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Battle for the Royal Lodge: How Prince Andrew has taken up a very nerdy hobby in his palatial Windsor home while he refuses to be ousted... as senior royals take sides, writes RICHARD KAY
Little by little Prince Andrew is being prised out of Royal Lodge, his palatial Windsor home. The latest revelation that the King is no longer prepared to meet the cost of providing its security is surely a sign that his brother's grip on the mansion is loosening.
And yet there has been barely a murmur of protest, not even from those staunch friends who usually like to remind observers at such times that the Duke of York has a 'cast iron' 75-year lease on the property he inherited on the death of his grandmother, the Queen Mother.
Was this, then, the moment that Andrew finally threw in the towel, acknowledging that the loss of the ten-man privately funded guards who patrol the grounds of the house and its 98-acre estate means he can no longer afford to safely stay there?
Or will he produce yet another rabbit from the hat – as he did when he came up with £200,000 for essential repairs to the roof – in order to remain in the place he considers his family home and where he likes to entertain his three grandchildren?
Meeting the bill for security guards on anything like the scale that the King has would seem to be beyond him.
Charles, after all, has been paying it ever since Andrew's £3million-a-year armed police detail was removed by the Home Office after he stepped down from official duties amid the scandal over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Little by little Prince Andrew is being prised out of Royal Lodge, where he has lived since 2003
With no discernible income beyond a modest Royal Navy pension, Andrew also relies on his brother for a living allowance, thought to be in excess of £1million a year.
If he were to lose that handout too, he would not just be funding his own security but also the housekeepers, butlers and gardeners (plus the constant renovations) that make Royal Lodge such a desirable and comfortable retreat. In its grandiose magnitude, the 31-room pile has come to define both the prince's extravagance and his folly. And now, it seems, his future.
For Andrew, with all his years of princely entitlement, however, it is not just a matter of prestige. Royal Lodge has been his family home since 2003. It's where his daughters Beatrice and Eugenie enjoyed their teenage years and where his ex-wife Fergie still lives with him in an amicable post-divorce arrangement.
And it provided him with a much-needed refuge after his royal world collapsed amid the storm over his links to the American financier Epstein, who killed himself in prison five years ago.
For most of the 21 years of his occupancy there was no threat to his tenure but the death of Queen Elizabeth changed all that. Even after his disgrace, his mother had no wish to force him out. But his brother, who now controls the royal purse strings, takes the view that a house with such a historic pedigree should be the residence of working royals.
And having lost his military titles and patronages, Andrew is no longer one.
To the King, who hates idleness, the optics of a man such as Andrew – who spends his days riding, practising his golf swing and, extraordinarily, immersed in an airline flight app – residing in such a grand manner are not good either.
That the King is no longer prepared to meet the cost of providing security at Royal Lodge is surely a sign that his brother's grip on the mansion is loosening
His outings are few these days and tend to involve trips to the Windsor Castle mews, where grooms regularly saddle a horse for him to ride out in the park – sometimes Prince Edward loyally joins him – and to the private golf course in the castle grounds he helped lay out.
This year, an additional diversion, I understand, has been a live flight tracker, which he has projected – via his home computer – on to a large screen which shows air traffic in real time.
The one-time helicopter pilot – commended for his bravery in the Falklands War flying decoy missions to draw Argentine missiles away from the ships of the British task force – is able to watch flights landing and taking off at airports all over the globe. According to a visitor to Royal Lodge, the prince has become obsessed by the app beloved of planespotter nerds.
What makes this saga so endlessly fascinating is that Andrew and Charles have this week been together under one roof at Balmoral Castle, where the Royal Family are gathered for their traditional summer holiday.
But it would be wrong to assume that the housing issue was a topic of conversation between the King and his brother. Indeed, it may not even have been raised. 'Charles does not like confrontation at the best of times and especially when he is on holiday,' says a friend. 'They are not in each other's pockets at Balmoral and probably only regularly see one another at dinner.
'This summer the King needs rest more than ever. The cancer treatment has been tiring and it makes him often fall asleep. I can't think of anything guaranteed to make him go off the deep end than to have Royal Lodge brought up.'
It is also likely that Camilla will be protecting her husband to ensure he doesn't get upset or exhausted. 'At Christmas, Andrew did try to get a meeting with the King and she kept him at arm's length,' says the friend.
So what is to be done and, if he is to leave, who might replace the duke as occupant of a house steeped in royal memories? (It is where the Queen Mother went to find solace after the premature death of her husband King George VI in 1952 and which she later turned into a vibrant social salon.) The obvious tenants to replace him would be the Prince and Princess of Wales, who live with their children, George, Charlotte and Louis, in Adelaide Cottage, a much more modest establishment on another part of the Windsor estate.
Andrew's outings are few these days and tend to involve trips to the Windsor Castle mews, where grooms regularly saddle a horse for him to ride out in the park
But William is not interested in the property, at least not at the moment when all his focus is on Kate's health as she battles her cancer diagnosis. William has also ruefully conceded that occupying yet another royal mansion – he already has a substantial Kensington Palace apartment and Anmer Hall near Sandringham in Norfolk – is not a good look for a prince who campaigns against homelessness.
Charles has entertained the thought of offering Royal Lodge to his youngest brother Prince Edward. The two haven't always seen eye to eye but the King has been hugely impressed by the manner in which Edward and his wife Sophie have increased their workload since their elevation to Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh.
The couple have filled in the many gaps created by the absence of both Kate and himself while they underwent cancer treatment. The Edinburghs, however, have their own home, Bagshot Park, which they hold on a long lease from the Crown Estate, and insiders suggest that transplanting them into Royal Lodge could dramatically disrupt family dynamics. It is also significant that Edward and Princess Anne have both quietly supported their brother Andrew's desire to carry on where he is.
All this, of course, hardly matters if Prince Andrew refuses to move. And there is, I understand, one crucial – and possibly overlooked – factor that governs this royal obstinacy.
For Andrew views any attempt to force him to move as being an acceptance of his guilt, a sign that he has done something wrong.
And he has never ceased insisting that the claims against him are untrue.
In 2022, he paid a reported £9.4million to sex abuse accuser Virginia Giuffre to settle a US civil trial after she said the prince had sexually assaulted her three times when she was 17, a claim which he vehemently denies. 'It is fundamental to Andrew,' says a friend. 'He sees the idea of him being forced to leave his home as a punishment. And it would be a punishment for something he hasn't done.'
Among senior courtiers, though, his continued presence at Royal Lodge is not just an embarrassment but a persistent source of public criticism for the monarchy.
For more than a year, there has been a steady drip, drip, drip of briefings to the effect that the prince must leave Royal Lodge and, until very recently, Andrew has always pushed back.
In June, it was reported that he had plans to bequeath the lease on the house to his daughters after his death. It runs until 2078 when it is due to return to the Crown Estate.
Earlier this year, insiders were quoted as saying that there were 'limits of patience and tolerance' over how long the situation could continue and a not-so-friendly warning had been issued by a source close to the monarch.
His ex-wife Fergie still lives with him in Windsor in an amicable post-divorce arrangement
'Unfortunately, if Andrew refuses to leave within a reasonable time frame, then the King may be forced to reassess the whole package of support he provides and the duke would be required to fund the lion's share of his security, accommodation and lifestyle costs all on his own – which, given the sums involved, is highly unlikely to be possible in the long term.' It was also revealed that, under the terms of his lease, Andrew had to repaint the exterior of the house 'with two coats of paint' every five years.
This was clearly designed to ramp up the pressure on the duke but his friends responded with some fine print of their own.
'The facts remain the facts,' said one. 'He's got a long lease...it's in perfectly good repair because they spent the lion's share of the sale of their previous home [Sunninghill Park] renovating it from top to bottom, thereby saving any draw on the public purse or the private finances of the Royal Family. Them's the facts.'
This response appeared to dash hopes that Andrew would move out voluntarily. 'That has been the King's wish all along,' says a Household figure.
'That his brother could keep face by saying it was his decision to downsize. It's still his wish.' After this week's revelation that the private security firm contract would end in October, the pressure on Andrew has ratcheted up.
And if he were to go, where would he end up? The King would like him to take on the vacant Frogmore Cottage, the spacious, lavishly refurbished and barely used former home of Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex.
The clear advantage of such an arrangement for Charles is that Frogmore falls within the taxpayer-funded Windsor security envelope and there would be no need for additional costly private guards.
Andrew has rejected such a move once already, another reason why accepting it now may be humiliating for him. Remnants of his old life, meanwhile, remain: he does appear at private royal events and, as we know, he still receives invitations to seasonal holidays at Balmoral as well as Sandringham.
Andrew is not by nature introspective but one regret, say friends – and it's an issue which goes to the heart of his predicament – is that he failed to secure a property in his own name (where he would have been untouchable) while the Queen was alive.
Among courtiers, the talk is that, if and when Andrew leaves, letting Royal Lodge commercially for a few years would be the best outcome. It would require a tenant with deep pockets who could restore it and pay a premium for the address.
It has happened before. The late food and retail tycoon Galen Weston took on Fort Belvedere, the Duke of Windsor's old bolthole, and financed a complete renovation. The cost-conscious King is understood to favour such a move for a short time.
But that can only happen if Andrew actually packs his bags and moves out.
Friends of Charles believe the solution to the Andrew problem all comes down to money. 'If he wants him out he may simply have to pay his brother to leave,' says one bluntly.
For all the sensitivities around the status-conscious Andrew, one old friend drew a parallel with another troubled prince similarly shorn of his royal privileges, the duke's nephew Harry.
'At least,' he said, 'Andrew hasn't been desperate enough to do a quasi-royal visit to Colombia.'