Last week, sources claimed that Prince Andrew was suddenly considering a move out of England. Andrew has been thoroughly thrown under the bus this month when it was revealed that he was good friends with a man who turned out to be a Chinese spy. The spy was even Andrew’s business representative in China, and Andrew was likely getting paid to provide all kinds of access to the spy. While Andrew absolutely deserves to be shamed and mocked for yet another bone-headed association, it also looks like Andrew’s mess is being purposefully pushed as a main story, so people won’t talk about the Chinese spy’s associations with actual Tory leaders and people who genuinely have power. Anyway, last week, we heard that Andrew was contemplating a move to Bahrain. Now he might move to Abu Dhabi?
Prince Andrew may have been frozen out of the British royal family yet again, but another royal family seems keen to adopt him. The prince has been gifted the use of a palace in Abu Dhabi by the country’s autocratic elite, the royal historian and freedom-of-information campaigner Andrew Lownie will claim in a hotly anticipated biography of the prince to be published next year, The Daily Beast can reveal.
The Daily Beast reported this week that several of Andrew’s friends say he could “do a Harry” and flee the U.K. for the Middle East next year after feeling that he has been unfairly treated over his relationship with Yang Tengbo. Yang is a Chinese businessman formerly based in London who has been unmasked as a suspected Chinese spy. He successfully cultivated a close personal and business relationship with Andrew after he was expelled from the royal family (for the first time) after his disastrous BBC interview about his relationship with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Documents found in Yang’s possession highlighting “main talking points” for a call with Andrew said he was “in a desperate situation and will grab on to anything.” Yang ran the Chinese arm of Andrew’s Pitch@Palace initiative, and Andrew was entitled to a 2 percent cut of any investment deals made.
It is a matter of public record that Andrew freely used private palaces owned by the UAE’s ruling House of Nahyan when he was a trade ambassador for the U.K. over a decade ago. However, Lownie, who is writing a biography of the prince due out next year called Entitled: The Controversial Lives of the Duke and Duchess of York, told the Daily Beast that Andrew continues to have exclusive access to at least one fully staffed private palace in the country despite not technically owning it. The revelation will raise yet further questions about how Andrew pays for his lavish lifestyle.
Lownie, who has waged a decade-long freedom-of-information war with royal authorities over access to a laundry list of concealed documents, told the Daily Beast: “Andrew has been given the use of a palace by the Abu Dhabi authorities. It costs them nothing. He has been spending a lot of time out there in recent years and I am told by reliable sources that from next year he may divide his time between the Middle East and the U.K. He is expected to go between the two. It makes sense for him; there is good weather, he is treated with deference, there are a lot of golf courses, and he can conduct his business affairs however he sees fit. The whole family are up to their necks in it. The children, Beatrice and Eugenie, have been out in the Middle East and so has Fergie.”
“The whole family are up to their necks in it” – and then names only the York family. Like King Charles isn’t also up to his neck in weird, compromised situations with shady oligarchs and despots. Like Charles’s years of financial messes weren’t covered up and buried by the authorities. Again, Andrew is incredibly stupid and I’m not defending him at all, but he’s doing the same thing as the KING. Speaking of, the Daily Beast also included this statement from Norman Baker, one of my favorite Windsor critics:
Norman Baker, a former British government minister who wrote extensively about the royals’ finances in a book entitled And What Do You Do?—which has a chapter about Prince Andrew titled “The Grand Old Duke of Sleaze”—told the Daily Beast: “While Andrew’s involvement with Epstein was pretty distasteful, the real scandal is his abuse of his position as U.K. trade envoy to enrich himself. Why was he engaged so heavily with this Chinese person, and why was the Chinese person engaged with him? The only logical explanation was he wanted money because he was, to quote the Chinese alleged spy’s email, ‘desperate.’”
“Andrew suffers from a fatal combination of arrogance, stupidity, and greed, which leads him to do the things he does. But actually, the practice of taking something for nothing from an external source, the practice of dealing with unpleasant regimes across the world, the practice of being prepared to hide everything—these are traits that apply to Charles and the rest of the royal family. It’s just they’re rather more subtle about it. It wasn’t very long ago that Charles was captured accepting bags of cash, thousands of pounds of cash in Fortnum & Mason bags, from an overseas donor of dubious integrity. He looked like a mafia boss. So, Andrew in a sense is no different from anybody else. He’s just more clumsy and stupid about it.”
Exactly this: Charles “looked like a mafia boss. So, Andrew in a sense is no different from anybody else. He’s just more clumsy and stupid about it.” They’ve all decided that they’re going to hang this mess around Andrew’s neck and make him take the blame for all of it. Which is funny because Andrew sucks, but people should keep in mind that Charles and the other Windsors are corrupt slumlords too. As for Andrew possibly choosing to spend more time in Abu Dhabi… it would not surprise me, just as it would not surprise me if Charles was mostly fine with it.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
