Entitled

Andrew Lownie’s new book has been getting a lot of attention. I have seen Lownie on so many different podcasts on YouTube that I probably did not need to read it.

I preordered Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York and received it on publication day, August 14 2025. I finished reading it on August 16. I will not go into too much detail. I advise you to read it and/or check out Andrew Lownie on YouTube. It is an entertaining, if sleazy story. There is a lot of detail about the shady financial dealings of both the Duke and the Duchess. It must have been very hard work for Lownie to amass all the evidence (in the face of much resistance) and to disentangle what there had been much effort to keep obscure.

One does not need insider knowledge to conclude that Prince Andrew is a deeply unpleasant person. The well-informed journalist Anthony Holden revealed: ‘Dull. Thick. Couch potato. Pro-am golf and Stallone videos, yawn, yawn. This is the message now coming from Sarah’s camp about the man she once adored … Fergie thought she was marrying Warren Beatty but found herself hitched to Mr Blobby with all the conversational sparkle of Nigel Mansell.’

His Royal Couch Potato

Some concluded that Andrew’s juvenile pranks were part of a coping mechanism because the duke did not have anything interesting to offer to a conversation. “The jokes and general narcissism were a protective layer Andrew hid behind; they stopped him being exposed as ‘a bit thick and boring’ during more open-ended conversation. ‘I heard of him once boring guests virtually to tears with a serious tale about the failings of the traffic light system in Westminster.’”

He had some kind of sexual contact (apparently) with thousands of women but never made any normal human engagement. “Andrew’s driver would often gossip about his important guest, revealing it was not just women who would be invited to party with the duke. He also had a thing for effeminate young men in their twenties.”

The Duke and Duchess squandered the taxpayers’ money with gay abandon and did not provide value for money. During 1987 Fergie carried out only 55 public engagements compared to the Princess Royal’s 429. ”Fergie’s brief career as Her Royal Highness The Duchess of York was ‘a vulgar extended holiday – the embarrassments endless, each one more cringe-worthy than the last…’” The Sun ran a telephone poll: ‘Would you rather date Fergie or a goat?’ Seven to one voted for the goat.

An accountant brought in to cut costs asked one member of staff what he did, and received the reply: ‘I pick up the dog shit.’ ‘And you?’ he asked, pointing to the person beside him. ‘I help him.’

Their Royal Grifters

One thing that struck me immediately was that the Greater Orange Grifter himself seems a rank beginner in the grifting business compared to the British Royal Family. The Guardian has done a deep investigation of how the Crown hides its finances from the taxpayer. Lownie’s book shows that the Queen was not beyond criticism in her attempts to protect her favourite son.

“Sarah had launched her own brand of luxury household goods in America. Her ‘Duchess Originals’ – a play on Prince Charles’s Duchy Originals – included teaspoons and bed linen. She was on the books of Twenty-First Century Speakers, charging $55,000 a speech, plus first-class expenses for two. There was talk she might compete in Dancing with the Stars, the American version of Strictly Come Dancing, with her star turn the tango. A senior TV industry executive said that success could make her a household name in the US.” Is this any classier than Trump’s gold plated trainers or all the other Trump Tatt?

Note that it is not just Fergie who has an eye for the main chance. Her unlovely husband was a clumsy grifter on a grand scale but so were his brothers and his mother. Prince Edward has been accused of using his royal connections for financial gain. Industry insiders have referred to Edward's production company, Ardent, as "a sad joke" with a perceived lack of professionalism in its operations.

“Buckingham Palace had been charging £8 million a year for dinners, dances and fashion shows, often attended by members of the Royal Family, and that Andrew had been hosting dinners or lunches at the Palace for representatives from the financial sector, including JP Morgan and Barclays every few months for the previous five years. He had also hosted a dinner at Windsor for more than three hundred internet tycoons, artists and musicians in the summer of 2013. St James’s Palace had been rented out at £30,000 a day during the London Olympics. These contacts would prove to be useful for the prince’s own private business activities.”

The Prince and Cruella

Andrew’s (and Fergie’s) links to Epstein and Trump go back much further than he has admitted. Andrew’s occasional sexual partner Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20 year sentence for sex trafficking of minors, has known the perverted prince for a long time. There has long been speculation about how Andrew can afford his crassly opulent life style.

Andrew’s lifestyle could be traced back to his relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell. He had been on eight different breaks with her, with Jeffrey Epstein joining them on five of them. It has been suggested the connections go even further back and that Robert Maxwell, before his death, entrusted Epstein with up to $20 million to hide from creditors. The flight logs of Epstein’s plane alone, known as the Lolita Express because it flew so many young girls, reveal the duchess travelled on it with Epstein. Whatever the exact dates of their first meeting, Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew had become business contacts and friends, united by a shared interest in money and sex.

Mountbatten Was the Mounter not the Mounted

I have read another biography by Andrew Lownie: The Mountbattens. Lord Louis Mountbatten (Dickie) was idolised by King Charles III. Dickie was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, an uncle of Prince Philip, whose dynastic prospects he advanced, and eventually ‘honorary grandfather’ to Prince Charles, who was alone in thinking him ‘incredibly honest’.

In a convention that I cannot hope to understand, many royals bear the surname “Mountbatten-Windsor.” "Prince Andrew was born on 19 February 1960 at Buckingham Palace, the first issue to a reigning monarch since Queen Victoria gave birth to Princess Beatrice in 1857. Christened Andrew (after his paternal grandfather Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark) Albert (after his maternal grandfather) Christian Edward (after his two great-great-grandfathers Christian IX of Denmark and Edward VII), he was the first royal to take the surname Mountbatten-Windsor in defiance of a promise by which the Queen had agreed that her descendants would take the name Windsor."

Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife Edwina led lives far more scandalous that those led by Andy and Fergie. Mountbatten was a prolific myth-maker, presenting himself in person, print and film as a peerless national hero. Field Marshal Templer once told him, “Dickie, you’re so crooked that if you swallowed a nail, you’d shit a corkscrew!” Field Marshal Sir Francis Festing told Field Marshall Lord Carver, “If the front door was wide open, Dickie would still prefer to come down the chimney.”

For David Cannadine, “there was about almost everything Mountbatten did an element of the makeshift, the insubstantial, the incomplete, and the disingenuous, a disquieting gap between the promise and the performance that no amount of bravura on his part could ever quite conceal.”

I will go into more detail about Mountbatten elsewhere, but there are similarities with Andrew - lack of empathy , hints of autism and narcissism in his make-up. Churchill’s biographer Andrew Roberts described Mountbatten as “a mendacious, intellectually limited hustler . . . promoted wildly above his abilities, with consistently disastrous consequences”.

The con man and murderer Archibald Hall (also known as Roy Fontaine) claimed to have been Mountbatten’s lover during the war. Fontaine’s biographer Paul Pender asked him , “You mean – you mounted Mountbatten?” Fontaine responded, “Mountbatten mounted me. He believed it better to give than to receive.”

Dickie was based in Ceylon during WW II as Supreme Allied Commander. My Sri Lankan readers might be interested to know what Lownie reveals about Dickie’s predilection for brown-skinned boys.

The former Conservative minister Keith Joseph had said that “Mountbatten had affairs with many young sailors whilst at sea – he said such liaisons were perfectly normal for men at sea; but he said that Mountbatten also bedded countless women . . . Mountbatten’s sexuality seemed to be an open secret.”

One wonders if his death in Ireland at the hands of the Provos had anything to do with his alleged abuse of under-aged boys from the Kincora boys home in Belfast.