Royal Mint, National Debt, page 17
Andrew, famously photographed with his arm around the young woman, has always denied sexual intercourse took place and has even suggested the photograph is a fake and that he had never met her. The Mail on Sunday had the photograph analysed and is in no doubt the picture is genuine.
The £12 million plus settlement does not include any admission of liability on Andrew’s part. As it happens, Andrew is one of the royals I have never met, so perhaps I should ask him for £12 million as well, if the absence of any meeting is the criterion for a huge pay-off.
It is widely believed that some or all of the £12 million paid over to Ms Giuffre came directly from the Queen, so it is appropriate to ask just how much she, Charles and William knew about Andrew’s sordid shenanigans. They must have asked questions before handing over such a sum, so did Andrew lie to them as well, or did they decide to try to keep the lid on everything?
Epstein, of course, was earlier another source of income for Andrew, or more accurately Fergie. In 2010 she had a mountain of debt to deal with, and shortly after his notorious meeting with Andrew in Central Park, Epstein gave her £15,000 to help clear her debts. She later admitted to a ‘gigantic error’ and vowed to repay the money. When asked five years later if she had done so, the reply was ‘no comment’. Perhaps the first word alone of that pithy response might have sufficed.
Her admission of a ‘gigantic error’ now looks duplicitous at best. While publicly stating she would ‘never have anything to do with’ Epstein again, at the same time she was writing to Epstein to ‘humbly apologise’ for making a link between him and paedophilia in the media – although by this time Epstein had been convicted of just that. She told him he was ‘steadfast’, ‘generous’ and a ‘supreme friend’.
This all emerged in September 2025, about the same time as we learnt that Peter Mandelson had described Epstein as his ‘best pal’. Mandelson quite rightly was sacked as British ambassador to the United States, though of course you cannot be sacked as a member or associate member of the royal family.
What also emerged shortly afterwards was that the relationship between Epstein and Fergie was much closer than had hitherto been admitted. Rather than simply making a one-off payment to her, Epstein seems to have bankrolled her for fifteen years, according to emails made public by the US Congress. Those emails also reveal that Fergie begged him for $100,000 to enable her ‘to pay small bills’. It is perhaps unsurprising, in the light of all this, that according to the tranche of emails, Fergie and her daughters were ‘the first to celebrate’ his release from jail in 2009. He had been convicted of soliciting underage sex from girls as young as fourteen. Fergie was clearly desperate for money, but is this the sort of man she wanted her daughters exposed to?
That Fergie was willing to accept money from such a tainted source perhaps reflected her desperate financial situation at the time. By the mid-1990s she reportedly owed her bank £4.2 million, not greatly helped by a somewhat miserly divorce settlement.
Other helpful sums flowed in, such as from David Rowland. He donated £40,000 to the Help The Fergie fund. Rowland was also invited to stay at Balmoral in the summer of 2010, when he had tea with the Queen and the then Prince Charles, and he had a front-row seat at Eugenie’s wedding in 2018.
Her plight was a result of her approach to finance, which was based on a colander model – pour money in at the top and watch it drain away through the holes at the bottom. Spending $25,000 in Bloomingdale’s in one hour cannot have helped.
She has continually sailed close to the wind. In 2009, she was summoned to a UK court over unpaid bills. In 2010, it was reported that she might have to file for bankruptcy, with outstanding debts of at least £2 million.
Also in 2010, there was the shameless attempt to sell access to Andrew for £500,000. She was skewered, and caught on film, by a News of the World reporter, Mazher Mahmood, widely known as the ‘Fake Sheikh’.
‘£500,000 when you can, to me, to open doors. I can bring you great business … Andrew said to me, tell him £500,000.’ She accepted a deposit of $40,000 in a briefcase. According to Vanity Fair, she told Mahmood that she simply wanted ‘a lick of the spoon’. She was also taped saying: ‘Andrew said, “Listen, if he’s going to be kind enough to want to play, then Andrew will play.”’
Andrew subsequently denied any involvement in any of this and when the story broke, Fergie offered to quit Royal Lodge. One senior royal insider quoted in MailOnline observed tartly: ‘We have been here so many times before with the duchess. She’s offered to leave before, but she never goes.’
She also vowed to repay the $40,000 to the News of the World, though as with the money from Epstein, it is not clear she ever did.
In the taped interview with Mahmood, she claimed to be living off the trust funds set up for her daughters Beatrice and Eugenie by the late Queen Mother.
In 2011, she was interviewed on the programme 60 Minutes on Australia’s Channel 9 and was pushed on the episode by the interviewer, Michael Usher. She rather lost it and walked off stage, instructing someone off stage to ‘delete that bit’. In January 2018, it emerged that she was demanding £45 million in damages from News Group, saying she had lost business as a result of the story in the Murdoch paper. Of course, had she not asked for £500,000, there would have been no story.
In 2012, the Ministry of Justice in Turkey issued an arrest warrant for her. This related to a trip she had made to the country in 2008 where she secretly filmed a state orphanage. The Turkish authorities maintained she entered the country under false pretences, trespassed on a Turkish government premises and invaded the privacy of children. The maximum penalty for all this was twenty-two years, but fortunately for Sarah, in order to be extradited from the UK, it was necessary for similar offences to exist in this country and a British judge helpfully ruled that they do not. Sarah apologised from a safe distance.
Fergie may not have become embroiled with such obviously dubious characters as Andrew has, but she has certainly had her share of colourful episodes and endeavours. Some of these idiosyncrasies were harmless, if redolent of a spoilt rock star, such as requiring her butler to rise at 4.30 a.m. to put her watercress on ice. Her business activities were rather more impactful.
She has been involved in a bewildering succession of business enterprises to try to bring the money in. With gusto, she became a representative in the United States for Weight Watchers, a gig that lasted eleven years, giving her about £2 million for twenty-five days’ work each year. She also did the rounds of the after-dinner circuit, picking up £40,000 a time for her appearances. She starred on QVC, a US shopping channel, to promote a £65 juicer, in a programme that aired at midnight. In 2006, she joined forces with American businessman Harry Slatkin to create a range of scented candles. Then there was the year-long contract with the luxury tableware brand Waterford Wedgwood, again in the US, that earned her £500,000. More recently, she has established a Duchess-branded range of products such as homeware and jewellery. Presumably this range will now have to be rebranded as her duchess title has disappeared down the drain.
Less successful was her creation in the US in 2006 of a lifestyle company called Hartmoor LLC. That collapsed within three years, leaving Fergie with debts of around a million dollars.
Also unsuccessful was Rumpel Water, which she had set up in 2020. This was a water-cleansing company aimed at overseas business. It closed in 2022 having never started trading because of Covid.
She also persuaded directors to agree to invest £250,000 in Vvoosh, an internet lifestyle concept headed by her friend Manuel Fernandez, but did not tell her fellow directors of their friendship. As a first step, a £36,000 loan to Mr Fernandez was agreed.
In 2019, the Daily Mail, which has produced some great investigative journalism in this case, got hold of a 2017 handwritten invoice from Fergie for the sum of £200,000. The account into which the money was to be paid was that of a secret offshore bank in the Caribbean.
The terse invoice was for Dr Johnny Hon, the then Hong Kong chair of Gate Ventures, for ‘marketing and promotion as discussed and agreed’. It came just three months before her request to the company for a £90,000 loan.
Then there was her controversial involvement with Gate Ventures, which might well have earned the name Gategate, had that not already been applied to Andrew when he forced his way through gates in Windsor Great Park with his Range Rover, causing thousands of pounds’ worth of damage which eventually fell to the taxpayer.
This film investment company had established a joint venture with Ginger and Moss, an upmarket tea promoter founded by Fergie in March 2015 and subsequently expanded into ‘lifestyle’ products. Ginger and Moss remains active in trading as of April 2025.
Gate Ventures, where Fergie was a director between 2017 and 2019, ended up in the high court after an investor, Zheng Yongxiong, claimed he was owed £2.5 million. Overall, some £24.5 million had been invested in the company, mostly by Chinese investors, yet by June 2019, only about £5 million remained unspent and available. Mr Zheng concluded that £19 million had been ‘lost’. The court placed Gate Ventures in administration.
Sarah Ferguson has always seemed desperate for money, but even so, it is difficult to understand why Gate Ventures, chaired by the credible figure of former BBC chairman (Lord) Michael Grade, would have agreed to make personal and business loans of more than £500,000 to her. The personal element of this came to £287,577, with £232,003 going to Ginger and Moss. The judge questioned whether the loans complied with relevant legislation. Also raised in the court case was the £4,738,174 paid in expenses to Dr Hon, Michael Grade’s predecessor as chair, expenses which the judge called ‘extraordinary’ and ‘remarkable transactions which seem well outside the company’s business’. They included photo opportunities with film stars and the best seats at sporting events.
They also included meetings with senior royals and it emerged that Dr Hon had developed close links with Sarah Ferguson and other members of the royal family, and ones which went beyond Gate Ventures. His website brimmed over with pictures of him with royals, including Kate.
Dr Hon was another interesting guest at Eugenie’s wedding, Like Andrew’s contact Yang Tengbo, Dr Hon has ties to an organisation believed to be a front for the Chinese Communist Party, specifically the snappily named Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee. He has conceded he was vetted by the same organisation that Yang was involved with, namely the United Front Work Department.
He has visited both Russia and its puppet neighbour Belarus to promote Chinese interests, as well as acting as a fixer for the pariah state that is North Korea. His interests include gold mining – in Mongolia?
His own website statement says: ‘Johnny is often consulted by Presidents, Prime Ministers and other state leaders from many countries who value his advice and insights.’
It seems Andrew and his family have settled on China as an important potential source of income for themselves and did not ever seem to question the motivations of the Chinese nationals involved. Do they never wonder why they have been chosen? Do they think it is their innate professionalism and experience?
As it was, Dr Hon paid Fergie £300,000 to be a non-executive director for Global Group of companies, an organisation chaired by him, and a further £72,000 a year to hold a similar role in Dr Hon’s Hong Kong investment company.
Zara Tindall, Princess Anne’s daughter, received £100,000 a year between 2017 and 2018 for ‘advice’ on horse racing for the same company. Her duties were to attend two board meetings a year – by telephone – and four company functions. When confronted about this by the Daily Mail, her lawyer said it was ‘wholly untrue’. But it was that statement that was wholly untrue, as became apparent when the paper produced documentary evidence to the contrary.
Zara’s brother, Peter Phillips, was also a ‘business partner’, specifically the salaried figurehead of a horse racing venture.
In 2020, it was revealed that Sarah Ferguson had drawn up plans for a trilogy of films about royal figures from the past, including Prince Albert. To further the project, she had asked the Queen for permission to access the royal archives to undertake research, permission which was given.
Most recently, she has teamed up with the Italian pen manufacturer Montegrappa, from whom you can even now buy a Duchess of York fountain pen for £1,615.50. According to the publicity blurb, the pen is inspired by nature, featuring designs with elements of the ocean, forest and garden. The pens are presented in a unique portfolio case and include twelve postcards featuring Ferguson’s own nature photography and quotes. Sounds a bargain. The price was reduced by the company by 10 per cent from its original price of £1,795.
In 2025, the Covid inquiry heard that Sarah had offered to try to source personal protective equipment from China through contacts she had there shortly after the first lockdown was imposed. I suppose she cannot have done any worse than Michelle Mone.
In a way, you have to admire Fergie’s irrepressible nature. No matter how calamitous, embarrassing and ill-judged her actions, when she is knocked back, she just gets up again. With her foray into children’s books – and she has now clocked up over twenty titles – she seems to have found a niche that suits her well. And whatever else she done, unlike Harry and Meghan she has not sought to make money from any kiss ’n’ tell about the royal family.
In 2020, there was more financial embarrassment for Andrew when the Charity Commission ruled that the Prince Andrew Charitable Trust had broken the rules by passing large sums of money over to the prince’s household to compensate for time spent by one of his employees on unconnected matters. The Commission ruled that £355,297 had to be returned to the charity and used only for purposes within the charity’s remit. Shortly afterwards, the charity was wound up.
Overall, Andrew, since he left the navy at the age of forty-one in 2001, has behaved in a manner that has destroyed the favourable public perception towards him that had previously existed, not least through his naked greed and the unsavoury circle of friends he has chosen to surround himself with, who would often feed that greed. His reputation is now at rock bottom and irrecoverable. The damage he has inflicted on the royal family is substantial.
The Palace is clearly exasperated by Andrew’s behaviour and by the drip-drip of embarrassing stories appearing in the press. They tell journalists, not for publication as it were, that they have ratcheted up the actions taken to distance Andrew from the rest of the royals – banning him from public engagements, removing him as a working royal, taking away his military roles and now his titles – but he appears to have a hide like a rhinoceros. There is no public awareness of just how unpopular, how despised he is. No self-awareness, no contrition, no shame. Just the same old saloon bar noisy arrogance and sweeping rudeness that has only got worse as his credibility has crumbled. He professes an absolute belief in the monarchy yet is doing more to advance the republican cause than any other person or group of people.
A. N. Wilson, writing in the Mail on Sunday after the 2011 ‘We’re in this together, let’s play more soon’ email emerged, went so far as to suggest that if the king showed him mercy, Britain would be a hair’s breadth from a republic. That looks like an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that the damage is real. My somewhat frivolous suggestion at the time was that he should be made Governor General of the uninhabited British territory of South Georgia.
Andrew, even at this late stage, could secure some reputational credibility by acknowledging his errors, expressing sadness for the death of Virginia Giuffre, and voluntarily leaving Royal Lodge. He could follow the example of John Profumo, who, in 1963 after he was caught out with a call girl, Christine Keeler, retired from public life and dedicated himself to charity work. He volunteered at Toynbee Hall, an east London charity, and became its chief fundraiser. Slowly his reputation was restored and he was awarded a CBE in 1975. The chances of Andrew following such a path, however, look minuscule. His one clumsy attempt came in 2022 when he offered to help charities ‘fight the evils of sex trafficking’. Women’s organisations called it ‘cynical’ and ‘an insult to survivors’. The offer ran into the sand.
He can, however, take comfort that he retains the support of his live-in ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson. ‘He is the greatest man there is,’ she said in 2015. ‘It was the finest moment of my life in 1986 when I married him. He is a great man, the best man in the world.’ Well, they say love is blind.
Meanwhile, spare a thought for the residents of Prince Andrew Way in Ascot, who by 2022 were fed up with the jokes and barbs made at their expense and were pushing for the road to be renamed. One local, James Parrott, quoted in the Daily Mirror, plaintively asked: ‘How do I explain who he is to the kids?’ Nonetheless, the name survived.
Even the seedy Donald Trump, who has played golf with Andrew, has met him many times including at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida, and once lent him a plane, now says: ‘I don’t know Prince Andrew.’
We know him all too well.
ANDREW’S UNSAVOURY CIRCLE
Jeffrey Epstein – convicted child sex offender.
Ghislaine Maxwell – convicted of recruiting and grooming underage girls for sex.
Ilham Aliyev – dictator President of Azerbaijan implicated in rampant corruption, torture and imprisonment of opponents, ethnic cleansing and war crimes.
Sheikh Nasser bin Hamad – son of Bahrain king, accused of torturing democracy campaigners in the 2011 uprising in that country.
Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow – former dictator President of Turkmenistan, one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Timur Kulibayev – immensely rich son-in-law of dictator President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Sakher El Materi – convicted of corruption and sentenced to sixteen years in jail.
Michael Milken – convicted and imprisoned fraudster.
