Prince Andrew’s friendship with convicted sex offender and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has been back in the news recently, following the posthumous publication of the memoir of his sexual assault accuser, Virginia Giuffre. In the book, Giuffre details having sex three times with Andrew, in London, New York and on Epstein’s private island. Andrew has denied the claims.
Andrew has been slowly frozen out of royal life since his disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis, in which he cited a spurious Pizza Express alibi and a medical condition that prevents perspiration to undermine the allegation that he was ‘dripping with sweat’ after dancing. After the interview, it was announced that he was suspending his royal public duties. The most recent allegations have led to his being stripped of his peerage titles (including his title, the Duke of York) and the honours conferred upon him, and there is mounting pressure on him to give up his home in Royal Lodge, for which he pays ‘peppercorn’ rent.
Andrew’s involvement with Epstein, and the extreme extent of Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise, is obviously a particular case. It is symptomatic of elite men being able to sexually exploit women with impunity in a society which privileges men’s reputations over women’s right to exist free from harm.
But Andrew is not a royal exception, and this doesn’t mean that the rest of the monarchy is unproblematic.
Royal privileges
The royals have been quick to distance themselves from Andrew, and of course, they may well be equally disgusted by his behaviour. And I am not claiming here that other royals have behaved similarly. But the notion that entitlement and privilege are exceptional within the monarchy is a fabrication, born from an ideology that the royals ‘serve the nation’, as I explore in my recent book What Is the Monarchy For?
Take the so-called ‘peppercorn’ rent that Andrew pays on Royal Lodge as an example. This pittance payment comes from a ‘grace-and-favour’ agreement. This is where a property owned by a monarch or a government can be leased rent-free to someone in return for their employment or services. Chequers, the country house of the prime minister of the United Kingdom, is one such example.
Andrew is far from being the only person benefiting from royal grace and favour. Prince Michael of Kent and his wife Princess Michael have been living in an apartment in Kensington Palace since 1979. In the early 2000s, a House of Commons Public Accounts Committee found they were paying just £69 per week in rent. This is despite not carrying out any official duties for the Crown (in comparison to people like the Prince and Princess of Wales, for example, who count as ‘working royals’ and have several grace-and-favour properties). In 2010, it was announced that the Kents would start paying £120,000 per year. But given that young people are being increasingly forced out of London due to surging rent costs and house price inflation, grace and favour shows us that royal exceptionalism is alive and well.
Rob Evans, a reporter for The Guardian who has undertaken excellent investigative work on royal assets, recently probed Andrew’s finances. He found that Andrew’s only officially declared income is the pension he gets from his time in the navy, which is said to be around £20,000 a year. As he points out, this income would not pay for the 40-hectare Royal Lodge, nor the Swiss chalet he procured in 2014 for £18 million.
But, again, murky royal finances are not unique to Andrew. As I explore in What Is the Monarchy For?, royal funding and wealth is an extremely complex area. Royal wills are kept sealed, which means that we cannot access full information on the personal assets of royals.
Furthermore, the legal status of royal property portfolios is unclear. The Duchy of Cornwall, the property portfolio of the heir to the throne, is not legally a registered company, and is therefore not liable for corporation tax, but nor is it a charity or a public body (despite being accountable to the Treasury and to Parliament). It benefits from the unique privileges of Crown exemption, meaning it need not pay capital gains tax, inheritance tax or income tax. This nebulous status means it can act like a corporate company, a charity and a public body all at once, exploiting the status of each one to give itself the most favourable deal.
Secrecy isn’t new either. Historian Andrew Lownie submitted hundreds of freedom of information requests during the writing of his book Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, and all were refused. Many journalists and academics have had similar experiences when trying to access royal information, and indeed, the Duchy of Cornwall’s annual reports describe it as a ‘private estate’, which means it is not subject to the Freedom of Information law at all.
Rob Evans tackles how Andrew has allegedly exploited his official role as the government’s international trade representative to cut commercial deals for himself with wealthy individuals around the world. The furore around this seemed partly to be about a supposition that royals should be above seedy corporate worlds.
But while there is no evidence of wrongdoing, other royals have made use of corporate investments, interests and contacts. Zara Tindall has a sponsorship deal with Rolex, and Peter Phillips was criticised for a Jersey milk advert he made for Chinese television, where he promoted the product from a grand stately home meant to evoke royalty. These examples also make use of the royal ‘brand’ for commercial gain.
Sorting out the Andrew problem
The removal of privileges from Andrew is welcome and very long overdue. The royals have sheltered Andrew for decades, with the Queen allegedly paying the financial settlement to Virginia Giuffre in 2022 out of her private funds. It is high time Andrew is held accountable for his actions – and surely having his royal privileges removed is the very least of penalties for someone who should have been subject to legal scrutiny a long time ago.
But we shouldn’t think ‘sorting out the Andrew problem’ means the rest of the monarchy can continue untouched. The monarchy is a deeply privileged and entitled institution. If we really want to tackle the root of the problem, we need to address alternatives to monarchical power in the 21st century.
Laura Clancy is a lecturer in media in the sociology department, Lancaster University. Her research focuses on issues of inequality, particularly ‘the elites’ and the monarchy.
What Is the Monarchy For? by Laura Clancy is available on Bristol University Press for £8.99 here.
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