This weekend, the Daily Mail began serializing Andrew Lownie’s Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York. The biggest gossip headline was immediately the stuff about Prince Harry possibly getting into a physical fight with Andrew in 2013, and then Harry’s spokesperson denying that it ever happened. The Harry stuff is obscuring the larger point of Lownie’s book though. That point being “Andrew is a degenerate and a sexual predator.” Lownie has written vividly about all kinds of lurid stories involving Andrew over the years, from Andrew’s years-long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, to a story which has apparently been well-known to royal reporters for decades. It involves Andrew traveling to Thailand on state business in 2006. From the Daily Beast’s Royalist column:

My friend Andrew Lownie’s new book about Prince Andrew, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, has been four years in the making, and it landed on the pages of the Daily Mail this weekend with an almighty bang. Lownie believes that, ultimately, Andrew will be brought down by financial—not sexual—wrongdoing, but predictably, perhaps, it is Andrew’s callous sexual behavior that has captured the headlines.

His long friendship with predator Jeffrey Epstein is, of course, well known—the prince, after all, told the BBC he didn’t regret the association one bit. Factor in Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and President Donald Trump, who once boasted he was so famous he could grab women “by the p—y,” and you have a truly toxic brew of power and abuse.

However, it is the prince’s lurid sexual escapades in Thailand, which are discussed in Lownie’s new biography, that may well prove to be the final nail in the coffin of Andrew’s reputation. Of all the revolting stories that have dogged Andrew’s disgraced career, Lownie’s account of a rolling hotel-room o-gy while on official royal duty stands out for its brazenness and its symbolism. Lownie—and the Mail—are to be congratulated for finally running this story, which has long circulated among the royal press pack.

Andrew, the queen’s son, travelled to Thailand in 2006, representing the Crown at the King of Thailand’s diamond jubilee. And what was he doing? (I have some sources in Thailand myself, thanks to several years of reporting on the Thai monarchy.) According to Lownie, he was ordering women to his hotel suite in such numbers that even the staff of a luxury Bangkok hotel—who really have seen it all—were stunned. According to Lownie’s sources, more than 40 women were brought to his room during the course of a weekend stay.

“Often, as soon as one left, another would arrive,” a witness told Lownie. My sources have confirmed Lownie’s account of Andrew’s industrial-scale sexual consumption, carried out under the auspices of royal diplomacy with the full apparatus of the British state behind him.

Indeed, one source told me that rumors abounded among the Thai demimonde that Andrew and another foreign dignitary—who also regarded access to a revolving door of female bodies as part of the perks of office—were sending girls to each other via luxury car services in a horrific power play masquerading as a twisted mark of respect.

[From The Daily Beast]

Given that Thailand has a reputation for sex tourism for all appetites however depraved, it would not surprise me at all if many of the “women” brought to Andrew were actually girls. But no one is saying that specifically, it seems to be merely hinted at. Anyway, there was a lot of back-and-forth in the comments about whether Lownie’s book should be taken seriously, especially given that Prince Harry has already come out to deny some specific aspects of Lownie’s reporting. I think people should use their best judgment – it’s more than possible that some of the book’s reporting is false, or compromised. It’s also possible that Lownie barely scratched the surface of all of the disgusting stuff Andrew has done over the course of his life.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.