The New York Times bestselling royal journalist and author Christopher Andersen has suggested in a new book that the then-Prince Charles agreed not to object to his mother funding his disgraced brother Prince Andrew’s legal settlement with Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre in return for the monarch’s public endorsement of his wife Camilla as the future queen.
A source familiar with Charles’ thinking immediately hit back at Andersen’s claims, telling The Daily Beast they were “unsourced” and “untrue.”
However, the new claims are likely to annoy the palace as Andersen is an influential figure in the world of royal authorship. His study of Diana’s relationship with her children, Diana’s Boys, remains required reading for Diana-ologists. He claimed last year in a book that Charles was the “royal racist” who had questioned what color Harry and Meghan’s children’s skin would be.
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The ongoing refusal of the Palace to say how the settlement was paid, combined with longstanding rumors that Andrew was the late Queen Elizabeth’s favorite son, also plays into Andersen’s hands.
In his new biography of Charles, entitled simply The King, Andersen reports that after Andrew’s lawyers had, “negotiated a reported settlement of $14 million,“ the question remained of “who was going to pay for it.”
Andrew, whose sources of funding have always been opaque, was clearly not able to and it was obviously not remotely reasonable for such a sum to be funded by the taxpayer.
Andersen writes that it became obvious that the queen was going to have to use “some of the half billion dollars in private savings and investments,“ that she had amassed over the years to get her son out of his fix.
As Andersen points out, however, “to all intents and purposes such funds would ultimately be coming out of Charles’ inheritance,” so “Charles would have to, if not actually sign off on the deal, then at least not offer a public objection to it. As distasteful as it was to have a slice of his inheritance go for this purpose, Charles recognized a rare opportunity for some sort of informal quid pro quo. While the question of where the money would come from was still very much on the table, the Prince of Wales suggested privately that February 6, 2020, the 70th anniversary of her father George VI’s death, might be the ideal time to make some sort of statement in support of Camilla becoming queen.”
It had long been claimed by the Palace that when the time came Camilla would be known as “Princess consort” not “Queen consort” (usually now abbreviated to the more catchy "Queen Camilla."
These were, Andersen writes, the behind-the-scenes maneuverings that led the queen to issue a statement in support of Camilla, saying that it was her “sincere wish that when the time comes, Camilla will be known as Queen consort as she continues her own loyal service.”
The queen’s endorsement is believed to have been absolutely pivotal in securing Camilla’s place by Charles’ side as his official consort; overnight polls published the next day showed that half of the British population had become willing to accept Camilla as queen consort.
