The fallout from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein is spiraling into a reputational disaster so damaging that a British historian believes the royal family could be facing “the most dangerous moment” in its 1,150-year history.
“I think they’re in trouble,” author Andrew Lownie said on The Daily Beast Podcast. “People are asking wider questions beyond Andrew about how this was allowed to happen, why it wasn’t dealt with earlier and how he continues to be protected.”
Lownie argued that the uproar over Andrew’s close friendship with Epstein, the late convicted sex trafficker, is fueled by a public “fed up with coverups, with the protection elites,” putting the wider royal family under an intensifying spotlight.
“The royals are now aware of that, and to save themselves, to save wider questions about royal privilege and accountability, they’ve thrown Andrew to the wolves in effect,” Lownie told host Joanna Coles.
King Charles, 77, sought to blunt the fallout from fresh outrage over Andrew’s close friendship with Epstein in October, when he stripped then-Prince Andrew of his titles and banished him from his royal lodgings.
But that has failed to quell growing calls for Andrew, 65, to be investigated over allegations of sexual assault and public misconduct.
Lownie suggested that Charles is secretly working to help his younger brother flee Britain for Bahrain, which has no formal extradition treaties with the U.K. or the U.S., pointing to a private meeting Charles held with Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the King of Bahrain, last month.
“It’s all smoke and mirrors and window dressing,” said Lownie, who recently detailed Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson’s ties to Epstein in a new book, Entitled.
Casting Charles as “much more forgiving” than “ruthless” heir Prince William, 43, Lownie suggested that Andrew’s daughters, Princess Beatrice, 37, and Princess Eugenie, 35, could eventually lose their titles as well.
Meanwhile, Ferguson, 66, who continued living in royal lodgings with Andrew after their 1996 divorce and was evicted alongside him, has become a “real worry” for the royal family, who fear that she could spill damaging information to protect herself, according to Lownie.
“This is just the most extraordinary story to think of the British royal family sort of imploding like this,” Coles remarked. “And the Queen’s favorite son being banished to the Middle East to avoid legal proceedings and his ex-wife threatening a tell-all.”
“Is there actually a drumbeat in the U.K. for a proper republic?” she asked.
“I think that this is probably the most dangerous moment in royal history since the abdication and perhaps before that,” Lownie said, referring to the crisis that unfolded when King Edward proposed to marry twice-divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson, leading to his abdication in 1936.
“People are asking much wider questions about the opaqueness of their finances, which they don’t want to answer,” Lownie said.
“Things are breaking up,” he noted, pointing to a recent poll by the anti-monarchy group Republic that found support for the monarchy at just 46 percent. “So they do need to sort of regroup and rethink what they do.”
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