Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in September. Photo / Getty Images
Just for a moment let’s look at it from his perspective.
In his private life, Prince Andrew has done little more than his priapic forbear King Edward VII.
Andrew paid off Virginia Giuffre in time-honoured royal fashion and that should be the end of the matter.
After all he’s served his country, and as recently as Friday night showed his continued loyalty in voicing his support for his brother, the King.
Andrew’s loaded statement (his last ever, we assume, released on his behalf by Buckingham Palace) was that he “vigorously denies” the accusations against him.
For good measure he tossed away his royal dukedom and retreated from his position as Knight of the Garter – that, surely, should be enough?
Now, Andrew and his former wife Sarah Ferguson, who remains his housemate, will be turning to the big question: what next?
It was Fergie herself who recently declared – in comments that were interpreted as an attack on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – that exiles from the Royal family “can’t have it both ways. You can’t sit on the fence and keep one foot in and one foot out. You’re either in or out.”
“But then don’t cry about not being invited to weddings,” she said in 2023. “You chose to leave, now go and live it – and be it.”
Such an approach might prove tricky if Fergie and her former husband are to remain at Royal Lodge, the house on the Windsor estate over whose possession Andrew scored a pyrrhic victory over his brother recently.
There he is inextricably, physically, linked to the family who have finally cast him out, destined for a life of paparazzi shots of him behind the wheel of a Range Rover or riding on horseback around the estate.
He is, however, 65, healthy and fit. If he follows in his father’s footsteps he has at least another 30 years of life ahead.
Notoriously unmotivated (except perhaps by the sight of an attractive woman), he needs now to devise a plan.
The obvious solution is to make a fresh start.
There are few openings going for an ex-duke here in Britain, but what about abroad?
It seems inevitable that Andrew will, consciously or unconsciously, take inspiration from his great-uncle – the Duke of Windsor – who similarly fooled himself with the notion that he’d done no harm to the Crown, and found peace and contentment in exile.
He and the former Wallis Simpson set up home in Paris and found a new celebrity in the post-war years among a group yet to be labelled Eurotrash.
They were happy – treated like royalty and behaving like it – only now there were no responsibilities, lots of invitations. Endless parties.
Could Andrew and Fergie follow suit? After all, there’s nothing to keep the ex-duchess here – ditched by many of her charities and now persona non grata in the publishing world, her income streams have evaporated.
Fergie also has expensive tastes – so much so that Paris might present a problem, given the temptation of the eye-wateringly dear shops on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
So maybe America. From a distance Harry and Meghan’s lifestyle in Montecito looks enviable and, with a greedy media, could allow Andrew to take pot-shots at the monarchy from afar, just like his nephew.
The difficulty for these royal castaways is that America is too small a country for two exiled, disgraced princes.
The Duchess of Sussex is hard at work with her celebrity status and conveyor belt of promotional ideas, but there’s a growing feeling she’s giving little back in return for her quasi-royal status. Nonetheless, the spotlight remains on her.
Though the ex-Duchess of York was there before her, arriving in America after her 1986 marriage and allowing her then “financial adviser” John Bryan (also her lover) to size up what the US could do to bolster her bank balance.
Her much-fanfared weight problems encouraged Weight Watchers to pay her millions of dollars as their ambassador and as a consequence a bewildering array of charitable causes, too numerous to contemplate, gave her the platform to promote her commercial life.
Fergie has, alas for her, abdicated her romantic image as the bad-girl princess to the younger, slimmer Meghan, and a re-entry to American society may prove less appealing.
So where else? According to Andrew’s biographer Andrew Lownie, he retains the use of a fully staffed palace in Abu Dhabi, the gift of the UAE’s ruling House of Nahyan, for his personal use whenever he wants it.
Trouble is, the temperature rarely goes below 24C and in summer rises to 56C, and the social life is, well, a desert. So he’d be unlikely to make his base there.
So it comes down to Switzerland – the place Fergie calls “home”.
A passionate skier in her day, she worked as a chalet girl in her teenage years and at the age of 23 started a four-year relationship with Paddy McNally, a multi-millionaire motor racing manager 22 years her senior with a home in Verbier, the creme de la creme of Swiss ski resorts.
The relationship floundered when McNally refused to marry her. Bruised, Fergie returned to Britain and very soon became engaged to Andrew, but her love of the country never faded, and in 2016 she applied to become an official resident of Valais, the canton in which Verbier sits.
In an interview last year she said that she and McNally, who is still believed to have property in Switzerland, remain “best friends”.
“Since my first visit, I regularly returned for holidays to Verbier,” Fergie said in 2016. “My family has followed me over the years. We feel free and happy, we feel at home. There’s a sense of welcome. The people of Valais take the time to listen to you, support you if necessary.”
In 2014, almost 20 years after their divorce, Fergie and Andrew purchased a £13 million ($30.5m) property in Verbier, apparently to use as a “nest egg” for daughters Beatrice and Eugenie. Andrew had celebrated his 53rd birthday at the Chalet Helora and was so taken by the seven-bedroom property he and Fergie put in a joint offer.
As with many of Fergie’s business ventures, the deal ran into difficulties.
Isabelle de Rouvre, a French socialite who sold the Yorks the chalet, later sued them over an outstanding £6.7m debt and it also emerged that a separate “business debt” was owed to a Swiss couple. Andrew finally sold the chalet in December 2022.
But given the extraordinary influence of Fergie in their curious relationship, Switzerland would appear to be the obvious solution.
And finding the money for a suitable property would present no problem, as the couple has a handy chunk of equity in their lease on Royal Lodge which could be exchanged for a generous dollop of cash – King Charles, in the circumstances, probably being inclined to help them on their way.
In Switzerland, they could embark on their own, perhaps slightly more modest, version of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s life after the firm.
Lake Geneva, with its suitably dodgy mix of uber-rich and shady residents, is a short hop away but offers a different lifestyle, and the ex-Yorks could find themselves a flat there.
Whatever choice they make, life will never be the same again – exile is exile.
There is, in not-so distant history, another British-born prince forced to give up his Garter – a man who yearned for his homeland but was never allowed to return.
If things had gone differently Queen Victoria’s favourite grandson Charles Edward would have become Duke of Albany in England and lived happily ever after.
Instead, he was plucked from Eton at the age of 15 and sent to Germany where he was anointed Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
At the outbreak of World War I, Charles Edward, honorary colonel of the Seaforth Highlanders, wanted to fight for the British.
But Kaiser Wilhelm leant on him, reminding him of his adopted German responsibilities, and so the prince fought on the German side.
In 1915, his name was removed from the register of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.
He compounded his distance from the family which nurtured him by joining the Nazi Party and serving with feigned enthusiasm in the German Army in World War II.
It’s chilly out there when you quit the royal mothership.
And while Andrew would surely reject a comparison to Napoleon, as the Duchess of Windsor, a fellow royal castaway, bitterly observed when she and her husband were deployed to the Bahamas in 1940: “This is our Elba”.
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