Prince Andrew latest: Andrew told to leave public life for ever after embarrassing royal family – UK Times

Prince Andrew has lived rent-free at Royal Lodge, a 30-room Windsor mansion, under a 75-year lease signed in 2003 with the Crown Estate.

Instead of paying annual rent, he made upfront payments of about £8m for renovations and future rent – effectively buying out his lease, BBC reported.

The deal allows him to stay without ongoing rent but requires him to maintain the property.

Prince Andrew’s rent is described as a “peppercorn”, which is a token sum, such as £1 a year, often used in long leases as a symbolic legal payment rather than a commercial one.

Pressure is mounting on Prince Andrew to give up his 30-room mansion after it emerged he has paid a “peppercorn rent” on the property for more than 20 years.

Senior Tory Robert Jenrick said it was “about time Prince Andrew took himself off to live in private” as “the public are sick of him”.

Parliamentary committees could also look into the Crown Estate’s handling of Andrew’s Royal Lodge residence in Windsor Great Park.

The campaign group Republic has, meanwhile, demanded a “full, unrelenting investigation” into royal links to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein and efforts to protect Andrew.

Protesters from the anti-monarchy group unveiled banners reading “End Royal Secrecy” and “What are you hiding? Royal Epstein Inquiry Now” outside the gates of Royal Lodge.

Four out of five Britons believe Prince Andrew should be formally stripped of his dukedom, according to a new poll.

It comes as calls intensify for the King’s brother to vacate his Royal Lodge residence.

The prince’s association with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has recently resurfaced in headlines, with renewed attention on the allegations made by his sex accuser, Virginia Giuffre, which Andrew denies, following the release of her posthumous memoirs.

Senior Conservative MP Robert Jenrick commented that it was “about time Prince Andrew took himself off to live in private” as “the public are sick of him,” particularly after it emerged Andrew has paid a “peppercorn rent” for his 30-room home for over two decades.

Many in Parliament would be unlikely to “disagree” with stripping Prince Andrew of his royal title, an SNP MP has said.

The SNP is putting forward a motion to pressure Sir Keir Starmer’s Government to strip Andrew of the title, which would require an Act of Parliament.

Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme, the SNP’s Stephen Gethins said stripping Andrew of his title would be “a good thing to do”.

He said: “I think he needs to give them up the way you formally give them up I’m afraid as an Act of Parliament. I’m not sure there would be many people in Parliament who would disagree with that.

“This is a move that you can strip that away, if that gives some relief to the victims I think that is a good thing to do.”

In her posthumous memoir, published today, Virginia Giuffre describes the moment the infamous picture of her with Prince Andrew was taken.

She says she posed with the prince the first time she met him, aged 17, at Ghislaine Maxwell’s house in London.

She recalled running to get her “Kodak FunSaver” camera and asking Epstein to take the photo.

She added: “My mum would never forgive me if I met someone as famous as Prince Andrew and didn’t pose for a picture”.

Andrew correctly guessed Virginia Giuffre’s age at 17 when they first met, she wrote in her memoir, Nobody’s Girl.

She said that in 2001 Ghislaine Maxwell, later a convicted sex trafficker, took her shopping for clothes to wear for the meeting in Maxwell’s London flat.

At the meeting, Maxwell, who “was more coquettish than usual”, asked the then-duke to guess Ms Giuffre’s age, and Andrew, then 41, guessed correctly at 17, Ms Giuffre wrote.

She said she was paid $15,000 for “serving the man the tabloids called ‘Randy Andy’”.

Pressure is mounting on Prince Andrew to give up his 30-bedroom mansion after it emerged he has paid a “peppercorn rent” on the property for more than 20 years.

Senior Tory Robert Jenrick said it was “about time Prince Andrew took himself off to live in private” as “the public are sick of him”.

Parliamentary committees could also look into the Crown Estate’s handling of Andrew’s Royal Lodge residence in Windsor.

A copy of the leasehold agreement, shared by the Crown Estate, shows Andrew signed a 75-year lease on the property in 2003.

It reveals he paid £1 million for the lease and that since then he has paid “one peppercorn” of rent “if demanded” per year.

Six months after her death, Virginia Giuffre’s memoir has uncovered new harrowing details experience being trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein.

As the book is published on Tuesday here are some of the biggest revelations:

Describing the first time she met Andrew

Giuffre describes being taken shopping by Ghislaine Maxwell in London before the meeting. At her flat, they took a picture together before going out for dinner and to a nightclub.

She alleges she was told to “do for him what you do for Jeffrey” and then after they had sex, the prince said thank you “in his clipped British accent” afterwards”.

An orgy with Andrew on Epstein’s island

Giuffre alleges the third time she had sex with Prince Andrew was on Epstein’s Caribbean island of Little Saint James during an orgy with eight other young girls.

She wrote: “Epstein, Andy, and approximately eight other young girls, and I had sex together. The other girls all seemed and appeared to be under the age of 18, and didn’t really speak English.”

Giuffre ‘amazed’ Andrew was ‘stupid enough’ to meet Epstein in public after conviction

After Epstein had been released from prison for procuring a minor for prostitution, Giuffre wrote that she was shocked to see a photograph of Andrew with him in New York’s Central Park in 2011.

Andrew’s Newsnight interview was ‘jet fuel’ for her legal team

As Giuffre wrote she was considering filing a lawsuit against Andrew in 2019, she said she saw the royal had done a sit-down interview with Emily Maitlis on BBC Newsnight, on which he said he had “no recollection” of meeting Giuffre.

Giuffre wrote: “As devastating as this interview was for Prince Andrew, for my legal team it was like an injection of jet fuel. Its contents would.. help us build an ironclad case against the prince.”

Andrew ‘hid behind Balmoral’s gates’

In August 2021, Giuffre’s team launched a legal suit that alleged, she wrote, that “that Prince Andrew had raped and battered me when I was a minor, causing me severe and lasting damage”.

She wrote that when action was launched, papers could not be served on Andrew because of his “fleeing to Queen Elizabeth’s Balmoral Castle in Scotland and hiding behind its well-guarded gates”.

There are plenty of people out there who know too well the shame and horror when a parent is accused of something monstrous. Yet few have experienced it under the same high-beam public scrutiny as princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. Theirs is a rare kind of living hell.

For their own sake – and certainly that of their young children – the royal princesses need to find some distance from their disgraced father, says Samuel Fishwick: