Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York

Andrew Lownie

William Collins, 2025; £22

Before he turned to royal biographies, Andrew Lownie wrote about Britain’s intelligence services, and he reports that he found the spies far more cooperative than he has ever found the royal family. It’s not just that many people in the know won’t talk, it’s that papers are kept secret and can be destroyed on a whim. This eye-opening biography of the aristo formerly known as Prince Andrew has been overtaken by events since it was published and can now be found on sale at a healthy discount, but it remains an impressive monument to research against the odds.

Andrew’s spoilt childhood (very different from that of his older brother), fraught marriage, shady business involvements and friendships with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are all dissected, and every claim appears well sourced. In interviews Lownie talks of being forced to leave things out by the lawyers and promises fresh revelations to come.

We get no strong sense of what Andrew is like as a person, perhaps because he lacks a coherent character – Lownie suggests his life has been bedevilled by the difficulty of deciding when he’s a prince and when he’s a normal person. Or as one young woman put it more picturesquely after a weekend house party: “One minute you’re having your bum pinched and the next minute he’s reminding you he’s Your Royal Highness”.

The picture Entitled paints of the royal family, with members leaking against each other to the press, is not an appealing one. Andrew’s role – he ceased to be needed once his brother had fathered two healthy children – is particularly unenviable, which makes you conclude that Harry did well to get out when he did.

Recent events in the United States have made us realise the virtues of a parliamentary system. Despite a thumping Conservative majority, the Commons forced two inadequate prime ministers out of office in the autumn of 2022, but it remains to be seen whether the US still satisfies Karl Popper’s pragmatic definition of a democracy – a country in which it is possible to remove a leader without violence. That uncertainty also makes a constitutional monarchy more attractive, but the reader still comes away from Lownie’s book suspecting it’s not only Andrew who needs to grow up a bit. When it comes to our reverence for the royals, we all do.

This review appears in issue 433 of Liberator magazine.