‘Many would have preferred this book not to be written, including the Yorks themselves.’ So Andrew Lownie begins his coruscating examination of the lives of Prince Andrew and Sarah ‘Fergie’ Ferguson, which has excited significant media attention due to its scandalous revelations. Lownie, a historian and literary agent, has pivoted away from an earlier, more conventional career as a biographer of John Buchan and Guy Burgess to the self-appointed role of royal botherer-in-chief. After earlier, similarly scabrous books about the Mountbattens and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, he now finds his first contemporary targets, and the results are predictably marmalade-dropping.

Prince Andrew’s decline in public popularity over the past decade, exacerbated by stories of his ill-considered friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and rumours of the sexual abuse of the underage Virginia Giuffre, was capped by his disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview with a disgusted-looking Emily Maitlis, in which he tried and failed to salvage his reputation with a series of bizarre admissions that made him look both stupid and sinister. Today, he has an uneasy relationship with members of the wider royal family, who would like to be shot of him but are reluctant to cast off one of their own;........

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