Top 10 WTF Prince Andrew Scandals

<h4>10 WTF Prince Andrew Scandals</h4>

Welcome to WatchMojoUK, and today we’re looking at the most bizarre scandals the Duke of York has been involved in over the years.

<h4>Arms Sales</h4>

In 2001, Andrew was made Special Representative for International Trade and Investment, a diplomatic post that many people in the UK, including MPs, thought he absolutely shouldn’t have. Andrew became a figurehead of the UK Trade & Investment department, which led many to call on him to start exercising political power in order to stop the British government from selling weapons to foreign dictatorships. Given how lucrative arms dealing is, it seems unlikely that this is really going to stop anytime soon, but it’s definitely an issue you’d usually want the royals to steer clear of. They’re not meant to be involved in politics at all, and especially not something as fraught as the international arms trade. For ten years, Andrew was seen to be promoting the selling of weapons to ruthless, authoritarian regimes worldwide, on behalf of the British people.

<h4>The Skiing Chalet</h4>

Despite being royal, Andrew apparently doesn’t have a lot of money. At least, he didn’t in 2014, when he was expected to pay £5 million of a £13 million purchase in cash. This purchase was an outrageously expensive skiing chalet in Switzerland, costing a similar amount to luxury properties in the West End of London. He bought it jointly with the Duchess of York – despite them getting divorced in the early 1990s – and they quickly seemed to fall behind on the payments. The owner was persuaded that they were in dire financial straits and agreed to lower the debt – only for Fergie to turn around and buy a swanky pad in Mayfair for five million. The story gets stranger, though, as rumours began to circulate that Andrew was going to petition Her Majesty to pay off his chalet debt for him, though this didn’t happen.

<h4>Banque Havilland</h4>

Property developer David Rowland has been a key friend and ally of Prince Andrew for decades, taking care of most of his finances – often via his private bank, Banque Havilland, in Luxembourg, a tax haven. Using his position as trade representative, Andrew helped Rowland make deals with the high-level diplomats he was meeting as part of his position. Rowland ended up loaning up massive amounts of money to politicians and businessmen, though it’s not clear how much he leveraged his access to Prince Andrew to get those meetings. Rowland is also a major donor to the Tory Party, which again calls his royal connections into question, and has plenty of his own scandals; he’s even friends with family members of Colonel Gaddafi. Over the years, Andrew has borrowed millions from Rowland’s bank.

<h4>The Royal Society</h4>

In 2013, Prince Andrew was elected to the Royal Society, a scientific organisation in the UK that has existed for hundreds of years, and most recently tackled misinformation around Covid-19 during the pandemic. Scientists and scholars at the Royal Society were livid about his appointment, though, owing to his total lack of scientific background. Like his father and brothers, the Duke of York went to Gordonstoun in Scotland, but it’s not clear what grades he achieved in his chosen A-level subjects of History, English, and economics. Regardless, even if he’d gotten the best grades possible – which seems doubtful – this still wouldn’t give him a scientific background. He also didn’t go to university, instead joining the Navy. Royal Society members actually tried to revolt and have him ejected, but this didn’t happen.

<h4>Azerbaijan</h4>

Another trade representative scandal, in his ten years manning that post Andrew struck up a friendship with Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan. He’s been president since 2003 and is well-known by international organisations for being involved with corruption and various human rights abuses. Despite all this, Andrew’s visited him many times, and they seem to be good friends. Andrew’s also been accused of being friends with Libyan gun smugglers and members of the contentious Tunisian government – the same government that was, in 2011, trying to quell a revolution against it. The flipside of these international scandals is that others have suggested Andrew has no idea what he’s doing or who he’s talking to, and is seeing these foreign trips as free holidays courtesy of the British government.

<h4>Ramming the Gates</h4>

We’re finally moving away from the international sphere, when Andrew found himself in hot water with Republic in 2016. Republic is an anti-monarchy organisation, and its CEO filed a police report claiming Andrew had been ramming into gates in Windsor Great Park. The park surrounds Windsor Castle and is open to the public, though it closes at night. Allegedly, Andrew in his Range Rover decided to ram open a pair of sensor-activated gates, which are designed to stop the park from being overrun with deer. Supposedly, the sensors didn’t work, and he didn’t want to drive the extra distance, so he tried to smash the gates open, breaking them AND damaging his car. No charges were ever pressed and the whole thing was a bit pointless, but it definitely speaks to how Andrew thinks the rules don’t apply to him.

<h4>Massages</h4>

Would you believe that Prince Andrew is a big fan of massages? He frequently received massages during his friendship with a certain convicted criminal we’ll talk about later, but a masseuse who briefly worked with him spoke to the press about his behaviour. The masseuse claimed that Prince Andrew always insisted on being naked during the massages she gave him, always in his bedroom, and that he grilled her at length about her sexual history and what sexual acts she had and hadn’t done. She said that she believes “Randy Andy” was trying it on with her, but that she rejected him at every opportunity, and that eventually, the massages stopped. She even described him as, quote, a “constant sex pest”, end quote.

<h4>Teddy Bears</h4>

A man having a collection of hundreds of teddy bears and other stuffed animals is weird, but maybe not scandal-worthy. At least, not until he starts verbally abusing his staff over not putting his toys in the correct order. The teddy bear collection received more infamy in 2024 when it was featured in the Netflix movie “Scoop”, dramatizing how he ended up giving the BBC THAT interview. He’s always been very public about his teddy bears, saying in 2010 that he bought them everywhere he stopped during his time in the Navy. But everyone who’s ever encountered them – particularly the maids he’d scream at if they were arranged incorrectly – has said that it’s very strange indeed.

<h4>The Epstein Friendship</h4>

It was as early as 2011 that Prince Andrew’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein made headlines. Epstein had already been convicted for sex trafficking in 2008 and made no attempt to stop or curb his illegal behaviour. It’s been rumoured that Epstein was trying to use Andrew as a cover to gain some credibility, though lawyers have been going after the Duke of York for a decade based on various allegations. For years and years, Andrew continued cavorting with Epstein, and this friendship has even been defended to this day by Sarah Ferguson – who still lives with her ex-husband and has done so since 2014. Just stop going to his private island!

<h4>Pizza Express</h4>

The Epstein scandal reached a fever pitch following Epstein’s death in custody in 2019, and the Duke of York finally decided that he was going to set the record straight. He sat down for a now legendary interview with Emily Maitlis for “Newsnight”, in which he made the most “WTF” claims he’s ever made in his life. The first of these was that on the nights accuser Virginia Giuffre says they were together at Tramp in London, he couldn’t possibly have been there, because he was attending a children’s birthday party at a Pizza Express in Woking. The second was, of course, that he had lost his ability to sweat because of an “adrenaline overdose” suffered during the Falklands, so her claim that he was sweating couldn’t be true. Crucially, the sweating thing was, according to him, “temporary”, explaining why he was sweating under those studio lights.

Let us know in the comments what your favourite branch of Pizza Express is.