The historian Andrew Lownie looks in pretty fine fettle for a 64-year-old man with an absolutely brutal work regimen. His day job, he reminds me as we meet in his unexpectedly plain sitting room in Westminster, is as a literary agent. But he is now possibly better known for his side-hustle as a biographer; most recently he producedEntitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, an explosive and meticulously researched book on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson.
Lownie says he wrote the book, which has just been updated for itsforthcoming paperback edition, around his agenting duties, which meant lots of early mornings, evenings and weekends, plus the odd snatched day off for important interviews.
“Fergie’s actually sat in that seat,” he says, pointing to the small leather armchair I’ve just settled into. He is dressed in a suit and tie (he’s not a man easy to imagine in jeans); beside us on the mantelpiece are works of art – and a rather plaintive commemorative mug from Andrew and Fergie’s wedding, in 1986. When he was working on the book, he says, he invited the former duchess to meet him – and she came by, seemingly in an effort to nudge the biography in a more positive direction. In that, as in many things, Fergie failed.
Was it strange, finding the woman he had uncovered so much about, suddenly in his house? “Yes,” Lownie says. He alleges several eye-watering details about Fergie in the book: that she frequently failed to pay her staff, that she continued to associate with Jeffrey Epstein years after publicly disowning him, that she once spent £25,000 in a single hour at Bloomingdale’s. Even so, Lownie airily admits, he was “charmed by her. You know, she’s very charismatic. She’s like a Labrador, a bundle of energy. These are the two sides to her.”
Around us is some of the evidence of Lownie’s industry: scruffy boxes filled with Freedom of Information requests, tome after tome about the Royal family, acres of press cuttings. Lownie used, he says, only around 10 per cent of the material he collected. It took him two years just to read it all and to compose a list of names to approach, which eventually numbered some 3,000 people. Of those, just 300 agreed to speak to him – “but”, he points out, “that’s probably about 250 more than most books”.
Andrew’s ‘possible sexual assault’
Many in the publishing world admire Lownie’s completionism, his Pied Piper ability to coax apparently slight but telling anecdotes from an extraordinary range of sources. One of many marmalade droppers in the new edition ofEntitledare comments from an armed police officer who used to work at Heathrow, and who recalls Andrew meeting a British Airways crew member on a plane, spinning her around when she tried to shake his hand and bending her forward “so that his groin was clearly and firmly in contact with her backside”. The police officer judged that the then-prince’s action amounted to a “possible sexual assault” but no action, of course, was taken.
At another point in the updated edition, Lownie returns to his theme of Fergie’sMarie Antoinetteattitude to food, reporting that her chef was ordered to “make a sizeable cream cake” every day. If it wasn’t eaten, the cake was thrown away – and a fresh one baked the following day regardless.
The book itself begins, as with all of Lownie’s books, with a question – in this case, whether Andrew and Fergie really were, as they used to be described, “‘the happiest divorced couple ever’. I thought, of course, that was a myth.” In general, Lownie admits, he is drawn to “what I call rogue royals, the bad boys. They’re more fun.” Still, when he started on Andrew, he was warned off it. “Everyone said ‘You’re crazy, he’s so boring, no one’s interested’.”
It turned out, of course, that people are very interested in Andrew – including various members of America’s Congress. “I was lucky it was part of the news agenda,” he says. WhenEntitledwas first published, “though it got a bit of attention, nothing happened. If there hadn’t been the Epstein releases, it would have just died a death.”
Why Epstein’s death may not have been a suicide
Lownie sets out persuasive evidence that suggests that Epstein may not have died by suicide – a position long dismissed as an outlandish conspiracy theory. “I think the thing with the Epstein revelations is we all say, ‘Oh conspiracies don’t happen, it’s all cock-up’. Then you suddenly realise that there is sort of a conspiracy here. This is all carefully planned and it’s sort of supranational.”
When the news ofAndrew’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public officebroke in February, and the press had a field day, a quiet minority of people felt some empathy for the former prince. Does Lownie?
“Well, he’s basically under house arrest. His reputation has been trashed. I mean, that look of absolute terror on his face when he came back from the police station. So, of course anyone who’s human will have sympathy – and have sympathy for Sarah Ferguson.”
‘Andrew’s still quite cocky, he’s not very remorseful’
But, Lownie points out: “they brought all this on themselves. And actually, I had a contact who’s close to him, saying he’s still quite cocky, he’s not very remorseful… I mean, he is so nasty to people.”
Earlier this month,a man pleaded not guilty at Westminster magistrates’ court for using threatening words towards Andrew, while he was out walking his dogs near his home in Norfolk. Lownie estimates that although he does have some protection, if he were to be, “I don’t know, in his car with one policeman and five cars turn up and ram him, and they try to kidnap him – I mean, yes, he is vulnerable.”
In the book we learn that, post-disgrace, Andrew is mainly spending his time watching golf on a vast television and playing on a flight simulator. Now 66, he’s also reportedly sinking many hours into playing Call of Duty; a royal source told Lownie that the former prince “prioritises gaming over work, health and hygiene”. It is hard not to feel a pang of melancholy at this desolate image: the former war hero and pin-up, now gaming deep into the night, all alone.
There is something, Lownie believes, profoundly “sad” about Andrew. “He talks about himself being a loner. And he’s always been kept apart from people. At school, he had separate accommodation because of security. He always had a separate wing on the naval bases. He didn’t drink. I think he kept himself apart, possibly because he thought he might be betrayed. … There is something that is not quitethere. So of course one feels sorry for him, but at the same time he is responsible for his own actions.”
For many, feeling sorry for Andrew is a stretch too far – but it is easier, I venture, to feel sympathy for his and Fergie’s daughters. I mention to Lownie that I’d watched him promise, in a YouTube video last year, that he was going to reveal much more detail about the girls’ activities in the paperback edition. But the book has relatively little about them. How come? “Lawyers,” he says darkly.
Still, Lownie says he feels that the Royal family needs to develop a proper strategy for how it deals with Beatrice and Eugenie. “There’s a slightly schizophrenic approach at the moment. One moment, the daughters arevery publicly not coming to Ascot– the next they can come. They can come to Sandringham – no, they can’t. It’s a bit cruel. I think it’s almost as if they can’t decide what to do.”
Beatrice and Eugenie should give up their titles
Lownie believes that the princesses should give up their titles and keep a low profile. But, he claims, their professional lives – Beatrice is a strategic adviser for the company Afiniti, and Eugenie is a director at the art gallery Hauser & Wirth – are dependent on their association with the Royal family. “Their jobs rely on that access that they give as royals. I mean, it’s never Beatrice Mozzi who’s going off to conferences – it’s always Her Royal Highness. And that’s part of the problem – they want the trappings, the perks, without any of the responsibilities.”
The hardback ofEntitledshot to number one in the bestseller charts, and the paperback is bound to do similarly well. Does it feel good to be at the peak of his career, at 64? “Well, I can only get better,” Lownie jokes. “No, I mean, I’ve watched so many authors over the last 40 years and there’s sometimes a book that catches on because of timing – and then you retire back into obscurity.”
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For all the book’s success, for many – especially in the Establishment – Lownie is deemed a menace. He is perceived as targeting the Royal family, and even sometimes accused of undermining the very fabric of the country, by revealing such damning information about them.
He has, he admits, paid a social toll for his work: there’s been a bit of “cold-shouldering” from his acquaintances. But he is, he insists, a royalist, and he genuinely wishes for the Royal family to continue to reign over us for many decades to come – he just happens to think they need to be held to account.
“I don’t think anyone should be given a pass just because they’re a member of the Royal family. There’s not a two-tier justice system here,” he says. “My father was a judge and Scottish, and I think there’s quite a strong Presbyterian element to this that drives me on. The monarchy depends on trust and respect from the public, and it carries moral authority. It brings the nation together… and that compact is undermined by people who seem to have their noses in the trough.”
It also undermines, he points out, “the reputation and the good work of all the others – the Prince Edwards andPrincess Annes, who get on with it day by day.”
As for the accusations that he is a scurrilous muckracker, Lownie seems exasperated by them: “There are a lot of, I would say, slightly jealous royal writers. Because clearly [the book] has changed the narrative. A lot of them who produce the sanitised stuff don’t like an outsider coming in and disrupting.” Someone has warned him, he adds, that publishing his Andrew biography would be like riding a tiger: “and ithasbeen like riding a tiger. And, you know, I prefer not to.”
Lownie lives in his Westminster townhouse with his wife and their two grown-up children; Alice, who works in publishing, and Robert, a journalist. What do they make of their father’s book? “I think they’re probably slightly embarrassed by it,” he says. “I think they also think I’m probably a bit of a media tart.”
Well, is he? “I hope not,” he says, looking rather worried. “I’ve been in the shadows for the last 40 years as an agent supporting writers, and that’s where I feel happiest.”
He maintains a frequent presence in the public eye – speaking on TV, radio, YouTube, podcasts and so on – as he feels an obligation to publicise the book, and also because he feels “more and more strongly about the need for more royal transparency. Really, that for them, that they do need to modernise. The old system of just hoping the problem will go away isn’t going to work. If they want to survive and want to restore trust and respect, they have to adapt. … And if they really want to restore respect, it’s not by us operating with censorship like Stalinist Russia or China. It’s actually by having openness and behaving well.”
The King’s recent trip to America –during which Charles seemed to charm Donald Trump to his core– is a good example, Lownie believes, of “just how effective” the Royal family can be. “I think we’re very lucky that Charles is clearly a highly cultured, compassionate, clever man.” After all, he says, “We could have got Andrew. I mean, if Charles had been killed in a skiing accident, we might well have had him as regent at least.” How would that have shaken out? A smile. “It would have been a disaster.”
William ‘is quite controlling, quite secretive’
Lownie is cautiously optimistic about how William will fare as king: “From the things I’ve heard, he is more prepared to move to this more European-style monarchy – fewer people with titles who are not working royals, look at the Crown Estates – but at the same time, he’s not declared the tax that the Duchy pays. His father did. And he is quite controlling, quite secretive, quite suspicious of the media.”
He is less ambivalent, however, about Catherine, and agrees with those who see her as the monarchy’s shining hope.The Princess of Wales, he reckons, is a “nice middle-class girl” – and “they’re far better royals than the royals themselves, and I would argue it’s the same with Sophie and Camilla”. Catherine is also, Lownie believes, “very tough – shades of the Queen Mum. And I think as an outsider, she gets it in a way I don’t think the royals do.”
Lownie sees himself as an outsider in the Windsor world, but there are striking parallels between him and the other Andrew: both are around the same age (Lownie is 64 and Mountbatten-Windsor is 66), both went to private schools in Scotland (Lownie to Fettes, Mountbatten-Windsor to Gordonstoun), both were involved in the military (Lownie as a naval reserve). Lownie remembers Andrew coming to play rugby at Fettes, and remembers hearing the stories about him, even then.
And Lownie has said that his wife, Angela Doyle, a house historian, was “brought up” with Ferguson, that they were neighbours: “So I knew quite a lot of the stories. For example, the story which no one has picked up on, Prince Philip and Susan Barrantes [Ferguson’s mother] being lovers. That all came from family information.”
Still, observing the teetering piles of royal material in Lownie’s house, you would imagine that he had been obsessed with the family since he was a boy. But in fact, it took him years to get to the royals. After founding his Andrew Lownie Literary Agency in 1988, he launched his writing career with a biography about the Scottish writer John Buchan in 2003, followed byStalin’s Englishman, a book about the spy Guy Burgess in 2015. He had long had a sense, he says, “that it’s not a proper job, being a writer” and that while various members of his family had done it, “they always had other jobs”.
It was only when he was writing about Burgess that he realised there was a good book to be done on Lord Mountbatten. “I had no interest in the royals until then,” he says. “I’d probably never read a royal biography in my life.”
Now Lownie is in the early stages of a new book about Prince Philip, which is so far shaping up to be a good deal more positive thanEntitled, he says. He clearly loathes the idea that people think he’s on some mission to wreck the Royal family’s reputation to such an extent that the whole edifice collapses altogether. “I don’t want to get a reputation for doing aTom Bower,” he says.
And he is still recovering, he says, from his five-year legal battle to gain access to the diaries and correspondence of Lord and Lady Mountbatten that became his bestselling bookThe Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves(2019). He was successful in his fight to open up the archive – but was forced to cover his own legal costs, paying around £400,000 from his own pocket.
Entitled, he says, “will hopefully get me back to where I was five years ago. So [Andrew’s] kind of been my saviour.” In the rush to stump up the money for the legal bill, he even had to use money he’d inherited from his late mother that had been earmarked to pass to his children.
The doorbell rings, and Rob, Lownie’s son, appears to let in the photographer. Lownie calls out to him: “Are you embarrassed by my book?” “Not in the slightest,” his son calls back.
As to the claim that he is harming the country by publishing such damaging information about the Royal family, Lownie clearly finds the idea faintly ridiculous. “The role of historian and journalist is to tell the truth. We can’t sugarcoat it just to protect them,” he says. “If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.”
The updated paperback of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie is published on May 21. Lownie will be appearing on the Daily T podcast on Sunday, May 17; you can watch episodes of The Daily There. You can also listen onSpotify,Apple Podcastsor wherever you get your podcasts.
