Did Charles REALLY wreak revenge on Andrew over fears he’d plotted to steal the crown?

In royal circles it has long been known that King Charles III is not a fan of his younger brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Charles once memorably described Andrew as ‘like a fizzy drink that has been shaken up and the top taken off’. The tension between the siblings – one the earnest older son, the other the playboy – was evident as far back as 1979 during the Cowes Week regatta on the Isle of Wight.

The then 19-year-old Andrew, nicknamed ‘The Boss’ by their father because he was so wilful, did not take kindly to 30-year-old Charles teaching him how to windsurf by barking instructions at him.

The sailing community looked on, bemused, as Andrew got his own back at the helm of a speedboat, deliberately creating huge waves to destabilise the heir to the throne, tipping him off his board as he tried to enjoy some windsurfing on his own.

For years, Charles was the overachiever Andrew was forced to look up to – and that seemed ever more the case in 1992, when it was announced that Andrew and his wife Sarah Ferguson were separating. Ten years on from the Falklands conflict, Andrew’s popularity as the glamorous warrior prince who had served his country as a helicopter pilot was on the wane.

But, by the end of 1994, Charles was also sinking fast in the opinion polls because of his continuing association with Camilla Parker Bowles. In a massive own goal of a TV interview that June – one not unlike Andrew’s Newsnight debacle decades later – Charles admitted in front of an audience of 25 million people to being unfaithful to his wife, Princess Diana.

The following year, Diana countered with the Panorama interview in which she said that she did not think Charles would ever be king. And with both the Queen and the Queen Mother refusing to have anything to do with Camilla, Charles began to feel that the entire House of Windsor was ranged against him, and brooded over suspicions that both Andrew and Edward were plotting his downfall.

In particular, according to royal biographer Tom Bower, he believed that Andrew had been spreading poison about Camilla to the Queen and Prince Philip.

‘Now, mindful of Diana’s prediction on Panorama … he convinced himself that Diana and Sarah, Andrew’s estranged wife, were hatching plans to replace him as heir – by announcing that on the Queen’s death, or abdication, Andrew would be regent until William was 18, when he would take over.’

For Charles, this confirmed something about Andrew that he had suspected all along.

‘Andrew wanted to be me,’ he told his private secretary Mark Bolland. ‘I should have let him work with me.’ Given the scandals in which Andrew has become embroiled, it is probably a good thing he didn’t.

Not least because there was the disgrace of his continued association with billionaire financier and convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Still more horrifying were accusations the prince had slept with Virginia Giuffre, who claimed to have been trafficked to him as a 17-year-old by Epstein’s girlfriend and ‘madam’ Ghislaine Maxwell, a close friend of Andrew’s.

The Epstein affair would have been reason enough to justify keeping Andrew out of the public eye. But can this fully explain the action that Charles is said to have taken during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations of June 2012?

He apparently saw to it that Andrew was excluded from joining his mother at a lunch for 700 people in Westminster Hall, and neither was he seen on the balcony of Buckingham Palace afterwards.

Prince Edward suffered the same fate. And while Charles had long argued that the monarchy’s future lay in a reduction in the number of working royals, this led to speculation that he had not forgotten the perceived plot against him in the 1990s.

Four years later, in 2016, Charles was said to have ‘resisted’ Andrew’s efforts to persuade the Queen that his daughters Beatrice and Eugenie should become taxpayer-funded working royals. Andrew issued a statement denying that there was any rift between them. But, according to Tom Bower, Charles was subsequently ‘furious’ about Andrew’s disaster of an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight in November 2019.

One reason was that it had ‘completely overshadowed’ the visit to New Zealand he and Camilla had embarked on two days previously.

‘The one thing Charles is determined to do is inherit the crown and he won’t let anyone get in the way,’ Bower told the Daily Mail.

Three days after the interview aired, Andrew issued a statement saying he recognised that his association with Epstein had become ‘a major disruption to my family’s work’. That being the case, the Queen had given him permission to step down from public duties.

It is believed Charles supported this effective sacking and one ex-courtier has suggested it was the result of continued paranoia about the duke’s alleged attempt at a palace coup in the 1990s. ‘If so, it’s a fitting revenge,’ commented the former royal employee.

The late Queen appeared never to have wavered in her support for Andrew. This was particularly clear on Sunday August 11, 2019, the day after Epstein – who, five weeks previously, had been arrested on charges of sex trafficking – was found dead in his cell in New York.

The focus on Epstein’s circle was more intense than ever, yet the Queen ensured that Andrew was sitting alongside her in a Rolls-Royce as she headed for Sunday morning worship in Balmoral.

In March 2022, almost a year after Prince Philip’s death, a memorial service was held for him and it was Andrew the Queen chose to be her chaperone at Westminster Abbey.

That June, she was also said to have agreed only reluctantly to Charles and William’s demand that he be excluded from the public procession in which Her Majesty and Knights of the Garter, the highest noble order in Britain, walked to St George’s Chapel at Windsor for a religious service.

Following the Queen’s death at Balmoral only three months later, Andrew had to wear civilian clothing when he followed her coffin in the procession taking it along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.

In January 2023, it was reported that Andrew would no longer be able to use his suite of rooms in Buckingham Palace and Charles also tried – and failed – to force him to leave Royal Lodge, a 30-bedroom residence near Windsor Castle.

But to the outside world, it seemed that not much had changed in Andrew’s position as eighth in line of succession. Perhaps Buckingham Palace thought it could sit on its hands under a new monarch, one who still appeared to lack a full grasp of the situation’s gravity.

In his notorious interview with Newsnight, Andrew had said he never had any contact with Epstein following his stay at his New York mansion in December 2010. Yet, in January last year, an email sent to Epstein by the prince on February 27, 2011, was revealed during a Financial Conduct Authority investigation into banker Jes Staley, a friend of Epstein.

‘Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!’ it read.

Last April came the shocking news that Andrew’s accuser Virginia Giuffre had committed suicide at the age of 41. His supporters may have been secretly relieved that she would no longer be around to level accusations at him. But just as her posthumous autobiography Nobody’s Girl was published in October, an email leaked to The Mail on Sunday spelt more trouble for the prince. Sent by him to the Queen’s deputy press secretary Ed Perkins in February 2011, just as this paper was about to go to press with the notorious photograph that showed Andrew with his arm around Giuffre’s waist, it revealed that he had emailed his police bodyguard her date of birth and social security number in the US, and asked him to find out what he could about her.

The implication was that he wanted to use this material to smear Giuffre.

But she had no criminal record and it is not clear if the officer complied with the request.

In desperation, Buckingham Palace reached for another range of symbolic measures to be seen to censure Andrew. It announced that Andrew had agreed to stop using the title Duke of York and other forms of address.

Behind the scenes, Charles was finally on manoeuvres. Two weeks later came the news that Andrew would give up his membership of the Order of the Garter and that Charles III had decided to formally remove all Andrew’s remaining royal styles and honours.

From November 3, Andrew was plain Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, a humiliation that came into effect nine days before a trove of 23,000 documents relating to the Epstein case was released in America.

While Andrew has long insisted the picture with Virginia Giuffre at Ghislaine’s home might be fake, the release included a damning email sent by Epstein to a reporter and appeared to confirm that it was genuine.

Shortly afterwards it was announced that Andrew and Fergie – who had continued to live under the same roof despite their divorce – were finally being forced out of Royal Lodge, Andrew’s 75-year lease notwithstanding.

With Fergie left to find her own accommodation, Andrew found himself exiled to the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, the Royal Family’s equivalent of Siberia.

Siberia it might be, but it was reported that the former royal would still have a cook and a footman – though it was unclear who was paying for this – and that Andrew was to be addressed as ‘Sir’ by them.

While Marsh Farm was being renovated, he moved temporarily into Wood Farm, once the out-of-the-way home for his father, Prince Philip, arriving there at the beginning of February this year.

That was shortly after another release of emails from the Epstein files, including documents suggesting that he had shared confidential information with Epstein while he was the UK’s trade envoy. At 8am on February 19, 2026, his 66th birthday, Andrew was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He was released hours later after questioning and without being charged.

Painfully for Buckingham Palace, not even King Charles had been given prior warning of the arrest of his own brother, a breach of the courtesies to which British royals had grown accustomed over a millennium.

It seemed that as a result of its handling of Andrew, the monarchy was now facing the dawn of an era where royal privilege has no place: One in which major change is needed to break with the past.

• Adapted from Downfall by Nigel Cawthorne (Gibson Square Books, £14.99) to be published April 22. ©Nigel Cawthorne 2026. To order a copy for £14.24 (offer valid to 02/05/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.