(Andrew) Lownie’s office, in his home a stone’s throw from parliament, is a monument to the success of his book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York (along with his other books: one on the Mountbattens, one on Guy Burgess, one to come on Prince Philip). One desk is piled high with books about Andrew and Sarah, some of them by Ferguson herself, others warts-and-all, kiss-and-tell accounts from confidants and clairvoyants. Lownie has stacks of rejected freedom of information requests, from UK Trade and Investment; the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office; the Information Commissioner – “They sometimes took so long to respond that they haven’t even downloaded the request before it expires.” He approached 3,000 people from all the way through Mountbatten-Windsor’s life; only a tenth of them would speak to him, which to me feels quite unsurprising, and yet Lownie is indignant. “I wrote to ambassadors, and they said ‘not interested’. This was a matter of public interest. Others, very cheerily when I wrote to them a third time, said ‘nice try’, as if it was some sort of joke. These are the guys I want in the dock, in parliament, on oath. This is the thing that makes me upset. I, perhaps naively, expect standards in public life.”
Entitled was published last year, after four years of research. It builds a cradle-to-police-station picture (he is now updating the book for a new edition) of a royal whose long association with a known child sex offender may look like the nadir of his behaviour, but is also completely congruous with a priapic, exploitative and money-grubbing life in which nothing was ever refused him.
Before her death by suicide last year, Virginia Giuffre stated that she had been trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Mountbatten-Windsor, and raped by him on three occasions as a minor (under US law) when she was 16 and 17. The third time was an orgy on Epstein’s island at which girls were present whom she believed to be underage, but didn’t know for certain because they spoke no English. After a review, the Metropolitan police said last December that it would not be launching a formal criminal investigation into Giuffre’s allegations about Mountbatten-Windsor, which he has denied. He claimed first that he had “no recollection of ever meeting this lady”; then, after a photo emerged of them together, that he was “at a loss to explain this particular photograph”. She brought a civil case against him in 2021, which he settled out of court the following year on no admission of liability. There has been no transparency over the amount, though the figure of £2m to Giuffre’s chosen charity, fighting sex trafficking, is known to have come from the queen. King Charles’s office has always denied that he contributed to Giuffre’s own settlement – estimated at between £7m and £12m – but “since he was running the show with the queen [by 2022], he must have been aware of what was going on,” Lownie says. If 2022 was an obvious moment to strip Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal title, it was by no means the first.