Friends of Prince William have told The Royalist that the heir to the throne masterminded the operation to evict his uncle Andrew and strip him of his princely titles, after despairing of his father’s weakness on the matter.
The success of William’s surgical strike has confirmed the flow of power to the Prince of Wales from King Charles that The Royalist has reported as being underway ever since Charles announced he had cancer, which is incurable, in 2024.
The British media has dutifully minimized the gravity of Charles’ disease and has not reported extensively on the fact that he is not expected by many at court to live many more years. Many U.K. outlets have also rushed to endorse the palace’s fanciful account that Charles was the brains and the muscle behind the latest attempt to defenestrate Andrew.
This position ignores the glaring reality that Charles had a first pass at the problem two weeks ago, which flopped, and that it was Charles who sought to bring Andrew back into the family after Queen Elizabeth II’s death, then launched an ineffectual media campaign to cajole and then shame the un-shameable Andrew into leaving his gigantic 30-room home, Royal Lodge.
The palace statement and a supporting briefing document issued to the media Thursday sought to unequivocally position Charles as the author of the decision to strip Andrew of all his titles and remove him from the palatial property.
However, sources who know William scoffed at the suggestion.
One said, “Charles has been trying and failing to get Andrew out of Royal Lodge for the past three years. William did it in two weeks. William is king in all but name now.”
A former courtier who retains good links with the palace said the king had been left “utterly exhausted” by the battle with his brother, which has plunged the monarchy’s approval ratings to below 50 percent in the U.K. for the first time.
A friend of the Prince of Wales said William stepped in after being left “dismayed” by the deal announced two weeks ago, under which Andrew lost the use of his Duke of York title but, crucially, kept Royal Lodge and continued as a prince.
The king’s team attempted to present that as an interim step Thursday, with the briefing document stating that “the necessity of further action was never in doubt.”
However, it is pretty clear that the king hoped at the time that the measures announced on Oct. 17 would be enough.
The briefing documents issued that day made it crystal clear that Andrew’s tenancy agreement with the Crown Estate was “unaffected” and that he would stay a prince, not very subtly trying to blame Queen Elizabeth for this latter reality, saying his princely title was his by virtue of Letters Patent (best thought of as a regal executive order) issued in 1917 by George V that were “updated” by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012.
This apportioning of blame was later made explicit in a smear in the Sunday Times in which the king’s camp accused the late queen of having left an “unexploded bomb” under Charles’ throne in the form of Andrew that the king was now coolly defusing.
The king’s team was clear: There was no way to remove Andrew’s titles, and everything was the late queen’s fault.
The other mysterious feature of this whole affair has been the king’s amateurish strategy in relation to Andrew’s tenure at Royal Lodge.
There was a flurry of briefings in late 2023 and early 2024 that Charles wanted him out. His funding and security were cut. Wild stories circulated that the electricity supply would be cut off.
Then, the King’s team buckled, telling the London Times, on Nov. 8, 2024, that he couldn’t be kicked out of the house because the Keeper of the Privy Purse had been “satisfied” that the money he was using to maintain it was clean.
A source told the paper, “If Andrew can pay for his own upkeep with legitimate means, then it is not an issue.”
William was bemused by the way it was handled by his father’s office, with a friend telling The Royalist: “This is Andrew, so the solution was always going to be a payoff. This is his father’s mess, and William wanted it cleaned up on his father’s watch.”
The notion that it is his “father’s mess” refers to deep unhappiness within William’s circle about the way Charles tried not only to rehabilitate Andrew, but to co-opt William and Kate Middleton into the effort by forcing them to drive Andrew to church in Balmoral in the summer of 2023, having invited Andrew to join the family’s Christmas Day photocall at Sandringham in 2022.
At Christmas 2023, both Andrew and Sarah were in the festive photocall. William, furious, boycotted Christmas lunch at Sandringham in response.
In February 2024, Andrew was permitted to lead the family to church for the memorial service of King Constantine of Greece. He was seated in the front row alongside Princess Anne and Queen Camilla.
He was due to be at Sandringham for Christmas again that year until it was revealed he had nurtured a friendship with a suspected Chinese spy.
However, in 2025, the couple seemed to be back in favor again: Sarah Ferguson conducted an engagement for cancer awareness with the king at Buckingham Palace and they were both given pride of place at the funeral of the Duchess of Kent, where William blanked Andrew after the publication of a book by Andrew Lownie had convinced him that Andrew had to be cut loose.
William has long grasped that the monarchy has been held hostage by Andrew’s scandal and knew a ransom would have to be paid.
The Royalist reported that Andrew walked away from the royals with a deal worth “millions.”
In that context, the statement from Buckingham Palace, portraying King Charles as the forceful mastermind who finally stripped Andrew of his “prince” style and forced him from Royal Lodge, is an inversion of reality.
This is not a triumph, as the coy admission that Andrew is to be given a house and a gold-plated pension makes clear.
The statement was a PR attempt to package a failure years in the making. Far from revealing a strong and decisive monarch, the denouement exposed a pattern of chaos, drift, and denial at the heart of the king’s court.
William knew what needed to be done, and ultimately Charles conceded.
For three years, courtiers insisted that Andrew’s lease at Royal Lodge could not be undone, that his titles were beyond reach without Parliamentary upheaval, that ancient letters patent made change impossible.
Now all those impossibilities have magically evaporated. They did not dissolve because Charles discovered new rights overnight. They dissolved because he finally succumbed to his son’s demands and paid his brother off.
Charles’ reign will now always be defined by the inexplicable indulgence he granted his vile brother—a man whose associations with Jeffrey Epstein have left the monarchy morally wounded and publicly diminished.
The problem for the royals, including William, now, is that the substantive issues—the allegations made by Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, the questions around Andrew’s finances, his behavior while serving as a trade envoy, and his refusal to answer queries from U.S. prosecutors investigating Epstein’s mansions of horrors—remain.
Far from closing the book, this settlement exposes how reluctant the institution still is to cut Andrew loose. The most obvious sign of that reluctance is the absence, so far, of the one thing that could bring genuine closure: an open police investigation.
My guess is that William knows this is coming and has calculated that it will be less damaging if it focuses on a Mr. Mountbatten Windsor, as Andrew will now be known, than on a guy called “Prince Andrew.”
The Palace must hope that by moving Andrew out of sight, it can move the scandal out of mind. Yet scandals do not fade if their causes are left untouched. They linger. They resurface. They metastasize further. And the king’s refusal to confront the root cause of this one—the legal and ethical questions around Andrew’s conduct—ensures that this scandal will return at a time of even greater vulnerability.
Andrew may no longer be a prince in styling, but until he is treated like an ordinary man, able to defend himself or be held accountable, this Halloween nightmare will endlessly recur.
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