Didn’t we toss these decadent losers oh, 150 years ago?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/24/andrew-mountbatten-windsor-biographer-andrew-lownie-entitled

The Saturday morning I meet Andrew Lownie, the author of “the most devastating royal biography ever written” (according to the Daily Mail), the front page of every newspaper carries the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Some have aerial shots of the police arriving to search his home, most including the now infamous photograph of his face in the back of his car. He looks hunted, because he literally has been, but his expression is curiously blank, its most legible emotion grievance. One journalist, Lownie says, reported late on the night of Friday’s arrest that: “Andrew still can’t see what the problem is. He thinks he’s been hard done by. He’s obsessed with other details – whether he can take his horses up to Norfolk, who’s going to get the dogs, where he’s going to park his car. It’s a sort of disassociation.”
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.”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.

There was a complaint going back years from a royal protection officer on the north gate of Buckingham Palace, who said, as Lownie describes it: “We were concerned that prostitutes were being brought in; we weren’t being given names.” (This witness, Paul Page, was himself found guilty of fraud, “but that doesn’t invalidate what he says”, Lownie continues). In 2006, representing the British monarchy at King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s diamond jubilee celebrations in Bangkok, Andrew was said to have had more than 10 girls a day going in to his room at the Grand Hyatt Erawan. “Often, as soon as one left, another would arrive,” the Reuters correspondent reported, “and this was all juggled amid official engagements.” Throughout Mountbatten-Windsor’s time as special representative for international trade and investment, ambassadors would feed back that he was a liability, rude and visibly bored at official engagements. His staff often requested attractive women be invited to events, to which “one consul replied, ‘I’m a diplomat, not a pimp,’” according to Entitled. “One bean-counter had complained about Andrew’s expenses,” Lownie says, “querying whether he could put massages on the taxpayer’s tab, and it was pushed through. We’ve been paying for happy endings for Andrew for years.” These warnings were unheeded: “There was a safe at the Foreign Office to keep all this stuff,” Lownie says.

There’s more, but this should be disgusting enough to go on..