King may allow disgraced Andrew to use royal estates for shooting days and horse-riding

Charles III’s patience with his brother may have snapped after a wave of fresh revelations about his friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – but it does not extend to banning him from using royal estates to go shooting with his friends, or horse riding.

Andrew, 65, will still be able to use the taxpayer-funded royal estate at Windsor Castle and the monarch’s private residences at Sandringham and Balmoral for his favourite sports and pastimes, according to well-placed sources.

The disgraced prince cannot be moved from Royal Lodge, the 30-room mansion in Windsor Great Park he has leased from the independently managed crown estate until 2078, and on which he made a one-off payment of £1m in lieu of rent and spent £7.5m on repairs in 2003. The king is reported to have tried to pressure Andrew into moving out by cutting his £1m annual allowance and estimated £3m security, but has no control over the crown estate, an arms-length property empire that hands all its profits to the Treasury. His brother has insisted he has sufficient private income to stay there.

Palace officials, who refused to discuss whether Andrew would ever lose access to the royal estates, hope that the king and Prince William’s efforts to force Andrew to relinquish the use of his titles and honours, including his knighthood in the Order of the Garter, will take the heat out of a controversy that hit fever pitch last week after the publication of an email showing that the prince had lied about cutting ties with Epstein.

In his disastrous BBC Newsnight interview in November 2019, Andrew claimed he had ended all contact with Epstein in 2010. Last weekend, it was reported that he wrote to Epstein in an email in 2011 telling him to keep in close touch, adding: “and we’ll play some more soon”.

The email, coupled with extracts from a forthcoming posthumous memoir by Virginia Giuffre, in which she gives an account of how she had sex with Andrew after having been trafficked aged 17 – something he denies – appears to have provoked the king and William to act. But it may not be enough to stem the reputational damage to the monarchy. Daphne Barak, one of the journalists who broke the story about the 2011 email, has claimed there are more to come.

The Mail on Sunday today reported that it had seen an email saying that Andrew asked his taxpayer-funded Met bodyguard to investigate Giuffre and passed him her date of birth and confidential social security number. He then told Ed Perkins, Queen Elizabeth’s deputy press secretary, that he had asked one of his personal protection officers to dig up information about Giuffre, adding that “it would also seem she has a criminal record in the States”.

It is not suggested that the officer complied with the prince’s request, or that she did, in fact, have a criminal record.

Andrew, who has faced accusations that he used his taxpayer-funded royal role as a cover to conduct private deals, has also been dragged into the Chinese spy controversy at Westminster after it emerged he had met a senior Beijing official, who is alleged to be a spymaster, three times.

Andrew shares Royal Lodge with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, who must now stop using the courtesy title of Duchess of York. She removed any reference to being a duchess from her social media accounts this weekend.

New Frontier Publishing, which was due to publish another children’s book by Ferguson on 9 October, postponed the launch until 20 November and has now deleted all references to her books on its website. Andrew retains the right to be called a prince, as the son of a monarch, and his daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, will continue to be called princesses. Unlike their parents, they will still be welcome to join the rest of the royal family at Sandringham at Christmas.

Buckingham Palace declined to discuss whether Andrew would retain use of the royal estates.

Photograph by Manish Swarup/AP