunned him publicly but in private called him ‘a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family’.

Emails showed the truth of her relationship with the paedophile: they had been much closer than she had ever admitted; he had bankrolled her for 15 years; she and her daughters had been among the first people to see Epstein after his release from prison.

Epstein had even paid for economy flights for Eugenie and Beatrice – then 19 and 20 – and a business-class seat for their mother at a cost of $14,080. Sarah wanted more. She asked Epstein to upgrade her to first class and her daughters to business, a request he ignored. She also, for good measure, supplied her British Airways frequent flyer number.

Sarah was so desperate for money she offered to work as a house assistant to the convicted paedophile, calling him a ‘legend’.

‘I am at your service,’ she said. ‘Just marry me.’

A Palace source emphasised that Sarah always gravitated to being with the bad boy: ‘Look at her long history; every man she dated or associated with had a controversial past – they all have sleazy and chequered pasts. She likes to live on the edge. She can’t settle down with a good man. It would bore her to tears.’

‘Fergie made no secret how she wanted to marry someone in the US who was wealthy and powerful,’ a Palm Beach friend of Epstein said. ‘If Jeffrey popped the question, she would have said yes. Even after… he was convicted of being a sex offender. She had a reputation for being an opportunist and for sleeping with wealthy men.’

One such wealthy man was the rapper P Diddy.

A former employee at P Diddy’s Bad Boy Records said the rapper was obsessed with the Royal Family, bragged about ‘slamming’ Sarah and once said ‘he could not wait until Fergie’s daughters come of age’.

This is confirmed by another associate of the singer who says Diddy, real name Sean Combs, first met Sarah Ferguson in New York in 2002 at a party thrown by Ghislaine Maxwell and that their ‘secret friends with benefits’ relationship began in 2004 and lasted for years.

In 2006 he launched his own perfume, Unforgivable, which he claimed was inspired by Sarah and how she liked a man to smell.

She introduced her two daughters to the rapper many times, including a yacht party weekend with Eugenie, then 16, in 2006. ‘Sean’s parties were wild,’ a Royal Family staff member said. ‘The fact that she brought Eugenie around was alarming.’

The duchess and rapper met in Europe and Africa. ‘They’d meet in luxurious hotels… They once stayed at a seven-star hotel that was over £50,000 a night. They spared no expense.’

In 2025, Diddy was found guilty on two counts of transportation for prostitution and sentenced to 50 months in prison.

One of Sarah’s long-serving personal assistants confirmed that Sarah tended to sleep not just with her fantasy figures but with her financial benefactors.

Life with the duchess was ‘chaotic’, said the assistant, who in common with other staff members had problems getting paid. They often had to buy things using their own credit cards.

Sarah herself drew on Beatrice’s credit card constantly and paid one psychic in cigarettes. She rarely paid for anything, expecting to be given products for free or be entertained by friends.

In spite of that, the money poured out. Sarah maintained an apartment on the Upper East Side in New York. Personal trainers waited on call but were never used and one person was employed just to organise all the tablets Sarah took.

Sarah talked endlessly about having messed up her relationship with Diana and about her love of the Queen – she hated Philip and Edward – and her parents. The assistant was struck by her immaturity. ‘She had this constant need to be wanted, with the result that she had no boundaries.’

She has talked up her relationship with the Queen but according to a royal source, the monarch ‘repeatedly trashed Fergie’ behind the scenes.

The source said: ‘Several people, notably the Queen, ex-Prince Andrew and Prince Charles, were aware of her activities for years but turned a blind eye to protect the family from more scandal.’

Questions continue to be asked about the extent of Andrew’s daughters’ involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, their commercial activities and the purpose of their charities.

Andrew has always been very protective of Beatrice and Eugenie and their status, pressing for them to be working royals and to receive police protection.

He even tried to alter Letters Patent so that Beatrice could inherit his title, but the Queen refused.

The daughters’ own business activities have come under increased scrutiny, especially those in the Middle East.

Beatrice has worked for Afiniti, a multinational data and software firm, since 2016, first as vice-president of partnerships and strategy and now as a strategic adviser. The firm filed for bankruptcy protection in late 2024 just as her appearances in the Middle East became more high profile.

She has also recently set up two companies – Purpose Economy Intelligence Ltd and BY-EQ (Beatrice York – Emotional Quotient), which describes itself as ‘working with technology and market-leading companies to maximise the positive impact they can have’.

In its first year, it reported a modest £39,000 profit, but recent accounts showed its earnings in 2024 came close to £500,000. According to one royal source, ‘She’s made millions promoting things like high-tech companies, a Saudi bank and several charities.’

Eugenie works in client relations for contemporary art gallery Hauser & Wirth.

She also has business dealings in the region and ‘was recently gifted an expensive medieval piece of art worth millions by a Turkish billionaire’.

Both women have refused requests by the King and William for an audit of their finances. One has to ask: why?

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s lack of consideration and his arrogance have been evident through his life.

Seconded to a nuclear submarine, Andrew ‘generally behaved like an arse to everyone,’ said one crewman, and the then-duke criticised another submariner for ‘dressing slovenly’.

After Andrew left a pair of kid-leather flying gloves behind in the control room, the submariner took them into the bathroom, ‘did something unspeakable and then returned the gloves’, which did much to raise the morale of the crew.

His protection officers disliked him, but out of loyalty to their colleagues and concern about their pensions, few spoke out. On one occasion, however, one of them caught an intruder in the Palace grounds and roughed him up. It took the policeman an inordinately long time to ‘realise’ that the intruder was the Queen’s second son.

Andrew bullied underlings. According to one member of staff at Sunninghill, ‘If he passed you in the corridor, you had to stop mid-walk and curtsey, and if he thought it was insufficient he’d stand over you saying “lower” and make you repeat the curtsey until he was satisfied.’

While staying with the Royal Family at Sandringham one weekend, one long-standing friend of the family attended a pheasant shoot. Mid-morning, everyone gathered for hot soup and sausage rolls. The guest was standing next to Andrew, who had his labrador by his side. Suddenly the dog leapt and snatched the guest’s sausage roll from his hand, causing him to laugh.

Andrew kicked the dog in the head, leaving her whimpering on the ground.

‘That is the most disgusting thing that you have just done to your beautiful dog,’ said the guest. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’

‘P*** off,’ Andrew retorted. ‘It is none of your business and I will do precisely what I want to MY dogs.’

That evening, Prince Philip came up to the guest and said, ‘What you said to my son today was absolutely right and Her Majesty and I fully agree with what you said. Andrew needs a good scolding from time to time.’

Andrew’s sexual predatory behaviour started at an early age. He used the same chat-up line when dancing: ‘What’s it like to have a royal cock rub up against your leg?’

John Longmuir, an armed police officer at Heathrow whose duties included escorting VIPs through airside and on to the aircraft, was shocked by Andrew’s behaviour in 2004.

A female British Airways crew member, who Andrew had never met, put out her hand to shake his as he entered the first-class cabin. He took it, pulled her towards him, spun her round so she had her back to him and then ‘bent her forward so that his groin was clearly and firmly in contact with her backside. He then appeared to mimic a golf swing and was laughing.

‘To me she looked awkward and bemused. I would judge the prince’s actions amount to a possible sexual assault but there was no way that the Met Police or British Airways would have gone down that road at that time.’

A stewardess on a first-class British Airways flight to New York in 2010 tells how Andrew complained a bottle of water was too cold. She apologised and said all the water was in the chiller, so ‘he undid his flies, shoved the bottle of water down his trousers and said, “This will warm it up.”’

At the end of January 2026 came a further release of Epstein emails by the US Department of Justice.

The new documents provided further evidence of Andrew’s closeness to top Chinese officials and that he spent ‘a great deal of time’ with Xi Jinping, the country’s leader.

They also revealed that a woman, who was not British and who was then in her twenties, had given a statement to the FBI in July 2020 in which she alleged she had been abused by Epstein and Andrew between 1996 and 2018 in the UK and France, including being taken to Royal Lodge in 2010 and afterwards being given a tour of Buckingham Palace.

Her lawyer, Brad Edwards, said she was considering a civil case against Andrew. ‘He [Epstein] and Andrew have dragged me through hell and back,’ she said. ‘They tore me and hurt the very soul of me. He became a controller and sexually abused me. He was friends with Andrew, who did the same thing.’

Documents also showed that an exotic dancer at Rachel’s Strip Club in Florida claimed she had performed ‘various sex acts’ on both Epstein and Andrew, after being taken to a 2006 party at Epstein’s Palm Beach home, where she danced for the men before they asked her for a ‘threesome’.

Her lawyer, William K. Vogeler, wrote that during the party his client had observed many young women, some as ‘young as 14 years old’, that the dancer had been prevailed on to engage in various sex acts and had only ever received $2,000 of the $10,000 promised.

According to the new material, Andrew had been on a 2025 FBI shortlist of 11 ‘prominent names’ accused of sexual abuse during investigations by the Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force.

The allegations included that he had taken part in orgies on Epstein’s private jet, been given sexual favours to keep him ‘happy’ on the instructions of Ghislaine Maxwell and been seen dirty dancing with a ‘young girl’ on Little Saint James, Epstein’s private Caribbean island.

A former pupil has told me how, in the early 1990s, Andrew used to return to Gordonstoun, ostensibly to visit his nephew and niece Peter and Zara Phillips who were pupils at the school. The ex-pupil was discussing an essay with a teacher one evening and was surprised to see ‘A M-W chatting to the third form girls in their dormitory. I did not witness anything untoward happening and I presume if it was him that he had permission to be there.’

One has to ask, however: why was he there?

What is Andrew’s current state of mind? According to a member of his staff, he misses seeing his grandchildren but had coped with the stress of recent years through riding: he had ‘found a deeper connection with nature and animals to help him escape the daily stress of all the “unfounded” allegations about him circulating in the media’:

‘It’s been very hard to deal with,’ he said. ‘The hardest thing was how it affected my family and put so much burden on them. For that, I’m sorry beyond words and unfortunately will have to bear that regret for the rest of my life.’

A royal source said Andrew spends hour after hour playing video games and watching golf on a super-sized TV.

It’s not uncommon for him to stay up all night playing Call of Duty. He prioritises gaming over work, health and hygiene.

The conversation ended with Andrew admitting he feels a ‘profound alienation’: ‘I won’t try to kid you. My life has been turned upside down, and often I feel a deep-rooted sense of being alone in the world. I need to establish new routines and networks.

‘Perhaps I’ll end up doing it somewhere else. Money isn’t an issue because I’ve made some shrewd business deals over the years that afford me a good lifestyle. I’ve been completely misunderstood, and I’m hopeful that one day the naked truth will finally let out. I won’t lie to you, this has been the most distressing experience of my life.’

Now homeless, Sarah Ferguson also faces a bleak future; her reputation is in tatters. For months she disappeared from sight, with sightings at a Swiss wellness clinic and in Doha, the capital of Qatar.

Andrew’s two daughters have been cut loose from the wider Royal Family – at least in public. Their titles and subsidised accommodation – Beatrice a flat in St James’s and Eugenie a three-bedroom cottage at Kensington Palace – are now in doubt.

The fall of the House of York is a tragedy for the family, but the family brought it on itself through poor judgment and greed.

The scandal has also deeply affected the House of Windsor, as King Charles wrestles with restoring trust in the monarchy and growing public concern about how complicit he was in protecting his younger brother.

It is inconceivable that he did not know about Andrew’s activities, given widespread media coverage, and it is extraordinary that no action was taken by the institution against the couple after Sarah Ferguson was caught on film attempting to sell access to her former husband for £500,000 in 2010 and the 2022 High Court trial of Selman Turk revealed large unexplained payments to three members of the York family.

The Epstein scandal has drawn attention to the Royal Family’s lack of transparency – not least over financial matters – and royal privilege, and their apparent unwillingness to modernise and become less secretive.

The Prince of Wales understands the issues and has hinted at change. It is understood he believes the monarchy needs to be closer to the European model – smaller and driven by service not privilege, by duty not pomp – but many commentators wonder if, like his father, William is fully ready to embrace change. At the moment he will not even declare how much tax he pays on the Duchy of Cornwall estate.

The reign of King Charles will not be a long one and it will be defined by how he deals with the ‘Andrew Problem’. It could be the making of the institution if the King makes the necessary reforms – or it could simply hasten its irrelevance if he does not.

Adapted from Entitled by Andrew Lownie (William Collins, £10.99), to be published May 21. To order a copy for £9.89 (offer valid to 23/05/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.