Revelations that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor charged his staff to live at his Windsor estate despite paying only a peppercorn rent himself have dominated most newspaper headlines this morning.
There is, however, another scandal brewing inside the new report by the National Audit Office (NAO).
It reveals that Andrew’s daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, who undertake no royal duties, have been living in palace homes without personally having to pay even a single penny.
Instead, the bill was settled by their grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, using money from the Privy Purse, which comes largely from the Duchy of Lancaster. This is the £650million property estate handed to our monarchs free of inheritance tax. That’s an arrangement that has continued under the princesses’ uncle, King Charles, since the Queen’s death.
And it’s a disgrace.
Our sovereign has been allowed to keep benefiting from the income provided by the Duchy of Lancaster (about £25million per year) so that he can fund official duties not covered by taxpayers; maintain private royal estates, such as Balmoral and Sandringham; and support members of the extended Royal Family who undertake public engagements.
What have Beatrice and Eugenie done to justify their receiving luxurious accommodation from the King? They are not working royals.
Hard-pressed taxpayers could, perhaps, understand the King using his generous income from the Duchy of Lancaster to pay for accommodation for elderly or infirm members of the Royal Family who have carried out public duties throughout their lives.
Beatrice and Eugenie’s Privileged Lives
But ‘Bea’ and ‘Euge’, as the sisters are known to friends, are certainly not in need. Beatrice, 37, is a well-educated businesswoman who lives an enviable lifestyle. Just last night, in my role as the Daily Mail’s Diary Editor, I saw her partying in Mayfair with pals including hotels heiress Nicky Hilton Rothschild and Princess Diana’s niece Lady Eliza Spencer.
The princess runs an advisory company, BY-EQ, whose initials stand for Beatrice York and, apparently, Emotional Quotient (intelligence). She described BY-EQ as ‘an advisory organisation focused on adding more exceptional emotional intelligence in an age of artificial intelligence’. It reported earnings of just under £500,000 last year – an astonishing increase on its first year of trading, when it made a modest £39,000 profit. The latest accounts disclosed that, after bills of £214,615, Beatrice retained £274,846 in accumulated profits.
And that is hardly Beatrice’s only household income, as she has been working as a private equity analyst for more than ten years. She has two daughters, Sienna, aged four, and Athena, 16 months, as well as a stepson, Wolfie, with her husband, Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 42. The son of an Italian aristocrat, ‘Edo’, as pals call him, is a smooth-talking property developer whose company has made a fortune since he married Beatrice in 2020. Last year, he even expanded his Banda interior design company to include fitting out private jets. ‘It’s escapism,’ he explained of their appeal. ‘When you’re in the air there are no people constantly asking you questions or children hanging off you.’
Eugenie, 36, is also a member of the international jet set. She is an expensively educated university graduate like her sister, and is a director at the art gallery Hauser & Wirth. She has two sons, August, five, and Ernest, who turned three last weekend, with Jack Brooksbank, an amiable former barman who, like Edo, has seen his career flourish since he married into the Royal Family.
First, he was given a job in marketing for Casamigos, the tequila brand founded by Hollywood star George Clooney (a friend of the royals), and Rande Gerber, husband of supermodel Cindy Crawford. Now, he undertakes sales, marketing and promotion for property entrepreneur Mike Meldman, who was the third co-founder of Casamigos.
Brooksbank and Eugenie live in luxury in one of Meldman’s seafront villas in Portugal. But, as the NAO report revealed yesterday, they also have a London bolthole at Kensington Palace. Called Ivy Cottage, the three-bedroom property is one of west London’s prime locations and the couple’s neighbours include the Prince and Princess of Wales, who live at the huge Apartment 1A some of the time.
The report states that Eugenie’s rent for Ivy Cottage was set until this year using open-market valuations dating back to 2018. This was only updated this year. Between 2020 and 2021, the princess’s rent was set at just 50 per cent of the 2018 market value.
This rose to 55 per cent in 2022, 60 per cent in 2023 and eventually to 64 per cent this year.
In keeping with Beatrice and Edo’s super-rich lifestyle, they own a house in the Cotswolds, where they can meet other famous figures such as the Beckhams, Kate Moss and Jeremy Clarkson. The princess’s manor-style farmhouse in Oxfordshire has six bedrooms, a swimming pool, tennis courts and a guesthouse.
The NAO report states that Beatrice also has a London pied-a-terre at St James’s Palace, for which the rent was 60 per cent of the market value in 2020, rising to 68 per cent by this year. The report says: ‘Rents were not consistently set at 60 per cent of the open-market value available at the time.’ As we now know, this rent was paid not by the wealthy couple but by the King using money he inherited when he ascended the throne in 2022.
For the long-term good of the monarchy, this can’t continue.
Princess Eugenie has a London bolthole at Kensington Palace. Called Ivy Cottage, the three-bedroom property is one of west London’s prime locations and the couple’s neighbours include the Prince and Princess of Wales, who live there part-time.
The NAO report states that Beatrice has a London pied-a-terre at St James’s Palace, for which the rent was 60 per cent of the market value in 2020, rising to 68 per cent by this year.
Why Beatrice and Eugenie Changed My Mind
I had always been a supporter of Beatrice and Eugenie. Whenever I met them at London parties, they seemed sensible and level-headed. I consistently argued that they should be given more prominent roles in The Firm and could become ‘working royals’ when their cousin Prince William eventually succeeded his father. After all, one of the secrets of Queen Elizabeth’s record-breaking success as a monarch was that she was supported by her loyal cousins such as the Duke of Kent and Princess Alexandra, who helped share the burden of public duties.
It struck me as unfair for Beatrice and Eugenie to be tainted by the failings of their parents, the former Duke and Duchess of York. However, the more I read of the three million documents in the Jeffrey Epstein files, the more disturbed I was by how much they knew about the late sexual offender and how little they did about it.
After Prince Andrew’s disastrous interview at Buckingham Palace with BBC Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis in 2019, it was reported that Beatrice had advised her father to take part. Indeed, she was said to have attended a meeting at the Palace with the BBC producers who persuaded Andrew to agree to it.
Then, I found it hard to believe that Bea could have been involved because it was such a foolish decision. But when it was confirmed to be the case, I persuaded myself that she must have done so out of a touching belief in the innocence of her father, and that she must have been desperate for him to convince the nation he had been involved in no wrongdoing, just as he had clearly convinced her.
Then, however, it was revealed that the princess, who was 20 at the time, joined her sister and mother on a visit to Miami in 2009 to visit Epstein less than a week after he was released from prison.
The American financier was under house arrest at the time, having served 13 months of an 18-month sentence for procuring a child for prostitution after a parent reported that he had sexually abused her 14-year-old daughter. Epstein had pleaded guilty to the revolting crime.
The Epstein files show extensive contact between Epstein and Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew from then onwards. The following year, Andrew went to stay with Epstein at his New York apartment.
In his Newsnight interview, Andrew told Maitlis that he went there only to inform Epstein that he would be having nothing more to do with him. However, emails from the Epstein files show that this was a lie. In fact, their creepy contact continued for years.
I believe that Beatrice knew her father had lied when he said this. The fact that she had accompanied her mother to celebrate the sexual offender’s release shows that her parents had no intention of cutting ties with him. Quite the opposite: they hoped to continue benefiting from his generosity. Surely Eugenie, too, must have been aware of their true position?
William’s Vision for a Slimmer Monarchy
While Queen Elizabeth and King Charles were happy to use the Privy Purse to pay for Beatrice and Eugenie’s London homes, their cousin Prince William will not do so. I can disclose that the heir to the throne believes that the current situation is unacceptable.
I have been told for years that William believes the monarchy should be ‘slimmed down’ and such arrangements will end.
‘William loves his cousins but firmly believes that only “working royals” should receive the benefits of being members of the Royal Family,’ one of his friends told me.
For evidence of how William and Catherine want things to be done differently, look at the way they recently made public how much they paid to live at their new home in Windsor. As part of the couple’s ‘short-term 20-year lease’, which began in July 2025, they pay £307,200 a year for Forest Lodge, and they will reportedly face a rent review every five years in line with the Consumer Price Index.
Supporters of the monarchy such as myself know that if the institution is to survive and prosper, members of the Royal Family need to be seen to devote themselves to public service. There can be no more feathering the nests of already pampered princesses such as Beatrice and Eugenie.
