Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor
stylistic model: The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer
1.
There is a photograph — already famous, already iconic, already hung briefly and illegally in the Louvre — in which a man sits in the back seat of a car. He is slumped. His collar is wrinkled. His face has the grey, cratered quality of someone who has just been told something they have known for years. The car is being driven away from a police station in Norfolk. It is his sixty-sixth birthday. He has been questioned for eleven hours. His name, at this point, is Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
It was not always his name. For most of his life he was His Royal Highness The Prince Andrew, Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, Baron Killyleagh, Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Now he is Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, a name that sounds like a regional solicitors' firm or a brand of sensible shoe. The stripping of titles is, among other things, a stripping of syllables. Each lost honorific is a small death of the tongue.
2.
Decline is rarely a clean downward arc. It is more often a series of plateaus, each one a little lower than the last, each one offering its own bleak vista and its own false sense of stability. You stand on the plateau and you think: this is the bottom, surely. And then the ground gives way again and you are standing somewhere new and worse, looking back up at the plateau you have just left, which now seems almost enviable. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been traversing these plateaus for more than a decade. Each time the public thought the story was over — after the Newsnight interview, after the settlement with Virginia Giuffre, after the Chinese spy scandal, after the stripping of his titles — there turned out to be another level below. Another release of files. Another photograph. Another email signed "The Duke."
3.
On the subject of decline, it is worth noting how rarely we think of the middle children of monarchs. History does not, as a rule, concern itself with the spare to the spare. Prince Andrew was the third child of Elizabeth II, which placed him in a peculiar stratum of royalty — prominent enough to expect deference, marginal enough to escape serious scrutiny. For decades this was the arrangement: all of the privilege, very little of the accountability. He moved through the world with the confidence of someone who has never had to explain himself, never had to queue, never had to consider that the foot massage he was receiving from two Russian women in Jeffrey Epstein's Manhattan townhouse might one day be described, in detail, in a published email.
4.
The Pizza Express in Woking is an unremarkable restaurant in an unremarkable town in Surrey. It serves dough balls, Fiorentina pizzas, and glasses of mid-range Montepulciano. It is not the kind of place that usually enters the historical record. But on the 10th of March 2001 — or so Andrew claimed in his Newsnight interview eighteen years later — he took his daughter Princess Beatrice to this very restaurant for a birthday party. This, he explained, was why he could not have been at a London nightclub that evening with a seventeen-year-old girl.
The alibi was both oddly specific and maddeningly vague. He remembered the Pizza Express. He did not remember the girl. He had never met her, he said, yet he also recalled having investigations carried out to determine whether a photograph of himself with his arm around her waist had been faked. The investigations, he said, were "inconclusive." One imagines a team of forensic analysts, paid for by the Crown, staring at a photograph for months and producing a report that essentially says: we don't know.
5.
Virginia Giuffre was born Virginia Roberts in Sacramento, California, in 1983. By the age of seven she was being sexually abused. By her teens she was a runaway, a foster child, a girl working in the spa at Mar-a-Lago when Ghislaine Maxwell approached her with an offer that would rearrange the architecture of her life. She was seventeen. She would later allege that she was trafficked to Jeffrey Epstein and, through him, to a number of powerful men, Andrew among them.
Giuffre died by suicide on the 25th of April 2025, at her farm in Western Australia. She was forty-one. She had three children. She was in the middle of a custody battle and had recently been in a car accident. Her family described her as "a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking." Her father rejected the finding of suicide entirely. He went on television to say: "There's no way."
She did not live to see Andrew arrested. She did not live to see the Epstein files released. She did not live to see the photograph in the Louvre.
6.
The Newsnight interview, broadcast on the 16th of November 2019, is one of those rare television events that is more devastating in its cumulative awkwardness than any single moment can convey. Emily Maitlis, the interviewer, had the stillness of a card player who knows the other person's hand. Andrew had the restlessness of someone who has been told by advisors not to do the interview, has done it anyway, and is now discovering, in real time, why he was told not to.
He said he had no recollection of meeting Giuffre. He said the photograph of them together might be faked. He said he could not have been sweating in a nightclub because he had a medical condition — acquired during the Falklands War — that prevented him from perspiring. He said his friendship with Epstein, even after Epstein's conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, had offered "very useful" opportunities.
It was this last remark that seemed to stun even Maitlis. Not a denial, not an excuse, but a cost-benefit analysis. The friendship had been useful. This is a word people use about filing systems and kitchen gadgets, not about their relationships with convicted sex offenders.
7.
What is it like to watch your own relevance evaporate? Not quickly, in the manner of a scandal that flares and is forgotten, but slowly, year after year, in a series of reductions so incremental that each one seems bearable until you look back and see how far you have fallen. Andrew went from being a working royal to a non-working royal, from a non-working royal to an embarrassment, from an embarrassment to a liability, from a liability to a man sitting in a five-bedroom Norfolk farmhouse with a single stuffed monkey for company while his sixty-odd teddy bears moulder in a storage unit somewhere in the Home Counties.
The teddy bears are, in their own way, the most poignant detail in the whole saga. Former staff described a collection of more than sixty stuffed animals arranged on his bed according to a specific protocol. There was a laminated photograph in a drawer showing the correct placement of each bear. Staff received a full day of training on their arrangement. Some of the bears were dressed as sailors. Two sat on "thrones" on either side of the bed. If a maid placed them incorrectly, Andrew would, according to a former protection officer, "shout and scream."
When he left Royal Lodge in early 2026, he reportedly told staff the bears "won't cope with the change" because the Lodge was "their home, too." The source who relayed this information added, with admirable restraint, that it was "like he's transferring his own emotions onto them, the way a little kid would."
8.
There is a particular species of British euphemism that applies to disgraced members of the upper classes. They are "stepped back." They have "ceased public duties." They are "living quietly." These phrases do a great deal of work. "Living quietly" can mean anything from tending a Gloucestershire garden to being confined to a Norfolk farmhouse under police investigation for misconduct in public office while your brother, the King, refuses to take your calls.
9.
The Epstein files — millions of pages released by the U.S. Department of Justice in a series of tranches through late 2025 and early 2026 — had the quality of a slow-motion detonation. Each release brought new names, new photographs, new emails. For Andrew, the damage was layered and relentless.
In December 2025: photographs of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell hunting with Andrew at Balmoral, the Scottish retreat where the royal family gathers each summer. Photographs of them in the royal box at Ascot. A photograph of Andrew reclining across the laps of five people while Maxwell smiled down at him.
In January 2026: photographs appearing to show Andrew on all fours over a fully clothed woman lying on the floor, touching her stomach.
In February 2026: emails from a sender labelled "The Duke," forwarding reports from overseas trade missions to Epstein. One was described as a "confidential brief." A 2001 email to Maxwell, signed "A," asking if she had found "new inappropriate friends" for the writer to spend time with. The writer mentioned being at "Balmoral Summer Camp for the Royal Family." He described himself as "The Invisible Man."
The Invisible Man. One could not invent a more apt pseudonym for a man who spent decades believing his actions were shielded from view.
10.
Misconduct in public office. The phrase has a dusty, procedural quality, as though it describes a clerk who has been embezzling from the parish council. It is, in fact, an offence that carries a potential sentence of life imprisonment. To prove it, prosecutors must demonstrate that a public officeholder wilfully neglected their duty or wilfully misconducted themselves, to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public's trust. The key questions in Andrew's case are whether a trade envoy counts as a "public officeholder" and whether forwarding confidential government briefs to a convicted sex offender counts as "misconduct." To most people, the answers seem self-evident. To criminal lawyers, they are, apparently, a matter of considerable debate.
11.
Geographies of shame. The move from Royal Lodge to Sandringham was a distance of roughly one hundred miles and an incalculable distance in status. Royal Lodge: thirty rooms, twenty-one acres, a conservatory, a terrace, a separate garden cottage gifted to the family by the people of Wales. It had been home to the Queen Mother until her death. Andrew had secured a seventy-five-year lease for approximately one million pounds — what estate agents would call a competitive price — with nominal annual rent "if required." He lived there for more than two decades.
His new home is Marsh Farm, a five-bedroom red-brick cottage on the Sandringham estate, seven miles from the main house. It required extensive renovations. A six-foot fence was installed around it, along with security cameras and — in a detail that feels almost novelistic — a Sky TV subscription. A no-fly zone, already in place over Sandringham, was extended to include the property, to prevent drones.
Royal biographer Andrew Lownie noted that the property sits near the abandoned Wolferton railway station, which has been closed since 1969. The station is most notable for being the place from which the bodies of two dead kings — George V and George VI — began their final journeys back to London. One imagines Andrew did not request this particular piece of local history when selecting his new accommodation.
12.
Decline in public life often follows a recognisable pattern: the triggering event, the defensive posture, the gradual retreat, the final reckoning. What makes Andrew's case unusual is the sheer length of the middle phase — the years of defensive posture that seemed, for a time, to be working. Between 2011, when Virginia Giuffre's allegations first surfaced publicly, and 2019, when the Newsnight interview forced a reckoning, Andrew continued to perform royal duties, attend public events, and conduct himself as though the allegations were a minor administrative inconvenience. He appeared at Ascot. He hosted entrepreneurs at Buckingham Palace through his Pitch@Palace initiative. He smiled for cameras.
This was possible, in large part, because of who he was. Not because of his individual character, but because of the institutional machinery that surrounded him: the palace press operation, the culture of deference, the network of courtiers and advisors whose job it was to manage perception. The monarchy is, among other things, a reputation-management operation of extraordinary sophistication. The problem with Andrew was that he kept generating new reputational crises faster than the machine could process them.
13.
A brief and incomplete inventory of Andrew's associations with people later described as problematic:
Jeffrey Epstein, convicted sex offender, died in prison.
Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted sex trafficker, sentenced to twenty years.
Yang Tengbo, alleged Chinese spy, barred from the United Kingdom on national security grounds.
Timur Kulibayev, the Kazakh son-in-law of a dictator, who purchased Andrew's former home, Sunninghill Park, for three million pounds above the asking price.
David Rowland, a Conservative donor and financier based in Guernsey and Luxembourg, who allegedly helped arrange Andrew's finances.
One can have an unfortunate association. Two is a pattern. By five, one begins to wonder whether the problem is not the associates but the associator.
14.
Concerning sweat. Andrew's claim that he could not perspire due to an adrenaline-related condition acquired during the Falklands War is one of those statements that, once uttered on national television, becomes permanently attached to its speaker. It is both absurd enough to be comic and serious enough — given the context in which it was deployed, as a defence against an allegation of sexual assault — to be deeply unsettling.
Giuffre had described Andrew as "sweating profusely" when they danced together at a London nightclub. Andrew's response was not merely to deny being at the nightclub but to deny the physiological possibility of the symptom described. It was as though, faced with an accusation of murder, a suspect were to argue not that they weren't present, but that they are physically incapable of pulling a trigger.
"He's Sweating Now," read the caption beneath his photograph when it was hung in the Louvre. It is the kind of joke that is also a judgement.
15.
In the taxonomy of royal scandals, Andrew's case is without precedent. Not because royals haven't behaved badly — history is littered with royal misbehaviour — but because the mechanisms of accountability have changed so fundamentally. The last royal to be arrested was Charles I, in 1647. His situation, admittedly, escalated somewhat beyond misconduct in public office. But for nearly four centuries after his beheading, the British monarchy operated in a zone of practical legal immunity, not because the law formally exempted them, but because the institutions tasked with enforcing the law were insufficiently motivated to test the question.
What changed was not the law but the public appetite for accountability — and, crucially, the existence of millions of pages of emails.
16.
On the morning of the 19th of February 2026, approximately eight plainclothes police officers arrived at Wood Farm, Andrew's temporary residence on the Sandringham estate, in six unmarked cars. One officer carried a police-issue laptop. One car approached from the front; the other five entered through the back. It was, witnesses noted, his birthday.
The King was not informed in advance. He learned of his brother's arrest the way many people learn of significant events in the lives of their siblings: after the fact and from an official source. His statement was a masterpiece of royal distance: "What now follows is the full, fair and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities." He then attended London Fashion Week.
17.
The email handle "The Invisible Man" — which Andrew reportedly used to correspond with Maxwell — invites a certain amount of literary analysis. There is, of course, the H.G. Wells novel, in which a scientist discovers the formula for invisibility and is gradually driven mad by the power it confers. There is also Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, about a Black man in America whose identity is systematically denied by the society around him, though one suspects this was not Andrew's primary reference point.
More likely the name reflects a simpler vanity: the thrill of secrecy, the pleasure of moving through the world undetected. It is the kind of alias chosen by a man who finds espionage exciting in the abstract — the idea of it, the vocabulary of it — without fully grasping that espionage is serious precisely because it involves things that are hidden. When you send an email to someone saying "Have you found any new inappropriate friends for me to have fun with?" and sign it with a pseudonym, you are not being invisible. You are creating a document.
18.
Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, who remained living with Andrew at Royal Lodge long after their divorce, declined to follow him to Norfolk. Reports indicated she was "ready to spread her wings." One destination mentioned was her younger daughter Eugenie's home in Portugal. Another was simply "somewhere."
The dissolution of this arrangement — the ex-wife who stayed, through everything, in the thirty-room mansion, and who finally left when the mansion was taken away — has its own melancholy geometry. They had been divorced since 1996 but continued to live together for reasons that were variously described as practical, financial, and familial. Whatever the reasons, the arrangement collapsed not because of any change in their relationship but because of a change in their address.
19.
Among the items reportedly left behind when Andrew vacated Royal Lodge: antique furniture, large oil paintings, and the bulk of his teddy bear collection. He was, according to one source, "wandering around muttering to himself" during the final days of the move. King Charles was reportedly so frustrated at seeing Andrew still strolling the Windsor grounds and greeting onlookers — even after the latest Epstein revelations — that he accelerated the departure.
It is worth pausing on the image: a man in his mid-sixties, recently stripped of his name, his title, his home, and his place in his family's Christmas celebrations, walking the grounds of a property he is about to lose, waving at strangers. There is something almost heroically delusional about it. Or something desperately sad. Perhaps both, in the way that delusion and sadness are often the same thing observed from different angles.
20.
"We are in this together and will have to rise above it."
This is what Andrew emailed Epstein on the 28th of February 2011, more than two months after the date Andrew later told Emily Maitlis he had severed all contact with Epstein. The email was revealed by British newspapers in October 2025. It is a sentence that does a great deal of inadvertent self-revelation. "In this together" implies a shared predicament, a partnership under pressure. "Rise above it" implies that the allegations against them are a nuisance to be transcended rather than a matter to be answered. The tone is that of two men inconvenienced by other people's suffering.
In another email, sent to Maxwell, Andrew wrote: "Please make sure that every statement or legal letter states clearly that I am NOT involved and that I knew and know NOTHING about any of these allegations." The capitalisation is his. It has the quality of a man shouting in a library: technically audible, fundamentally inappropriate, and ultimately drawing more attention to the thing he wishes to conceal.
21.
There is a philosophical question embedded in the Andrew story that rarely gets asked directly: at what point does institutional protection become institutional complicity? The palace knew. Royal bodyguards accompanied Andrew to Epstein's island. Courtiers managed his schedule. Advisors drafted his statements. The late Queen, by some accounts, was broadly aware of the associations if not the specific allegations. The institution did not fail to notice. It chose, for decades, not to act.
When action finally came — the stripping of titles in October 2025, the eviction from Royal Lodge, the terse statements of "full support" for the police investigation — it had the quality of a controlled demolition. The building was already structurally unsound. The monarchy simply decided it was time to bring it down rather than wait for it to collapse.
22.
Giuffre's posthumous memoir, Nobody's Girl, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in October 2025. It had been, the publisher noted, "vigorously fact-checked and legally vetted." The title is precise. She was nobody's girl in the sense that no institution protected her, no system caught her fall, and the men who used her regarded her as a commodity rather than a person. She was also nobody's girl in the sense that she belonged to herself, which was the thing they could not finally take from her, and which she asserted with increasing force over the last two decades of her life.
The memoir's publication accelerated the process of Andrew's removal from royal life. Within days, a formal process to strip his remaining titles was underway. The book, one might say, accomplished in print what years of legal proceedings, media investigations, and public outcry had failed to fully achieve.
23.
On the question of what Andrew knew and when he knew it: a 2011 FBI report, contained within the Epstein files, records a statement from a survivor who alleged that Andrew knowingly had sex with a seventeen-year-old girl. The report describes a scene at a London nightclub in which Epstein and Maxwell asked Andrew to guess the girl's age. He guessed correctly: seventeen. The report adds that he was "grabbing her waist and fondling her on the dance floor." They returned to Maxwell's London residence. They went into a bathroom.
The content of these allegations matches those made by Virginia Giuffre. The FBI had this report in 2011. Andrew was not arrested until 2026. The gap between those dates contains multitudes: of institutional reluctance, of jurisdictional complexity, of the peculiar legal force field that surrounds the relatives of heads of state.
24.
Peter Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister, was arrested days after Andrew, also on suspicion of misconduct in public office relating to Epstein. The detail has a grim symmetry: a royal and a politician, a Conservative figurehead and a Labour grandee, brought down by the same trove of emails. The Epstein files, in this sense, were bipartisan. They did not discriminate by party or by class. They merely recorded what happened and waited, in their millions of pages, to be read.
25.
The photograph taken by Phil Noble of Reuters — Andrew slumped in the back seat, leaving the police station — entered the public consciousness with the speed and permanence of certain iconic images. Within days, the activist group Everyone Hates Elon had framed a print of it in a gold-coloured frame, affixed a caption reading "He's Sweating Now — 2026," and hung it on a wall in the Louvre, reportedly just metres from the Mona Lisa. It remained there for approximately fifteen minutes before museum staff removed it. Visitors, according to reports, laughed, took photographs, and expressed disbelief.
The stunt was juvenile and effective and, in its way, historically apt. For centuries, the Louvre displayed portraits of European royalty. Now a portrait of a different kind: not the prince in ermine and ceremonial dress, but the man reduced, caught in the democratic medium of the Reuters wire photograph, looking like someone who has just realised that the ground beneath him is no longer solid.
26.
What does it mean to lose a name? Not a reputation, not a career, not a home — all of which Andrew has also lost — but a name. When the formal process to strip his titles was completed in late October 2025, Andrew ceased to be Prince Andrew, Duke of York. He became Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The hyphen is the only aristocratic thing left in it.
In fairy tales, the loss of a name is a form of enchantment, a curse that can be broken only by some act of extraordinary courage or sacrifice. In this case, the loss of the name was the breaking of the enchantment. For sixty-five years, "Prince Andrew" had functioned as a kind of spell: it opened doors, deflected questions, ensured that a man of no particular intellectual distinction or professional accomplishment was treated as though he were both distinguished and accomplished. The name is gone. The spell is broken. What remains is a man in a farmhouse, with a plush monkey and a police-issue laptop's worth of questions to answer.
27.
The monarchy's survival has always depended on a particular negotiation between visibility and mystery. The royal family must be seen — at Trooping the Colour, at Christmas services, at state funerals — but they must not be known. The moment a royal becomes fully legible as a human being, with human appetites and human failings and human emails, the institution is in danger. Andrew's crime, from the monarchy's perspective, was not primarily moral. It was ontological. He made himself knowable. He sat down with Emily Maitlis and revealed a man who was arrogant, obtuse, self-pitying, and apparently incapable of expressing empathy for the victims of a convicted sex offender with whom he had maintained a friendship. He allowed millions of viewers to see, clearly and unmistakably, the kind of person who lives behind the title.
28.
"Prince William doesn't want to inherit this problem," said Andrew Lownie, Andrew's biographer, before the arrest. "It's shaped the reign of Charles. It's a distraction from all the other work they do. It's undermined the reputation of the members of the family. It's pretty much destroyed the institution."
This is, perhaps, overstated — the monarchy survived the abdication crisis, survived the death of Diana, survived decades of tabloid warfare — but it captures something true about the peculiar exhaustion of the Andrew affair. It is not dramatic enough to be cathartic and not minor enough to be ignorable. It is a chronic condition rather than an acute one, a persistent low-grade infection in the body of the state. The institution limps on, but it limps.
29.
At the time of writing, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been released under investigation. He has been neither charged nor exonerated. Searches of his properties have been concluded. His emails are being examined. He remains eighth in line for the throne, a fact that, in context, reads less like a constitutional arrangement and more like a dark joke. Experts have noted that misconduct in public office is notoriously difficult to prove. He may never be charged. He may live out his days at Marsh Farm, behind the six-foot fence and the security cameras and the no-fly zone, in a kind of comfortable rural detention, the monarchy's uncomfortable secret housed at a safe distance from its operational centre.
Or he may face trial. The law, as his brother said, "must take its course."
30.
There is a line from an email Andrew sent to Epstein on Christmas Day 2010. He was forwarding a "homemade family message." It is a small detail — a man emailing his friend on Christmas, sharing a family greeting — and yet it contains, in miniature, the entire catastrophe. The domesticity of the gesture. The casualness of the relationship. The apparent inability to recognise that the friend in question had, two years earlier, pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from a minor. The collision between the ordinary rhythms of family life and the extraordinary depravity they were entangled with.
The Christmas message has not been made public. One imagines it contained the usual sentiments: good wishes, seasonal cheer, hope for the coming year. "Homemade" suggests effort, suggests a personal touch. It was sent from a man surrounded by his family in one of the grandest houses in England to a man who, two years later, would be found dead in a New York jail cell. Between the sender and the recipient lay a vast and complicated web of exploitation, secrecy, and suffering. And between them, on that December day, a Christmas card.
The rest is still being read.
