The man formerly known as Prince Andrew but in future will be just plain old Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, is undoubtedly a grifter, willing to trade on his title and the connections generated by his family connections to fund his greed and lust for a lavish lifestyle. But the public revelations of his association with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his sexual relations with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a young women whom Epstein offered to him and other men, has been too much for the current king who has set about cutting him loose from the family, at least publicly.
The entitled behavior of people like Windsor is usually something that is learned at an early age. It is said that he was the favorite child of the late queen who indulged him and protected him and partially funded his lifestyle, though his greed for even more led him into all manner of shady deals with shady people. Throughout his life, there have been questions about how he and his now ex-wife Sarah Ferguson funded their luxurious lifestyle, which includes the upkeep of the 30-room Royal Lodge described as “a Georgian mansion sitting in 40 hectares of secluded grounds in Windsor Great Park” for which he paid no rent, or in 2014 to buy for £18 million a chalet in Switzerland. On top of this was the lavish lifestyle that he enjoyed.
There is little doubt that the former queen and the current king would have been aware that he was up to no good, at least financially if not sexually. And they would likely have continued to turn a blind eye if Roberts Giuffre had not come forward with her revelations. But knowing that ultimately, the continuance of the parasitic lifestyle of the royal family depends upon public support even while they work hard to keep their wealth and finances shrouded in secrecy, the current king has decided to cut him loose, at least publicly, by stripping him of all his titles, including one of being an honorary admiral, even forcing him to leave the Royal Lodge.
But do not worry that Windsor will be out in the streets. He will still be comfortably off.
It is understood that Andrew will move to a property on the private Sandringham estate in Norfolk, to be privately funded by the king.
His ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, will also move out of Royal Lodge and will sort out her own living arrangements.
Given Windsor’s history and his desire for moving among the wealthy, I do not think he will fade quietly into the woodwork. He will try to work some other grifts and cause further embarrassment to the family.
He should have to revert back to the old house name to further distance himself from the current one, he should have to use the name Andreas Battenberg Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
I find all of the discussion about his finances very strange… Like, is it really a mystery how this scion of one of the most famously and permanently wealthy families in the world funds his lavish lifestyle? I read a piece in the Guardian the other day, that was all about how they couldn’t square his obvious spending with any of his known income, and it wasn’t until the third last paragraph that they even mentioned the idea that he might have some form of wealth -- i.e. investment assets that provide a yield. Gee, ya think? And that was literally it.
Do people really just not understand the concept of wealth, as distinct from income? That there are people in this world sitting on vast, dragon-like hoards of assets, that yield more passive income in a week than most of us will ever earn in our entire lives?
His “desire for moving among the wealthy”? He’s a member of the British royal family! You might as well talk about the desire of fish to move in water.
Agree with Dunc @2. It wasn’t like Andrew grew up clipping coupons and looking for the restaurants with meal deals as a monthly treat from those 25-centramen noodle dinners. He was born into obscene wealth without the need to work. Furthermore, he had a mother perfectly willing to spend obscene amounts of money on his happiness all her life.
@2 and 3… it’s a common misconception that the British royal family are, by modern standards, obscenely wealthy. By which I mean yeah, obviously, they’ve got a lot of money, far more than most of us can imagine. But what people in general are really bad at is processing and understanding the difference between common-or-garden millionaires, people with generational wealth and titles… and billionaires.
Consider: JK Rowling is richer than the king, and she’s not even the richest person in the country. The king is not even close.
Another analogy. Imagine for a moment I wave a magic wand and when I do, everyone in the world lives for just one more second for every dollar they have. Counting things like mortgages, most of us would be dead either instantly or within minutes, perhaps hours at the outside. A millionaire -- a proper millionaire -- would have just 11 days to live. A billionaire could look forward to another THIRTY TWO YEARS. Elon Musk would have SIXTEEN THOUSAND YEARS. Prince Andrew, according to reasonable estimates, would be good for about six to eight weeks.
The issue of Andrew’s finances is not that he’s short of money on an absolute scale, it’s that he likes and has grown used to hanging around with, and keeping up with, literal billionaires… and compared to them, he is poor. His living expenses sound a lot to you and me but to the people he thinks he ought to be allowed to be around, it’s the kind of money they’d lose down the back of the couch. This has been his problem for decades, and it’s not going away.
It wouldn’t be so bad if he weren’t so universally despised by basically everyone who’s ever had anything to do with him. He’s not stupid, per se -- you don’t get to be a combat helicopter pilot if you’re an idiot -- but he’s obviously got no self-awareness and the word “entitlement” has his picture next to it in the dictionary.
A minor nit, but his last name is not Windsor. It’s Mountbatten-Windsor, currently with a hyphen. Wikipedia currently has a hyphen, and the Talk page is full of argument on how to refer to him. But none of the ways include just plain Windsor.
There’s a move log (where “move” means a renaming of the entire article) saying: