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Royal historian Andrew Lownie gave a damning indictment of Prince Andrew, both in his relations with Epstein and his behaviour in the Royal Family.

“Andrew certainly likes young pretty girls.  There are allegations that Virginia Giuffre brought against Andrew have never been investigated by the police,”  Lownie said.

“For the night when he was in London and Virginia Giuffre accuses him of having gone to bed with her and he claims that he was in Windsor, there’s plenty of evidence – pictures of him and testimony in papers for the period saying he came out of the night club sweating.  And plenty of things; the last time he saw Epstein, the first he met Epstein have been shown to be palpably untrue,” he said.

When Lownie requested records to conduct research for his new book, he was told they had been destroyed.

“This is the behaviour of Russia and China in the way that they curate the narrative [and] that they destroy records – if you make life difficult, we can make life difficult for you,” he said.  

Yesterday evening, Andrew Lownie joined Andrew Gold to discuss his research into the sexual scandals surrounding Lord Louis Mountbatten and Prince Andrew.

Lownie is a British biographer, literary agent and bestselling author of  ‘The Mountbattens: Their Lives & Loves’ (2019) and ‘Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’ (2021).   He is currently researching a book on Prince Andrew which is due to be released in 2025.  In addition to his writing, Lownie and his lifelong friend, the filmmaker and writer Phil Craig, host a weekly podcast, ‘The Scandal Mongers Podcast’.

There are two problems with trying to expose abuses by members of the Royal family, Lownie explained.  The first problem is getting access to the material.  Royal files are generally closed.  Currently, Lownie is researching Prince Andrew. “Those files will be closed until 2065, 105 years after his birth, so he’ll be dead,” Lownie said.

“And when you do find things, as I did for example the FBI file on Mountbatten … saying that he had a predilection for paedophilia, the files were destroyed.  And when I asked when they’d been destroyed [and] I was told: after I’d asked for them.

“So, there’s a sort of hoovering up process that goes on even when things begin to emerge.”

Lownie’s book on Prince Andrew will focus on Andrew’s time as a public servant when he was a member of the Royal family but working for the Government as a trade envoy during 2001-2011.  During this time Andrew was supposed to be “drumming up trade for Britain” but there are suggestions he “took some of his chums – people who paid off debt, for example, for his ex-wife – and that he was doing business himself as a fixer,” Lownie said.  There’ve been suggestions that Jeffrey Epstein may have gone on some of these trips as well. “These are accusations that were made, often, by people who were dealing with him.”

So Lownie was trying to find out who was accompanying him on these trips and what the arrangements were. Those papers should be released after 20 years, so we should at least have access to the first few years, 2001 to 2003.  But, we don’t because “all the files are closed until 2065,” Lownie said.

Lownie has also tried to establish who was on the Royal flight for these trips so he has requested to see the flight logs.  “They refuse to release them or say they don’t have them.  The line is they don’t have them.  The Foreign Office [which also includes trade] say they have no records of this 10 years [2001-2011],” Lownie said.

Yet, diplomats who organised the trips and were dealing with all the related correspondence have told Lownie that there is “voluminous correspondence” regarding these trips. “[It] must be somewhere, but no one will say where it is, or if it has been kept,” Lownie said.

“If [Andrew] wanted to clear up his name, you would have thought he would be happy for these [flight] logs to come out.”

For the night when Giuffre accused him of being in London while Andrew claims he was in Windsor, logs of, for example, who came in and out of Buckingham Palace on that night, are kept by the protection officer.  Those logs, which are less than 20 years old, have been destroyed, or so they say, Lownie said.

“You have to wonder why they’ve been destroyed.  These are logs which are normally kept,” he said.  “So, there’s a lot of material that has been rather suspiciously destroyed after the event.”

“There are lots and lots of good things about the monarchy,” Lownie said,” but that doesn’t mean they should be above the law, that they should be feathering their own pocket from government, public work.”

“Any other trade delegate would be open to some sort of scrutiny; the papers would be available.  So, why is he different?”

Prince Andrew is very rude to staff, he’s very arrogant, Lownie said. “He believes he’s the son of the monarch and behaves as he wants.  He believes in the divine right of kings … Very few people had a good word to say about him … [Andrew has] a huge turnover of staff.”

Andrew was very close to Epstein, Lownie said.  “He went, supposedly, to end this relationship and stayed for several days with him while he did so.  There’s no doubt that Epstein opened doors for him business-wise, and vice versa, introduced him to useful people and also Epstein was trafficking women, that’s pretty clear, and providing women for his guests – people who were on the Lolita Express, people who were staying with him.”

“It’s not just Virginia Giuffre that’s come forward but there are others … A lot of people have been paid off, a lot of people too scared to speak, I think there’s a certain amount of evidence … I think [Andrew] took advantage of the women who were on offer and I don’t think they were that young, we’re talking about women probably 16 [years old] and up we’re not talking about little children.”

In the UK, the age of consent is 16 so sex with a consenting 16-year-old may not be as shocking to people in the UK as it would be for, say, people in the USA.  We may be disgusted with the notion of a man as old as Andrew having sex with a 16-year-old, but as long as it’s consenting, it’s not illegal.

“Mountbatten was involved with 12-year-old boys, that’s a very different story,” Lownie said, “[but] I don’t think [Andrew’s] a paedophile at all.”

The discussion then moved on to Harry and Meghan for the next 20 minutes or so before returning to Mountbatten and Prince Andrew.  There is a well-presented chapter and timestamp in the description below the video on YouTube.

There’s a lot of evidence that Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten was a paedophile.  There’s evidence in the FBI files which go back to 1943 as well as testimony from several people, including his chauffeur, Norman Nield, during the Second World War.  His chauffeur claims to have driven young children to or from Mountbatten.

There is also the testimony of two boys who were abused by Mountbatten in 1977 and a third victim, Arthur Smyth, who now lives in Australia.  Smyth has an active case in the High Court in Belfast, Northern Ireland, against Kincora Boys’ Home where a lot of these boys were trafficked, Lownie said.

“Quite a lot of people have come forward about stories about Mountbatten’s either bisexuality or paedophilia … So, I think there’s plenty of evidence there.  And, the fact that Mountbatten is a subject where records are destroyed, people won’t talk, I think, is quite revealing.”

Because of Smyth’s case, which has got further than any of the others, Lownie feels Mountbatten’s reputation will be reassessed in the next few years.

William McGrath, who ran Kincora Boys’ Home, was a paedophile.  “There’s some evidence he was trafficking boys from Kincora … to the rich Anglo-Irish Vice Ring, a group of people centred on country houses across Ireland. And the authorities, so MI5 who were the intelligence organisation in Northern Ireland knew this and they allowed this to happen because this gave them a chance to blackmail people to work for them,” Lownie explained. “So, they used these poor boys as pawns, really, to get people by the short and curlies and then get them to cooperate.”

(Related: Mountbatten, the Royal who abused boys aged 8-12, Lilburne & Friends on Threadreader App, 20 May 2021 and Lord of darkness? The disturbing life of Charles’s favourite uncle, Herald Scotland, 21 November 2021 and How MI5 protected child sex abusers in the notorious Kincora Boys’ Home, Sunday World, 4 December 2022)

Prince Philip, the husband of the late Queen Elizabeth II, was Dickie’s nephew.  Mountbatten helped raise Prince Philip who took his name to become known as Philip Mountbatten.  Dickie got Philip into the navy and encouraged the romance between Philip and Elizabeth II.  The two men were very close, Lownie said. Mountbatten was also a mentor to Elizabeth II. “[Mountbatten’s] influence [on the Royal family] has gone down four generations,” Lownie said. “He was very much part of the insider Royal family.”

You can watch Andrew Lownie’s interview below.

Featured image: Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten (left). Source: The Sun.  Prince Andrew (right). Source: The Independent