Her Majesty, 95, reportedly agreed to pay for Andrew’s defence at the beginning of last year, shortly after his disastrous Newsnight interview, in which he failed to show any empathy for Epstein’s victims or regret over their friendship. The funds have been sourced from her annual income from her private Duchy of Lancaster estate, which recently increased by £1.5 million to more than £23 million. This is on top of the £250,000 annual stipend she gives Andrew to top up his £20,000-a-year Royal Navy pension.
Yet with the allegations having left his reputation in tatters, whatever the outcome of the proceedings, there remain serious concerns about how the “grand old Duke of York” is going to get back on an even fiscal keel.
As one source put it: “The Duke is currently totally dependent on the Queen but that surely cannot go on forever. The trouble is the Yorks’ outgoings are still huge. Andrew is still paying for Beatrice and Eugenie’s private bodyguards.”
Then there’s Fergie, who was reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy in 2010 following a string of failed business deals and after being caught in a News of the World sting trying to sell access to Andrew to a reporter posing as a sheik, for £500,000.
“It doesn’t matter how much money she has, it just seems to slip through her fingers. They are not in a great place right now,” added the insider.
Mr Rowland is not the first multi-millionaire to have lent money over the years. In May 2011, the Duchess apologised for a “gigantic error in judgment” in accepting a £15,000 loan from Epstein to pay off her debts. Two months later, the Duke stepped down as the UK’s trade envoy after it emerged he had stayed at the disgraced financial adviser’s Manhattan mansion after he had been imprisoned for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Andrew’s judgement had already been called into question for holding meetings with Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saif, and for entertaining the son-in-law of Tunisia’s ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali at Buckingham Palace. Eyebrows were also raised after he took Mr Rowland’s businessman’s son, Jonathan, on trade envoy missions to China and Saudi Arabia.
And then there was the intriguing matter of the Duke managing to sell Sunninghill Park, the Yorks’ marital home, for £3m more than its £12m asking price in 2007 to Timor Kulibayev, the son-in-law of the President of Kazakhstan.
The Yorks do not pay any rent on Royal Lodge, the freehold of which is owned by the Crown Estate, after spending £7.5 million renovating the Grade II listed 30-room property in 2003. They are also understood to get favourable leasing deals on their Range Rovers.
Nevertheless, cash flow has been a problem since the Duke stepped down as a working royal “for the foreseeable future” in November 2019, following that Newsnight appearance. The damaging tete a tete with the BBC’s Emily Maitlis also cost him Pitch@Palace, the Dragons Den-style mentoring network that had helped to rehabilitate his image, as well as facilitating a continuation of the jet-set lifestyle that earned him the nickname Air Miles Andy.
