<
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/24/andrew-mountbatten-windsor-biographer-andrew-lownie-entitled>
"The Saturday morning I meet Andrew Lownie, the author of “the most devastating
royal biography ever written” (according to the
Daily Mail), the front page
of every newspaper carries the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Some have
aerial shots of the police arriving to search his home, most including the now
infamous photograph of his face in the back of his car. He looks hunted,
because he literally has been, but his expression is curiously blank, its most
legible emotion grievance. One journalist, Lownie says, reported late on the
night of Friday’s arrest that: “Andrew still can’t see what the problem is. He
thinks he’s been hard done by. He’s obsessed with other details – whether he
can take his horses up to Norfolk, who’s going to get the dogs, where he’s
going to park his car. It’s a sort of disassociation.”
Lownie’s office, in his home a stone’s throw from parliament, is a monument to
the success of his book,
Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York
(along with his other books: one on the Mountbattens, one on Guy Burgess, one
to come on Prince Philip). One desk is piled high with books about Andrew and
Sarah, some of them by Ferguson herself, others warts-and-all, kiss-and-tell
accounts from confidants and clairvoyants. Lownie has stacks of rejected
freedom of information requests, from UK Trade and Investment; the Foreign,
Commonwealth and Development Office; the Information Commissioner – “They
sometimes took so long to respond that they haven’t even downloaded the request
before it expires.” He approached 3,000 people from all the way through
Mountbatten-Windsor’s life; only a tenth of them would speak to him, which to
me feels quite unsurprising, and yet Lownie is indignant. “I wrote to
ambassadors, and they said ‘not interested’. This was a matter of public
interest. Others, very cheerily when I wrote to them a third time, said ‘nice
try’, as if it was some sort of joke. These are the guys I want in the dock, in
parliament, on oath. This is the thing that makes me upset. I, perhaps naively,
expect standards in public life.”
Entitled was published last year, after four years of research. It builds a
cradle-to-police-station picture (he is now updating the book for a new
edition) of a royal whose long association with a known child sex offender may
look like the nadir of his behaviour, but is also completely congruous with a
priapic, exploitative and money-grubbing life in which nothing was ever refused
him."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
