The royal was a spoiled prince. The Queen had been too busy getting to grips with the job to lavish any attention on Charles and Anne, her two eldest children. When Andrew came along, she made up for it in spades. And with gifts: for his seventh birthday he received a £4,000 custom-built replica of James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, complete with rotating license plates and an exhaust that spewed smoke bombs .
In civilian life, he seems to have been intolerable. A playboy in his 20s, the papers dubbed him “Randy Andy”. But he was an Anxious Andy too – fretting constantly about money, especially after his marriage to Sarah Ferguson. At that time, Andrew’s stipend from the British taxpayer was £260,000 – not a lot if you have to pay for private jets and your new wife’s love for ski holidays.
“He refused to stay at the ambassador’s residence – only at the royal suite at the best hotel,” recalls a one-time deputy ambassador to Bahrain, who hosted Andrew for trade talks. “He arrived at the Ritz Carlton with an ironing board. His valet said, ‘no one else can iron his royal highnesses trousers like I can’.”
The rest of the delegated watched incredulously. “He was completely unaccountable,” the ambassador says. “He wasn’t interested. Nothing was done to rein him in.”