‘He's Finished!' Andrew's Down Fall

To Save The Throne, The Queen And Her Heirs Make An Astounding Demand

- Andrew Mackintosh

When Prince Charles touched down in Auckland for his New Zealand tour, he was expecting an afternoon off. Instead, his aides showed him a recording of a TV show.

He’s said to have watched it with “incredulity and alarm”, growing icily angry. At the end, he uttered just one word: “Misguided.”

Charles put in a call to his mother, the Queen, and received a call from his son and heir, Prince William – three generations of current and future monarchs, startled and shaken by the interview Prince Andrew had given to the BBC’s Emily Maitlis about his involvement with the late paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

A palace insider says the Queen didn’t give her approval of the questions or Andrew’s replies.

“There is no way the Queen and her private secretary wrote a ‘yes’ on a memo that fully explained what was proposed.”

Instead, Andrew (59) had told her he was going to knock the gossip on the head and explain he’d met none of Epstein’s young harem, including Virginia Roberts (now Giuffre), who claims that Andrew had sex with her three times when she was 17, each time at the request of Epstein, a convicted sex offender.

“What should have happened was the full palace process, where the interview proposal was placed under all the scrutiny and due diligence that usually takes place,” says the insider.

An aide adds, “Prince Charles was fuming but calm. He knew that the interview would wipe his tour off the front pages and undermine all the work that had gone into it. He hadn’t wanted anything to overshadow the big things, such as meetings with [Prime Minister] Jacinda Ardern, or the smaller things, like visiting Paihia Volunteer Fire Brigade station.”