Royal Mint, National Debt, page 14
The increased public revulsion with Andrew following the latest Epstein revelations in October 2025 led to calls from many quarters for Andrew to be removed from Royal Lodge. There was fury when it became generally known that he had paid no rent on the mansion for around twenty years and was thus indirectly subsidised by the taxpayer, as the amount of Crown Estate profit paid over to the Treasury was less than if a commercial rent had been charged. There were calls for Parliament to investigate, and the Lib Dems mooted the idea of using one of their rare opportunities to determine Commons business to force a vote on Andrew-related matters, including legally removing his titles. The upkeep was setting him back around £1 million a year after Charles pulled the plug on publicly funded cover, most probably in an attempt to force the couple to move to something more appropriate in size.
Andrew is said to have spent to date almost £8 million on refurbishing the property – again, it is unclear where that money has come from. Even so, by early 2025, and despite Fergie having arranged for the outside to be given a lick of paint, the house looked to be in a sorry state of disrepair, and the grounds unkempt and overgrown.
Andrew had been determined to stay in Royal Lodge and it looked like he would have to be crowbarred out, yet such was the pressure on him that by the end of that month, discussions were under way behind the scenes to consider alternative accommodation.
The unedifying answer to this financial conundrum lies in Andrew’s perpetual propensity to use his royal status, not particularly to serve his country but first and foremost to serve himself.
This really kicked in when he was appointed as a special trade envoy for the UK back in 2001, an appointment incidentally cautioned against by his brother Charles.
Andrew had completed his active time in the military and it was thought necessary to find him a role. A hundred years earlier, he could perhaps have been sent away to run some colonial possession in deepest Africa, but clearly that particular avenue had long been closed off. So in trying find something for him to do, the role of trade envoy was created. It proved to be a disastrous choice.
UK Trade and Investment, the government body he was supposed to be helping, described his role as ‘promoting UK business internationally, marketing the UK to potential inward investors, and building relationships in support of UK business interests’.
While his appointment was originally welcomed by UKTI, enthusiasm within the organisation soon waned. Right at the outset, Andrew demanded £200,000 of the UKTI budget be made available to him to establish an office in Buckingham Palace, even though it was well known he already had an office there. In addition, Andrew had already been allocated offices within both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department of Trade. In the latter case, this was at Kingsgate House, less than ten minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace. The two departmental offices, and his own one at the palace, were all within a twelve-minute walk of each other. It is believed he did in the end manage to screw some money out of UKTI.
Nor was his appointment welcomed by all overseas countries. Whenever it was suggested to the Australian government that Andrew was available for a trade-related visit, they declined. One Australian official witheringly remarked that Jamie Oliver would be a better fit.
In May 2006, the south-east Asia team at UKTI received an abrupt email stating that Andrew would be in Thailand the following month and was seeking useful engagements. The team scrambled to put together suggestions, but each was batted back, ‘for a variety of flimsy reasons’, I am told. Eventually, a very basic programme was accepted by the prince, and at that point, the likely purpose of his contacting UKTI about this visit became clear. He wanted them to pay for a private jet to fly him into the country from Hanoi. The scheduled flights, which ran every two hours, ‘did not suit his needs’. He complained that his timetable was such that he would arrive in Bangkok at one o’clock in the morning.
Andrew was in Vietnam on a private visit, although he managed to get a team from the British embassy to undertake a recce of golf courses in advance of his visit. He generally always took a set of golf clubs with him while ‘working’ for the British national interest. Even worse, prior to a visit to New Zealand in 2007, Andrew arranged for a team to be sent from London to do a recce of golf courses there.
UKTI did not see why they should fork out £20,000 for a two-hour journey in a private jet from a personal visit in Vietnam into Thailand. The scheduled flight of which Andrew complained was to arrive on the Saturday morning and he had only one internal half-hour appointment on that day at 4 p.m., so he could easily have taken a scheduled plane on the Saturday itself if he was worried about arriving early in the morning.
Andrew insisted on the private jet, stating that he was carrying out ‘important work’ for UKTI, but when asked for details, he failed to specify what this was. In the end, Andrew’s diary for the Bangkok visit contained just three events: a briefing by the British ambassador, a visit to a Tesco warehouse, and a hastily arranged British chamber reception on the Monday. All three were in the capital itself.
Of course, the timing of a private jet would have allowed Andrew to get out early onto the chosen Thai golf course.
After a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing, the matter was escalated up the line as far as UKTI’s chief executive, who correctly refused the request. It later turned out that Andrew had managed to secure a coveted private jet, though it is not clear who paid for this. It did not, however, stop him from sending UKTI an invoice for £6,000 to cover the cost of the flight from the UK to his private visit in Vietnam. Contrary to long-established government policy, no evidence of a ticket or even proof that the flight existed was provided, but this time UKTI paid up.
When I tabled a parliamentary question asking for details of deals Andrew had helped to secure, the relevant minister was unable to offer any specific examples. Had I wanted to establish details of deals where he had himself benefited, that might have been easier to establish, though not through official channels, obviously.
One problem is that since the scandals surrounding Andrew, particularly the one involving Jeffrey Epstein, have become ever more public, the waters have covered over, and there no longer seems to be publicly accessible anywhere a comprehensive list of all the many trips Andrew made as trade envoy, nor any access to the background papers relating to these.
Back in May 2008, I asked this parliamentary question:
Norman Baker: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform which countries have been visited by HRH Prince Andrew in his role as UK Special Representative for Trade and Investment since he took up his position; what the dates were of each visit; what mode of transport he used to travel to and from each country; and how many (a) officials and (b) other people accompanied him on each.
Mr Thomas [the Business Minister]: HRH the Duke of York took up his role as the UK Special Representative for International Trade and Investment on 1 October 2001. Details of all countries visited by the Duke of York in this role can be found either at: www.thedukfeofyork.org (for overseas visits in 2006 to present day) or for visits dating back to 2001 from the Court Circular on the British monarchy’s main site at: www.royal.gov.uk. The mode of transport used for travel to and from each visit is a decision for the royal household based on advice from the royal travel office.
It is a decision for the royal household who accompanies the Duke of York. It is usual for locally based officials to accompany the Duke of York on visits in their markets.
Unsurprisingly, the Duke of York site has vanished, and equally unsurprisingly, the official royal website does not list these trips any more. In fact, there seems to be a general determination to erase history.
Today’s successor department, the Department for Business and Trade, is as unhelpful as possible when asked for information about Andrew’s trips. Freedom of information requests are batted away with monotonous regularity. The indefatigable royal author Andrew Lownie has seen his requests rejected as in turn too wide or too narrow, or for every other bureaucratic reason under the sun. The department has even rejected a request to access relevant papers which was submitted by former Secretary of State for the department Vince Cable.
There is a right for former ministers to be able to see papers that were available to them during their time in office, and indeed I used that facility to examine some Department for Transport files when I was writing my political memoir, Against the Grain. The Department for Business and Trade instead treated Vince Cable’s request as one submitted under the FoI Act, which thus generated the usual dead-bat response. As I write this, he is pursuing the matter further.
It is reasonable to assume that the department has retained full details of Andrew’s trips from 2001 to 2011 but has perhaps concluded that they are so egregious that a lid should be kept on them. Be that as it may, there is no legitimate reason for the department to withhold requests for release of this information.
Fortunately, I retained a list of the trips Andrew made between 2001 and 2008, taken from the now-defunct webpages quoted above, and this list is attached as an appendix in this book.
The analysis I carried out at the time showed that between November 2001 and May 2008, Andrew visited the United Arab Emirates nine times, Qatar five times and Bahrain, Kuwait and Egypt four times each. There were also visits to Saudi Arabia, Oman, Dubai and Jordan.
Countries like Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have a number of aspects in common. First, of course, they are fabulously wealthy. Second, they are each run by more or less despotic rulers. Third, they all have historical links to Britain and its royal family. Fourth, they are culturally generous to esteemed foreign visitors.
Overall, Andrew made at least thirty visits to Middle East countries in six and a half years. It is difficult to conceive of any justification in terms of British foreign policy for the sheer intensity of this schedule. Of course, there may have been advantages to be gained by Andrew personally rather than advantages for Britain.
Whereas trips overseas by leading royals are instigated by the government of the day and the schedule is tightly controlled, a much laxer approach seems to have been taken to Andrew’s jaunts. Indeed, he often seems to have decided himself where he was going, for how long, how he would travel there (usually by private jet or if not in first class) and where he would stay (usually in the best five-star hotels).
We now know that while Andrew was on a taxpayer-funded trip to the United States to support fundraising efforts by the NSPCC, whose raison d’être is to protect children, he found time to board Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet on his way to a massage. Epstein did not share the NSPCC’s objective to protect children.
On his trip to India in 2012, he flew to Delhi first class then used a private aircraft to fly around the country between cities which have very regular direct flights. He insisted on staying in the capital’s best hotel, the Leela Palace, spurning the offer of accommodation at the British high commissioner’s luxury residence. The room charge for the most opulent suite, which Andrew would normally insist on, even then cost £1,000 a night and came with a private lift and a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.
His ultra-loyal ex, Sarah Ferguson, tweeted about his ‘gruellingly busy trip’. Perhaps the gruelling nature of the five-star hotel helps explain why Andrew, displaying his normal boorish saloon bar diplomacy, arrived late at a garden party where he was supposed to be flying the flag and then snubbed journalists, who were allegedly escorted from the building when they tried to speak to him. The subsequent headlines in the Indian papers were all too predictably not kind to Andrew or helpful to Britain.
Official figures released in 2011 revealed that since he began his role in 2001, he had run up an estimated bill for the taxpayer of close to £15 million. In 2010, for example, he cost the taxpayer £465,000 for flights and £154,000 for hotels and food. He and four staff managed on one occasion to spend £19,200 of public money in three days on meals and accommodation.
It is no surprise that Andrew, as late as 2018, was in the vanguard of those calling for a new £60 million royal yacht, the previous one, Britannia, having been decommissioned by the incoming Labour government in 1997. For Andrew, the cost to the public purse has never been a consideration.
While on overseas trips, he also made a habit of disappearing off into private discussions, unaccompanied by diplomatic or other staff. For instance, he had several private meetings lasting hours with the immensely rich Kazakh businessman Kenges Rakishev, who at the time was engaged in the construction of a £2.5 billion petrochemical plant in the country. One of his senior employees, Artur Krivov, cryptically noted: ‘I know that Mr Rakishev does not meet with anyone more than once if he does not need anything.’ What did he need from Andrew, and what did Andrew get from him?
The Labour backbench MP, now minister, Chris Bryant, told the author Tina Brown: ‘The last thing the Foreign Office wanted was Andrew on a trip, because he didn’t know the difference between private and public … He’d go off on secret missions and return laden with gifts.’
In 2011, Andrew mysteriously took four days to travel from the UK to Qatar (yes, yet another visit there) by taxpayer-funded private jet. It was discovered that he had stopped off on the way in Azerbaijan, widely regarded as one of the world’s most corrupt countries. Upon further investigation, it transpired that he had visited that country eight times in the previous six years.
Andrew is known to have been there in May 2005, June 2006 and October 2007 before making two visits in 2008, described in the Wikileaks cables as ‘very private’. He also visited the capital Baku in June and December 2009, using a taxpayer-funded private jet on at least one occasion, although there were regular daily flights between London and Baku.
He was reported in the press at the time to be ‘close friends’ with the country’s President, Ilham Aliyev, who called Andrew ‘the dear guest’. During the 2011 visit, a banquet in his honour was thrown by the President.
That visit took place as Amnesty International was calling for Aliyev to stop throwing opponents into jail and torturing them. It also followed what were widely regarded as blatantly rigged elections.
Aliyev, still in power in 2025, warmly welcomed the decision by Donald Trump to eviscerate the federally funded news organisation Voice of America on the grounds that it was ‘anti-Trump’. Aliyev deemed the move ‘very promising’, which probably tells you all you need to know about both men.
A leaked US cable from 2009 was less than flattering about Aliyev. It referenced Michael Corleone’s sardonic quote from The Godfather II: ‘I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out. Just my enemies.’ The US took the view that the country was subject to ‘pervasive corruption’.
Despite his frequent visits and close friendship with Aliyev, Andrew seems to have been singularly ineffective in defending Britain’s interests. In 2009, Aliyev blocked BBC transmissions into his country.
There was a suggestion that Andrew had a financial stake in a golf complex near the shores of the Caspian Sea, denied by Buckingham Palace.
Strikingly, given later allegations involving his connections with Jeffrey Epstein, Andrew is said to have enjoyed massages at an opulent spa owned by President Aliyev, which boasted a blind Moscow masseur, said to be the best in the world. Most of the country lives in conditions of grinding poverty.
The freewheeling prince also showed a disproportionate interest in other corrupt and unpleasant countries formerly within the Soviet Union. One was Turkmenistan, where he met President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow in April 2010. According to the international campaign group Global Witness, the country was ‘one of the most fiscally opaque countries in the world, with a stagnating private sector and a business system apparently built on bribery’. It was ranked as the sixth most corrupt country out of 178 in the Transparency International corruption index.
Another was Kazakhstan, with some of the best gas and mineral reserves of any country in the world. Like Turkmenistan, at the time it languished near the bottom of the table for most corrupt countries. Documents smuggled out of the country in 2011 are said to show how the then President Nursultan Nazarbayev and his friends rigged elections to deliver 95 per cent of the vote, and plundered the country’s oil reserves. The President and Andrew were patrons of the British–Kazakh Society. The two also went goose hunting together.
In 2006, the President’s daughter Aliya Nazarbayeva went on a spending spree in London after moving $300 million out of her country. The money was spent, amongst other things, on a $25 million private jet and a £8.75 million house in Highgate. The average annual income per person in the country at the time was about $3,000.
The prince was particularly friendly with the President’s son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, who has also amassed a vast personal wealth. He has a particular penchant for property, having invested in real estate right across Europe, including eight properties in Spain.
Curiously, Andrew seems to have had little interest in visiting stable, well-run democratic countries during his time as trade envoy, although doubtless there were many synergies between such countries and the UK and many opportunities to build trade links.
In 2008, a report was commissioned by Andrew himself from PriceWaterhouseCoopers into his role as trade envoy. The prince refused to make this public and the trade minister, in a parliamentary answer to me on 5 March 2009, said that neither his department not UKTI had a copy either. Perhaps it was not terribly complimentary. It is rumoured to have urged Andrew to cut his costs.
Andrew was officially forced out of his role as trade envoy in 2011 after the publication in the papers of the infamous picture of him walking with his friend and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in Central Park. He maintained in the notorious 2019 car-crash interview with Emily Maitlis on BBC Newsnight that he had gone to New York to break off his friendship with Epstein.
