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Prince Andrew, a former acquaintance told The Daily Beast, always had a type.
“Andrew was very much a boob man. Introduce him to a beautiful woman with big boobs and he’d be following them around the place with his tongue on the floor. He never drank; women were his drug,” the former pal said.
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Andrew’s alleged fascination with good looking, large-breasted women was, by chance, the subject of a report at the weekend in which a former lapdancer came forward to claim he had “blown a raspberry” on her chest at one of Jeffrey Epstein’s parties, a practice known as “motorboating” by its devotees.
The woman alleged that after Andrew had buried his face in her cleavage, he suggested she should be in a pornographic magazine for “big-breasted women.”
In a Sunday Mirror interview, the woman said she was paid by Epstein to hire girls to attend parties, and claims she was instructed to select buxom women to suit Andrew’s taste.
She said: “The Duke seemed in good spirits and was out to enjoy himself. I always thought, Andrew liked my breasts. When he started to say hello he looked at them first rather than me. He leaned forward and put his face on them and blew a raspberry. I was shocked, but I laughed, thinking ‘Wow what was that?’
“I guess being a prince gives you those privileges. Anyone doing that in a bar or in the street would have got a punch in the face, believe me.”
However it was not just socially that Andrew enjoyed the company of women; it came as little surprise to Andrew’s circle that, when he left the navy and became a full time working royal, his office ended up being staffed by a disproportionately large number of attractive women who were nicknamed (with a neat dose of tabloid sexism) “Andy’s Angels.”
The Andy’s Angels soubriquet goes back at least to 2010, when he appointed Laura Hutchings, described by the Telegraph as “one of David Cameron’s most glamorous lieutenants,” to be his new assistant private secretary.
Hutchings gave up a promising position as the director of the Conservative Middle East Council to take up her role with Andrew. She knew exactly what she was getting into as she had worked extensively with the prince when he visited the Middle East in his U.K. trade envoy role, which came to an end when the infamous picture of him walking in Central Park with Epstein was published.
It was also in 2010 that the Duke appointed as his new equerry Squadron Leader Charlotte Fenn, 33, a test flight pilot with the Red Arrows stunt aircraft team, who attracted much comment because of her physical similarity to his former wife, Sarah, Duchess of York. She replaced a man, although her predecessor but one (from 2006-2008) was Royal Navy Lieutenant Caroline Clark.
“Andrew did hire a lot of women,” another source who knows the Yorks and their circle told The Daily Beast. “But for a junior royal, this was acceptable. The senior royals all had men as their private secretaries but that wasn’t a requirement for Andrew. In fact, a lot of the younger royals now have large numbers of female staff. They have followed his lead.”
The source says that any suggestion that Andrew would have exploited his position to take advantage of his staff sexually is wide of the mark.
“He never had a problem with a member of staff over anything like that,” said the source, “Andrew’s girlfriends were all well-bred girls on the smart London circuit. Koo Stark may have been American, but she was part of that trendy posh, London world of the 70s and 80s. Her friends were people like Henry Pembroke, the Earl of Pembroke. He was actually a producer on one of Koo’s movies.
“Andrew was never one for shop girls. Yes, he liked to surround himself with women but I always felt that didn’t mean a thing—other than that he likes women, and maybe that is because he is a mummy’s boy.”
Right now, the powerful female staff member in the spotlight is Amanda Thirsk, an exceptionally bright law graduate of the University of Cambridge who has worked for the Prince since 2012 and was widely regarded as his right-hand-woman.
Amanda Thirsk (left, in black coat), and Prince Andrew
A mother of three, Thirsk was unceremoniously fired from her job by the queen when Andrew was pulled back from royal duties. However, her importance to Andrew is demonstrated by the fact that he immediately rehired to run his private office, which includes operating the husk of the Pitch@Palace initiative (although as sponsors are rapidly deserting the program it seems unlikely this is a sustainable long-term career).
The camp of Andrew’s ex, Sarah Ferguson, has been furiously briefing against Thirsk in recent days, saying that it was Thirsk, not her and Beatrice, who encouraged Andrew to do the fateful BBC interview in which he failed to express sympathy with Epstein’s victims, said he didn’t regret his friendship with Epstein and suggested his main failing was being “too honorable.”
However Thirsk’s camp have been quietly pushing back against this narrative, saying it was Fergie who wanted the air cleared ahead of Beatrice’s wedding next year.
Some who know Thirsk say she is too intelligent, and too aware of Andrew’s own intellectual frailties for it to be plausible that she would have encouraged Andrew to sit down Emily Maitlis, one of the U.K.’s toughest interviewers.
In fact this argument about whether it was this person or the other who persuaded Andrew to do it ignore is a massive distraction.
It’s notable that Andrew’s life, more than any other royal, is dominated by his relationships with strong and powerful women: his staff, his daughters, Sarah Ferguson and of course, his mother.
It's quite clear that several of these women had reservations about what Andrew was planning to do, but he chose not to listen to the voices of dissent.
It is not too late to start listening to them.
