Today, we uncover the controversial story of Prince Andrew, the black sheep of the British royal family.
From his ties to Jeffrey Epstein to his car crash interview, we explore the life of Queen Elizabeth's second son, Prince Andrew, The Duke Of York.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about royalty.
[00:00:25] Specifically, we are going to talk about Andrew Albert Christian Edward Windsor, otherwise known as Prince Andrew.
[00:00:34] He is the king’s brother, but he is a highly controversial figure, accused of some terrible things, and the undisputed black sheep of the royal family.
[00:00:45] OK then, let’s get right into it, and talk about Prince Andrew, The Duke Of York.
[00:00:52] A lot can change in an hour.
[00:00:54] On the 16th of November, 2019, an interview was published between Prince Andrew, the then queen’s second son, and a well-respected BBC journalist called Emily Maitlis.
[00:01:10] The interview was initially scheduled to be about Andrew’s charity work, but the focus had changed. Andrew had been a friend of the American financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was awaiting sex trafficking charges when he was found dead in his prison cell a couple of months before the interview.
[00:01:33] As a quick side note, if you’d like to learn more about the life of Jeffrey Epstein, you can listen to episode number 422.
[00:01:41] Anyway, back to Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:01:45] Prince Andrew was in the spotlight for more than just being friends with Epstein; the prince had been accused of having sex with a then 17-year-old girl who had been trafficked by Epstein.
[00:02:01] These were some serious accusations, and the prince had reportedly decided to use this opportunity, the opportunity of an interview with the BBC, to clear the air, to have his say on the matter.
[00:02:18] After all, up until then there had been plenty of accusations and reports in the media, but the prince had not spoken publicly.
[00:02:28] If he was innocent of all charges, this would be his chance to tell the British public and the world.
[00:02:37] Now, the full interview is on YouTube, so you can watch it for yourself if you so choose.
[00:02:44] One way of summarising the content of the interview, or perhaps the result of it, is by me reading you the most popular comment below the video. It reads: “Best thing about this is that the interviewer doesn't interrupt him too much and just allows him to dig his own grave”.
[00:03:05] And it’s true. The BBC interviewer, Emily Maitlis, allows the prince to talk, and the result was what we call in English “car crash TV”.
[00:03:18] Or, as one commentator put it, it was less a car crash than "a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion."
[00:03:31] If, before the interview was aired, some people might have thought, well, surely he didn’t, these must be groundless accusations, when the 60 minutes were up and Prince Andrew had been given the opportunity to give his side of the story, well it did not look good.
[00:03:51] When the prince was asked about having sex with this young girl, which reportedly took place on March 10th 2001, he vehemently denied it.
[00:04:02] But he didn’t just say, no, it didn’t happen, he claimed that it couldn’t have happened because he was at a restaurant called Pizza Express in a town called Woking at the time.
[00:04:15] This seemed odd, given that it was 18 years before, and if I asked you exactly what you were doing on a particular date 18 years ago, I imagine that you wouldn’t know.
[00:04:30] Also, Pizza Express in Woking, a very mediocre chain restaurant in an uninspiring British town, was an unlikely place for a prince.
[00:04:41] But, Prince Andrew claimed to remember precisely.
[00:04:46] And this wasn’t the only unusual and somewhat unbelievable response to why he was absolutely innocent.
[00:04:55] The woman who he was accused of having sex with had said that she remembered dancing with him at an exclusive London nightclub because he was particularly sweaty.
[00:05:07] But rather than saying “that’s incorrect”, or “I wasn't at that club”, the Prince went a step further.
[00:05:16] He said, and I’m quoting directly: "There’s a slight problem with the sweating because I have a peculiar medical condition which is that I don’t sweat or I didn’t sweat at the time and that was…was it…yes, I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falkland’s War when I was shot at and I simply…it was almost impossible for me to sweat."
[00:05:45] Now, this seemed…somewhat implausible, hard to believe.
[00:05:51] The prince claimed that he simply couldn’t have been at that place at that time because he was at a Pizza Express restaurant, and he also certainly couldn’t have been the person at the club because at that time he was medically unable to sweat.
[00:06:07] It seemed almost so unbelievable that it was comic, it was funny, and indeed within minutes the Google Maps page of the real Pizza Express restaurant in Woking was flooded with reviews from witty members of the public.
[00:06:24] For example, one read: Love this place. I had a cracking pizza here in 2001. I remember it was 2001 because it was very strange, the guy next to me had an American Hot pizza with extra chillies...not a drop of sweat came off him. Very odd. Food was fit for a prince and the vitamin K in the chilli peppers did wonders for my long term memory. End quote.
[00:06:51] Now, since then things have gone from bad to worse for the prince. Shortly before her death in September of 2022, his mother Queen Elizabeth stripped him of his military titles and his royal patronages, meaning that he is no longer able to publicly represent the royal family.
[00:07:13] He was cast out, a black sheep, and has been told in no uncertain terms that he was not allowed to speak to the media about the incident.
[00:07:24] Now, to understand how it got to this point, we should talk a bit about life before the scandal.
[00:07:32] In fact, there isn’t much of his life that is scandal free.
[00:07:38] He was the third child and second son of Queen Elizabeth, but was, reportedly, the Queen’s favourite child.
[00:07:48] He joined the navy after finishing school, and went on to fight in the Falklands War in 1982. After he returned home, he was something of a national hero, or he at least enjoyed strong public support. He was a royal, and there he was, serving his country.
[00:08:10] His career as a navy officer lasted almost 20 years, but it was not all hard work; when he was off duty he was known as a regular at London’s exclusive nightclubs, and was photographed arm in arm with a wide variety of eligible young women, earning him the nickname “Randy Andy”.
[00:08:34] Randy means having a high sex drive, so I’ll let you be the judge of whether that was a positive or negative nickname for him to have.
[00:08:45] What I will say, however, was that this was the 1980s, and for a young prince to be rushing around town and engaged in a large number of nocturnal activities with different women was sort of the done thing, it was expected behaviour for a prince.
[00:09:04] He did eventually get married to a lady called Sarah Ferguson in 1986, and the pair had two children before divorcing in 1996.
[00:09:15] It was reportedly a happy marriage. The pair have stayed friends ever since, but Sarah Ferguson has continued to be a thorn in the side of the royal family, much like her ex-husband.
[00:09:29] She was secretly filmed by a reporter for the News Of The World offering to arrange access to Prince Andrew for the not insignificant sum of £500,000.
[00:09:41] In fact, we have an episode about the journalist behind that, “The Fake Sheikh”, it’s episode number 374 if you haven’t listened to that one yet.
[00:09:50] But back to our story.
[00:09:53] Moving into the 2000s, even before the details of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes became public knowledge, Prince Andrew started to see his popularity fade as the scandals started to mount.
[00:10:08] He left the navy in 2001, and was given the title of “Special Representative for International Trade and Investment”.
[00:10:18] Now, this might sound like the kind of job that you or I could get, but in fact, neither of us is qualified.
[00:10:28] It was a special “honourable” position for a member of the British royal family, where the purpose was to represent British business interests abroad.
[00:10:40] In practice, it involved flying around the world, shaking people’s hands, cutting ribbons and standing next to business people and politicians for photo opportunities.
[00:10:52] These were all things that Prince Andrew should have been uniquely qualified to do, but it turned out that he wasn’t particularly good at this job.
[00:11:03] He had befriended corrupt dictators and people accused of human rights abuses, and back home he was accused of everything from being easy to trick with fine wine and expensive gifts through to aiding and abetting corruption.
[00:11:20] The position itself was an unpaid one, but he was criticised for the huge expense bills that he racked up everywhere he went.
[00:11:31] In 2010, he spent £620,000, which included £154,000 on hotels, food and hospitality, and £465,00–over half a million Euros–on travel.
[00:11:48] Now, the prince would defend this as actually being an excellent use of funds, as the value he was generating for British businesses was many multiples of this, but the British public weren’t buying it.
[00:12:02] The newspapers started referring to him as “Airmiles Andy”, and would report on stories of how he would insist on flying first class, sometimes even in British military planes, instead of going by car or by train.
[00:12:20] In the 1980s the British public might have laughed at this young prince being photographed with a different aristocratic girl every month, and falling out of fashionable nightclubs, and he certainly still had some public goodwill stored up after serving in the navy in the Falklands War.
[00:12:39] But fast forward 30 years, he was a divorced 50-year-old man who was seen to be a drain on the public purse and an embarrassment to British interests.
[00:12:51] And in 2010, he was photographed walking in Central Park with Jeffrey Epstein, who had been released the previous year from prison.
[00:13:02] Now, at this point the true extent of Epstein’s crimes and depravity weren’t publicly known, but he had been sent to prison for having sex with an underage girl, so he was certainly not the sort of person that the queen’s son should be photographed chatting with.
[00:13:21] And things went from bad to worse a year later when his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, admitted that Epstein had helped pay off her debts to the tune of £15,000, so around €20,000.
[00:13:37] Why was a convicted sex offender paying all of this money to the queen’s former daughter in law, to the mother of the queen’s grandchildren?
[00:13:49] Something smelled rotten, and in July of 2011 Prince Andrew was sacked, or forced to give up his role as special trade envoy, and he reportedly cut off all ties with Epstein.
[00:14:04] And since that fateful BBC interview in November of 2019, Prince Andrew has been truly cast out, not allowed to speak publicly out of a fear that he further incriminates himself.
[00:14:19] There is, of course, the very real possibility that he might face criminal charges.
[00:14:26] He is not just accused of having sex with an underage girl who was a victim of trafficking, but of knowing full well what his friend Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and being a willing participant in it.
[00:14:41] If this is true, and his excuses don’t exactly inspire confidence that it isn’t, this is a serious crime, one for which regular members of the public would face some serious jail time.
[00:14:57] So, what comes next?
[00:15:00] According to most royal observers, it is unlikely that the charges against the king’s brother will ever come to anything, whether he will ever have to face his accuser in court, much less spend a moment in a jail cell.
[00:15:15] He is a man for whom much of his adult life has been mired by scandal, entirely of his own making.
[00:15:24] Many foreign commentators like to get fixated on Prince Harry and his break from the royals, but when it comes to the real black sheep of the Royal Family, it seems like there is no competition.
[00:15:39] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Prince Andrew, the black sheep of the royal family.
[00:15:45] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:15:49] This episode is scheduled to be released on April 5th, in fact the same day as a new bumper Netflix drama called “Scoop” about Prince Andrew’s car crash interview with the BBC, so if you are interested in learning more about the man and his downfall, then I imagine that the Netflix show should be a good place to start.
[00:16:09] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:16:14] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about royalty.
[00:00:25] Specifically, we are going to talk about Andrew Albert Christian Edward Windsor, otherwise known as Prince Andrew.
[00:00:34] He is the king’s brother, but he is a highly controversial figure, accused of some terrible things, and the undisputed black sheep of the royal family.
[00:00:45] OK then, let’s get right into it, and talk about Prince Andrew, The Duke Of York.
[00:00:52] A lot can change in an hour.
[00:00:54] On the 16th of November, 2019, an interview was published between Prince Andrew, the then queen’s second son, and a well-respected BBC journalist called Emily Maitlis.
[00:01:10] The interview was initially scheduled to be about Andrew’s charity work, but the focus had changed. Andrew had been a friend of the American financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was awaiting sex trafficking charges when he was found dead in his prison cell a couple of months before the interview.
[00:01:33] As a quick side note, if you’d like to learn more about the life of Jeffrey Epstein, you can listen to episode number 422.
[00:01:41] Anyway, back to Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:01:45] Prince Andrew was in the spotlight for more than just being friends with Epstein; the prince had been accused of having sex with a then 17-year-old girl who had been trafficked by Epstein.
[00:02:01] These were some serious accusations, and the prince had reportedly decided to use this opportunity, the opportunity of an interview with the BBC, to clear the air, to have his say on the matter.
[00:02:18] After all, up until then there had been plenty of accusations and reports in the media, but the prince had not spoken publicly.
[00:02:28] If he was innocent of all charges, this would be his chance to tell the British public and the world.
[00:02:37] Now, the full interview is on YouTube, so you can watch it for yourself if you so choose.
[00:02:44] One way of summarising the content of the interview, or perhaps the result of it, is by me reading you the most popular comment below the video. It reads: “Best thing about this is that the interviewer doesn't interrupt him too much and just allows him to dig his own grave”.
[00:03:05] And it’s true. The BBC interviewer, Emily Maitlis, allows the prince to talk, and the result was what we call in English “car crash TV”.
[00:03:18] Or, as one commentator put it, it was less a car crash than "a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion."
[00:03:31] If, before the interview was aired, some people might have thought, well, surely he didn’t, these must be groundless accusations, when the 60 minutes were up and Prince Andrew had been given the opportunity to give his side of the story, well it did not look good.
[00:03:51] When the prince was asked about having sex with this young girl, which reportedly took place on March 10th 2001, he vehemently denied it.
[00:04:02] But he didn’t just say, no, it didn’t happen, he claimed that it couldn’t have happened because he was at a restaurant called Pizza Express in a town called Woking at the time.
[00:04:15] This seemed odd, given that it was 18 years before, and if I asked you exactly what you were doing on a particular date 18 years ago, I imagine that you wouldn’t know.
[00:04:30] Also, Pizza Express in Woking, a very mediocre chain restaurant in an uninspiring British town, was an unlikely place for a prince.
[00:04:41] But, Prince Andrew claimed to remember precisely.
[00:04:46] And this wasn’t the only unusual and somewhat unbelievable response to why he was absolutely innocent.
[00:04:55] The woman who he was accused of having sex with had said that she remembered dancing with him at an exclusive London nightclub because he was particularly sweaty.
[00:05:07] But rather than saying “that’s incorrect”, or “I wasn't at that club”, the Prince went a step further.
[00:05:16] He said, and I’m quoting directly: "There’s a slight problem with the sweating because I have a peculiar medical condition which is that I don’t sweat or I didn’t sweat at the time and that was…was it…yes, I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falkland’s War when I was shot at and I simply…it was almost impossible for me to sweat."
[00:05:45] Now, this seemed…somewhat implausible, hard to believe.
[00:05:51] The prince claimed that he simply couldn’t have been at that place at that time because he was at a Pizza Express restaurant, and he also certainly couldn’t have been the person at the club because at that time he was medically unable to sweat.
[00:06:07] It seemed almost so unbelievable that it was comic, it was funny, and indeed within minutes the Google Maps page of the real Pizza Express restaurant in Woking was flooded with reviews from witty members of the public.
[00:06:24] For example, one read: Love this place. I had a cracking pizza here in 2001. I remember it was 2001 because it was very strange, the guy next to me had an American Hot pizza with extra chillies...not a drop of sweat came off him. Very odd. Food was fit for a prince and the vitamin K in the chilli peppers did wonders for my long term memory. End quote.
[00:06:51] Now, since then things have gone from bad to worse for the prince. Shortly before her death in September of 2022, his mother Queen Elizabeth stripped him of his military titles and his royal patronages, meaning that he is no longer able to publicly represent the royal family.
[00:07:13] He was cast out, a black sheep, and has been told in no uncertain terms that he was not allowed to speak to the media about the incident.
[00:07:24] Now, to understand how it got to this point, we should talk a bit about life before the scandal.
[00:07:32] In fact, there isn’t much of his life that is scandal free.
[00:07:38] He was the third child and second son of Queen Elizabeth, but was, reportedly, the Queen’s favourite child.
[00:07:48] He joined the navy after finishing school, and went on to fight in the Falklands War in 1982. After he returned home, he was something of a national hero, or he at least enjoyed strong public support. He was a royal, and there he was, serving his country.
[00:08:10] His career as a navy officer lasted almost 20 years, but it was not all hard work; when he was off duty he was known as a regular at London’s exclusive nightclubs, and was photographed arm in arm with a wide variety of eligible young women, earning him the nickname “Randy Andy”.
[00:08:34] Randy means having a high sex drive, so I’ll let you be the judge of whether that was a positive or negative nickname for him to have.
[00:08:45] What I will say, however, was that this was the 1980s, and for a young prince to be rushing around town and engaged in a large number of nocturnal activities with different women was sort of the done thing, it was expected behaviour for a prince.
[00:09:04] He did eventually get married to a lady called Sarah Ferguson in 1986, and the pair had two children before divorcing in 1996.
[00:09:15] It was reportedly a happy marriage. The pair have stayed friends ever since, but Sarah Ferguson has continued to be a thorn in the side of the royal family, much like her ex-husband.
[00:09:29] She was secretly filmed by a reporter for the News Of The World offering to arrange access to Prince Andrew for the not insignificant sum of £500,000.
[00:09:41] In fact, we have an episode about the journalist behind that, “The Fake Sheikh”, it’s episode number 374 if you haven’t listened to that one yet.
[00:09:50] But back to our story.
[00:09:53] Moving into the 2000s, even before the details of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes became public knowledge, Prince Andrew started to see his popularity fade as the scandals started to mount.
[00:10:08] He left the navy in 2001, and was given the title of “Special Representative for International Trade and Investment”.
[00:10:18] Now, this might sound like the kind of job that you or I could get, but in fact, neither of us is qualified.
[00:10:28] It was a special “honourable” position for a member of the British royal family, where the purpose was to represent British business interests abroad.
[00:10:40] In practice, it involved flying around the world, shaking people’s hands, cutting ribbons and standing next to business people and politicians for photo opportunities.
[00:10:52] These were all things that Prince Andrew should have been uniquely qualified to do, but it turned out that he wasn’t particularly good at this job.
[00:11:03] He had befriended corrupt dictators and people accused of human rights abuses, and back home he was accused of everything from being easy to trick with fine wine and expensive gifts through to aiding and abetting corruption.
[00:11:20] The position itself was an unpaid one, but he was criticised for the huge expense bills that he racked up everywhere he went.
[00:11:31] In 2010, he spent £620,000, which included £154,000 on hotels, food and hospitality, and £465,00–over half a million Euros–on travel.
[00:11:48] Now, the prince would defend this as actually being an excellent use of funds, as the value he was generating for British businesses was many multiples of this, but the British public weren’t buying it.
[00:12:02] The newspapers started referring to him as “Airmiles Andy”, and would report on stories of how he would insist on flying first class, sometimes even in British military planes, instead of going by car or by train.
[00:12:20] In the 1980s the British public might have laughed at this young prince being photographed with a different aristocratic girl every month, and falling out of fashionable nightclubs, and he certainly still had some public goodwill stored up after serving in the navy in the Falklands War.
[00:12:39] But fast forward 30 years, he was a divorced 50-year-old man who was seen to be a drain on the public purse and an embarrassment to British interests.
[00:12:51] And in 2010, he was photographed walking in Central Park with Jeffrey Epstein, who had been released the previous year from prison.
[00:13:02] Now, at this point the true extent of Epstein’s crimes and depravity weren’t publicly known, but he had been sent to prison for having sex with an underage girl, so he was certainly not the sort of person that the queen’s son should be photographed chatting with.
[00:13:21] And things went from bad to worse a year later when his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, admitted that Epstein had helped pay off her debts to the tune of £15,000, so around €20,000.
[00:13:37] Why was a convicted sex offender paying all of this money to the queen’s former daughter in law, to the mother of the queen’s grandchildren?
[00:13:49] Something smelled rotten, and in July of 2011 Prince Andrew was sacked, or forced to give up his role as special trade envoy, and he reportedly cut off all ties with Epstein.
[00:14:04] And since that fateful BBC interview in November of 2019, Prince Andrew has been truly cast out, not allowed to speak publicly out of a fear that he further incriminates himself.
[00:14:19] There is, of course, the very real possibility that he might face criminal charges.
[00:14:26] He is not just accused of having sex with an underage girl who was a victim of trafficking, but of knowing full well what his friend Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and being a willing participant in it.
[00:14:41] If this is true, and his excuses don’t exactly inspire confidence that it isn’t, this is a serious crime, one for which regular members of the public would face some serious jail time.
[00:14:57] So, what comes next?
[00:15:00] According to most royal observers, it is unlikely that the charges against the king’s brother will ever come to anything, whether he will ever have to face his accuser in court, much less spend a moment in a jail cell.
[00:15:15] He is a man for whom much of his adult life has been mired by scandal, entirely of his own making.
[00:15:24] Many foreign commentators like to get fixated on Prince Harry and his break from the royals, but when it comes to the real black sheep of the Royal Family, it seems like there is no competition.
[00:15:39] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Prince Andrew, the black sheep of the royal family.
[00:15:45] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:15:49] This episode is scheduled to be released on April 5th, in fact the same day as a new bumper Netflix drama called “Scoop” about Prince Andrew’s car crash interview with the BBC, so if you are interested in learning more about the man and his downfall, then I imagine that the Netflix show should be a good place to start.
[00:16:09] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:16:14] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about royalty.
[00:00:25] Specifically, we are going to talk about Andrew Albert Christian Edward Windsor, otherwise known as Prince Andrew.
[00:00:34] He is the king’s brother, but he is a highly controversial figure, accused of some terrible things, and the undisputed black sheep of the royal family.
[00:00:45] OK then, let’s get right into it, and talk about Prince Andrew, The Duke Of York.
[00:00:52] A lot can change in an hour.
[00:00:54] On the 16th of November, 2019, an interview was published between Prince Andrew, the then queen’s second son, and a well-respected BBC journalist called Emily Maitlis.
[00:01:10] The interview was initially scheduled to be about Andrew’s charity work, but the focus had changed. Andrew had been a friend of the American financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was awaiting sex trafficking charges when he was found dead in his prison cell a couple of months before the interview.
[00:01:33] As a quick side note, if you’d like to learn more about the life of Jeffrey Epstein, you can listen to episode number 422.
[00:01:41] Anyway, back to Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:01:45] Prince Andrew was in the spotlight for more than just being friends with Epstein; the prince had been accused of having sex with a then 17-year-old girl who had been trafficked by Epstein.
[00:02:01] These were some serious accusations, and the prince had reportedly decided to use this opportunity, the opportunity of an interview with the BBC, to clear the air, to have his say on the matter.
[00:02:18] After all, up until then there had been plenty of accusations and reports in the media, but the prince had not spoken publicly.
[00:02:28] If he was innocent of all charges, this would be his chance to tell the British public and the world.
[00:02:37] Now, the full interview is on YouTube, so you can watch it for yourself if you so choose.
[00:02:44] One way of summarising the content of the interview, or perhaps the result of it, is by me reading you the most popular comment below the video. It reads: “Best thing about this is that the interviewer doesn't interrupt him too much and just allows him to dig his own grave”.
[00:03:05] And it’s true. The BBC interviewer, Emily Maitlis, allows the prince to talk, and the result was what we call in English “car crash TV”.
[00:03:18] Or, as one commentator put it, it was less a car crash than "a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion."
[00:03:31] If, before the interview was aired, some people might have thought, well, surely he didn’t, these must be groundless accusations, when the 60 minutes were up and Prince Andrew had been given the opportunity to give his side of the story, well it did not look good.
[00:03:51] When the prince was asked about having sex with this young girl, which reportedly took place on March 10th 2001, he vehemently denied it.
[00:04:02] But he didn’t just say, no, it didn’t happen, he claimed that it couldn’t have happened because he was at a restaurant called Pizza Express in a town called Woking at the time.
[00:04:15] This seemed odd, given that it was 18 years before, and if I asked you exactly what you were doing on a particular date 18 years ago, I imagine that you wouldn’t know.
[00:04:30] Also, Pizza Express in Woking, a very mediocre chain restaurant in an uninspiring British town, was an unlikely place for a prince.
[00:04:41] But, Prince Andrew claimed to remember precisely.
[00:04:46] And this wasn’t the only unusual and somewhat unbelievable response to why he was absolutely innocent.
[00:04:55] The woman who he was accused of having sex with had said that she remembered dancing with him at an exclusive London nightclub because he was particularly sweaty.
[00:05:07] But rather than saying “that’s incorrect”, or “I wasn't at that club”, the Prince went a step further.
[00:05:16] He said, and I’m quoting directly: "There’s a slight problem with the sweating because I have a peculiar medical condition which is that I don’t sweat or I didn’t sweat at the time and that was…was it…yes, I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falkland’s War when I was shot at and I simply…it was almost impossible for me to sweat."
[00:05:45] Now, this seemed…somewhat implausible, hard to believe.
[00:05:51] The prince claimed that he simply couldn’t have been at that place at that time because he was at a Pizza Express restaurant, and he also certainly couldn’t have been the person at the club because at that time he was medically unable to sweat.
[00:06:07] It seemed almost so unbelievable that it was comic, it was funny, and indeed within minutes the Google Maps page of the real Pizza Express restaurant in Woking was flooded with reviews from witty members of the public.
[00:06:24] For example, one read: Love this place. I had a cracking pizza here in 2001. I remember it was 2001 because it was very strange, the guy next to me had an American Hot pizza with extra chillies...not a drop of sweat came off him. Very odd. Food was fit for a prince and the vitamin K in the chilli peppers did wonders for my long term memory. End quote.
[00:06:51] Now, since then things have gone from bad to worse for the prince. Shortly before her death in September of 2022, his mother Queen Elizabeth stripped him of his military titles and his royal patronages, meaning that he is no longer able to publicly represent the royal family.
[00:07:13] He was cast out, a black sheep, and has been told in no uncertain terms that he was not allowed to speak to the media about the incident.
[00:07:24] Now, to understand how it got to this point, we should talk a bit about life before the scandal.
[00:07:32] In fact, there isn’t much of his life that is scandal free.
[00:07:38] He was the third child and second son of Queen Elizabeth, but was, reportedly, the Queen’s favourite child.
[00:07:48] He joined the navy after finishing school, and went on to fight in the Falklands War in 1982. After he returned home, he was something of a national hero, or he at least enjoyed strong public support. He was a royal, and there he was, serving his country.
[00:08:10] His career as a navy officer lasted almost 20 years, but it was not all hard work; when he was off duty he was known as a regular at London’s exclusive nightclubs, and was photographed arm in arm with a wide variety of eligible young women, earning him the nickname “Randy Andy”.
[00:08:34] Randy means having a high sex drive, so I’ll let you be the judge of whether that was a positive or negative nickname for him to have.
[00:08:45] What I will say, however, was that this was the 1980s, and for a young prince to be rushing around town and engaged in a large number of nocturnal activities with different women was sort of the done thing, it was expected behaviour for a prince.
[00:09:04] He did eventually get married to a lady called Sarah Ferguson in 1986, and the pair had two children before divorcing in 1996.
[00:09:15] It was reportedly a happy marriage. The pair have stayed friends ever since, but Sarah Ferguson has continued to be a thorn in the side of the royal family, much like her ex-husband.
[00:09:29] She was secretly filmed by a reporter for the News Of The World offering to arrange access to Prince Andrew for the not insignificant sum of £500,000.
[00:09:41] In fact, we have an episode about the journalist behind that, “The Fake Sheikh”, it’s episode number 374 if you haven’t listened to that one yet.
[00:09:50] But back to our story.
[00:09:53] Moving into the 2000s, even before the details of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes became public knowledge, Prince Andrew started to see his popularity fade as the scandals started to mount.
[00:10:08] He left the navy in 2001, and was given the title of “Special Representative for International Trade and Investment”.
[00:10:18] Now, this might sound like the kind of job that you or I could get, but in fact, neither of us is qualified.
[00:10:28] It was a special “honourable” position for a member of the British royal family, where the purpose was to represent British business interests abroad.
[00:10:40] In practice, it involved flying around the world, shaking people’s hands, cutting ribbons and standing next to business people and politicians for photo opportunities.
[00:10:52] These were all things that Prince Andrew should have been uniquely qualified to do, but it turned out that he wasn’t particularly good at this job.
[00:11:03] He had befriended corrupt dictators and people accused of human rights abuses, and back home he was accused of everything from being easy to trick with fine wine and expensive gifts through to aiding and abetting corruption.
[00:11:20] The position itself was an unpaid one, but he was criticised for the huge expense bills that he racked up everywhere he went.
[00:11:31] In 2010, he spent £620,000, which included £154,000 on hotels, food and hospitality, and £465,00–over half a million Euros–on travel.
[00:11:48] Now, the prince would defend this as actually being an excellent use of funds, as the value he was generating for British businesses was many multiples of this, but the British public weren’t buying it.
[00:12:02] The newspapers started referring to him as “Airmiles Andy”, and would report on stories of how he would insist on flying first class, sometimes even in British military planes, instead of going by car or by train.
[00:12:20] In the 1980s the British public might have laughed at this young prince being photographed with a different aristocratic girl every month, and falling out of fashionable nightclubs, and he certainly still had some public goodwill stored up after serving in the navy in the Falklands War.
[00:12:39] But fast forward 30 years, he was a divorced 50-year-old man who was seen to be a drain on the public purse and an embarrassment to British interests.
[00:12:51] And in 2010, he was photographed walking in Central Park with Jeffrey Epstein, who had been released the previous year from prison.
[00:13:02] Now, at this point the true extent of Epstein’s crimes and depravity weren’t publicly known, but he had been sent to prison for having sex with an underage girl, so he was certainly not the sort of person that the queen’s son should be photographed chatting with.
[00:13:21] And things went from bad to worse a year later when his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, admitted that Epstein had helped pay off her debts to the tune of £15,000, so around €20,000.
[00:13:37] Why was a convicted sex offender paying all of this money to the queen’s former daughter in law, to the mother of the queen’s grandchildren?
[00:13:49] Something smelled rotten, and in July of 2011 Prince Andrew was sacked, or forced to give up his role as special trade envoy, and he reportedly cut off all ties with Epstein.
[00:14:04] And since that fateful BBC interview in November of 2019, Prince Andrew has been truly cast out, not allowed to speak publicly out of a fear that he further incriminates himself.
[00:14:19] There is, of course, the very real possibility that he might face criminal charges.
[00:14:26] He is not just accused of having sex with an underage girl who was a victim of trafficking, but of knowing full well what his friend Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and being a willing participant in it.
[00:14:41] If this is true, and his excuses don’t exactly inspire confidence that it isn’t, this is a serious crime, one for which regular members of the public would face some serious jail time.
[00:14:57] So, what comes next?
[00:15:00] According to most royal observers, it is unlikely that the charges against the king’s brother will ever come to anything, whether he will ever have to face his accuser in court, much less spend a moment in a jail cell.
[00:15:15] He is a man for whom much of his adult life has been mired by scandal, entirely of his own making.
[00:15:24] Many foreign commentators like to get fixated on Prince Harry and his break from the royals, but when it comes to the real black sheep of the Royal Family, it seems like there is no competition.
[00:15:39] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Prince Andrew, the black sheep of the royal family.
[00:15:45] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:15:49] This episode is scheduled to be released on April 5th, in fact the same day as a new bumper Netflix drama called “Scoop” about Prince Andrew’s car crash interview with the BBC, so if you are interested in learning more about the man and his downfall, then I imagine that the Netflix show should be a good place to start.
[00:16:09] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:16:14] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
