‘Many would have preferred this book not to be written, including the Yorks themselves.’ So Andrew Lownie begins his coruscating examination of the lives of Prince Andrew and Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, which has excited significant media attention due to its scandalous revelations. Lownie, a historian and literary agent, has pivoted away from an earlier, more conventional career as a biographer of John Buchan and Guy Burgess to the self-appointed role of royal botherer-in-chief. After earlier, similarly scabrous books about the Mountbattens and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, he now finds his first contemporary targets, and the results are predictably marmalade-dropping.
Prince Andrew’s decline in public popularity over the past decade, exacerbated by stories of his ill-considered friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and rumours of the sexual abuse of the underage Virginia Giuffre, was capped by his disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview with a disgusted-looking Emily Maitlis, in which he tried and failed to salvage his reputation with a series of bizarre admissions that made him look both stupid and sinister. Today, he has an uneasy relationship with members of the wider royal family, who would like to be shot of him but are reluctant to cast off one of their own; and suspicions persist that it will only take one more scandal for him to be banished to reputational Siberia.
Entitled, then, is designed to serve two complementary but distinct purposes. It is the first serious attempt to deal with the life story of a grotesque man who was nicknamed ‘Baby Grumpling’ shortly after his birth in 1960. He was his mother’s favourite child, but even she acknowledged that he was ‘not always a little ray of sunshine about the house’. The bullying, arrogant boy who would rhetorically ask his Gordonstoun contemporaries ‘You do know who I am?’ would grow up a lonely, essentially friendless figure. Even the knowledge that ‘Randy Andy’ was, in the words of one former lover, ‘a well-built gentleman’ would eventually become his undoing. Lownie writes that Andrew reputedly slept with more than 1,000 women, of whom by far the most notorious (supposedly) was Giuffre, who eventually won an out-of-court settlement rumoured to have been around £10 million.
But Entitled also aims to delve beneath the benignly useless exterior of Ferguson – described by one source as ‘all high jinks and jolly hockey sticks and practical jokes’. Lownie suggests she is rather a pitiful figure who has clung to her ex-husband’s coat-tails in an attempt to maintain her status and income alike. She has always suffered insecurity about her appearance and weight, but her financial illiteracy was such that a court case revealed: ‘Sarah had explained her actions by saying she was drunk, was trying to help a friend and in debt.’ Perhaps only drink could account for the decision to write a series of lifestyle books entitled Madame Pantaloon.
Lownie achieves the near
impossible: one almost feels sorry for Prince Andrew
Yet if Fergie comes across as an essentially comic character, the Duke of York is a villain. Lownie clearly loathes the man, who is depicted in the most unflattering light at virtually every turn. If one contemporary attempts to excuse the worst of his behaviour as being driven by shyness or a desire to help friends, another source, usually anonymous, will testify to his arrogance or snobbery or some other unpleasant trait. He gets some grudging credit for his courage during the Falklands War, in which he participated as a helicopter pilot; but it is made clear that the exaggerated reporting of his exploits was driven more by duty than genuine admiration. And by the time we are offered a minutely detailed account of his Epstein-triggered disgrace and downfall, Lownie achieves the near impossible: one almost feels sorry for Prince Andrew.
This is not a book that any of the royal family will enjoy reading. There are casually delivered revelations, such as Prince Philip having had an adulterous affair with Ferguson’s mother Susan in the 1960s, that no other biographer has ever made public. And there is a discussion of Andrew and Harry having a fight in 2013, following which Harry allegedly told William how much he hated his uncle Andrew. Lownie concludes cheerily: ‘It is ironic that the Duke and Duchess of York, ostensibly the strongest defenders of the monarchy, may through their behaviour between them have done most to hasten its demise.’ It is hard not to believe that the author would relish such a downfall.
One cannot help wondering whether Entitled, which combines high-minded contempt and bitchy gossip in readable but seldom inspired prose, is the precursor to another, yet more scandalous account by Lownie of the younger members of the royal family, specifically Harry and Meghan. Perhaps it will be called Dumb and Dumber. In any case, this is a fascinating if oddly joyless book that will no doubt sell in huge quantities. But be prepared to feel queasy after this wallow in the dark side of noblesse oblige.
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