One night time, the queen of England got here to Johnny Money in a dream. “Johnny Money! You’re like a thorn tree in a whirlwind,” she remarked. When he awoke, the phrase caught with him, and over the subsequent seven years, he turned it into his apocalyptic music, “The Man Comes Round.”
Q: A Voyage Across the Queen, Craig Brown, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 672 pp., $35, October 2024
Regardless of his fame, Money and Queen Elizabeth II had by no means met. However she occupied a strong place in his oneiric panorama, simply as she did for numerous others worldwide. Craig Brown’s e book, Q: A Voyage Across the Queen, particulars many individuals’s goals of her, starting from the banal to the erotic.
It’s one of many ways in which Brown approaches a legendarily troublesome topic to jot down about. Prior to now decade or so, Brown, one among Britain’s most interesting satirists, has taken his eye for the absurd and began making use of it to biography. That features a e book on the chaotic lifetime of the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, which mixes might-have-beens, dissection of rumors, parody, and anecdote.
Margaret offered a wealth of fabric. However whereas most of her sister’s life had been lived in public, Elizabeth herself was professionally boring. She inhabited the function of a constitutional monarch to the fullest and gave nothing of her personal self away. In her private life, she married the good-looking younger man that she set her coronary heart on as a youngster, and she or he stayed with him till they each died of their late 90s. When she spoke in public, she spoke not as herself, however as her authorities.
Because the e book’s subtitle hints, it isn’t a lot about Elizabeth herself as it’s about folks’s reactions to her. She is the unmoving focus on which a crowd of worldwide eccentrics and fantasists flip. It’s a piece of fascinating digressions, from an ailing Margaret Thatcher to the Intercourse Pistols to Elena Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator’s spouse. The queen drifts by different folks’s lives, sometimes saying, “How very attention-grabbing,” or “Have you ever come far?”
A number of moments of Elizabeth’s humanity break by, similar to her mild mothering of a boy who had simply misplaced his twin brother and grandparents on account of a bombing by the Irish Republican Military. Brown means that her love of corgis was as a result of the messy, unrestrained little canine might behave in methods she couldn’t. When she needed to knight an apparent dangerous egg similar to Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, who was honored by the British authorities in 1978 as a part of a state go to, she would solely go as far as to calmly complain about his boorishness. She confided to a good friend that U.S. President Donald Trump was “very impolite” and couldn’t cease staring over her shoulder. (Trump proclaimed that individuals had “by no means seen the queen have a greater time” than when he interacted along with her.)
Elizabeth walks along with her corgi on the seaside in Norfolk, United Kingdom, on July 28, 1982.Tim Graham Photograph Library through Getty Photographs
As in his earlier books, Brown is within the inherent unreliability of biography; he lists out, for example, the sheer vary of claims made about Michael Fagan, the unemployed man who efficiently snuck into Elizabeth’s bed room in 1982 and started speaking to her. Their transient dialog has a half-dozen wildly completely different tellings.
Elizabeth prompted, even within the wealthy and well-known, conduct starting from the tongue-tied to the insane. When the Japanese multimillionaire Ryoichi Sasakawa, an ultranationalist and suspected struggle felony, maneuvered his means right into a backyard occasion to see her as a part of his lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize, he flung himself at her toes whereas wailing. “He can rise up, you realize,” she remarked.
Sasakawa was delivered to that occasion as a visitor of an equally crooked determine: Robert Maxwell, a Czech British businessman. Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine is now, impressively, extra notorious than him. She would later play a crucial function within the relationship between her boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein and Elizabeth’s second-oldest son, Prince Andrew.
A mural of Prince Andrew, Duke of York, is seen in Shoreditch in London on July 1, 2020, after the prince got here below elevated scrutiny over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. Man Smallman/Getty Photographs
Andrew, now faraway from royal roles in shame, was the alternative of his mom—an energetically indiscreet playboy vulnerable to voicing pub-bore opinions. That makes him simpler to jot down about. Extra conventional books on the British royal household fall into two classes: sycophantic or muckraking. Literary agent and historian Andrew Lownie’s Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the Home of York is squarely within the second group, much less of a biography and extra of a blunderbuss shot at Andrew with each scurrilous story and piece of palace gossip that Lownie can discover.
Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the Home of York, Andrew Lownie, Westminster Press, 362 pp., $24.99, August 2025
That features new claims in regards to the extent of Andrew’s relationship with Epstein and Maxwell, who Lownie says was additionally an “occasional lover” of his. That relationship value Andrew most of his royal roles after a disastrous interview through which he unconvincingly denied having ever met Virginia Giuffre—one among Epstein’s victims who mentioned the prince slept along with her 3 times when she was simply 17—regardless of her testimony and picture proof. His popularity in the UK is trash: That is the type of e book written by an writer with full confidence that his topic won’t ever deliver a libel swimsuit.
It’s arduous to really feel any sympathy for the duke of York, however Lownie’s e book inadvertently turns into an instance of simply how simply tales, even unsourced ones, can follow the royals. Elizabeth’s untouchability means tall tales connect themselves much more simply to different members of the royal household.
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The e book suffers from an lack of ability to tell apart between the well-attested, similar to Andrew’s ties to Epstein, and the tales that Lownie was informed as soon as by any person who knew Andrew many years in the past or by nameless former staffers. Did he actually have intercourse with a number of girls earlier than he turned 13? Does he have a secret penchant for good-looking younger sailors? Is it true that he favors “four-handed massages the place two girls work on you on the similar time,” as one supposed former girlfriend—referred to solely by her first title—claims? Does he name maids as much as the fourth ground of his home simply to open the curtains for him?
Any of those would possibly be true, however I’ve severe doubts that each one of them are. Palace employees and royal hangers-on are a remarkably gossipy bunch with a cheerful disregard for strict accuracy. Again within the early Nineties, I heard a narrative from Prince Philip’s safety element about the true cause for then-Prince Charles’s desire for Camilla over Diana that I can’t relay to the harmless ears of International Coverage’s readership. I don’t suppose the account was true, however it was each obscene and really humorous, which is what made it such an interesting story.
Andrew, and Sarah, Duchess of York, throughout an official go to to Liverpool, England, on Feb. 11, 1988. The royal couple had introduced that they had been anticipating their first little one earlier that day. Tim Graham Photograph Library through Getty Photographs
The place Lownie is sweet is on cash—each incoming and outgoing. He exhibits how Andrew and his former spouse Sarah Ferguson, higher generally known as Fergie, felt that their mixed earnings in 1986, after they married, was far lower than they wanted. Andrew’s naval wage and Fergie’s publishing wage totaled 32,000 British kilos, which is roughly $160,000 as we speak; this was supplemented by round $250,000 in as we speak’s cash that the British authorities paid them yearly by the Civil Record to cowl official bills. In addition they obtained a number of houses and inherited appreciable household cash.
This was not, nevertheless, sufficient for his or her wants. Fergie comes throughout higher than her husband in Lownie’s account, not solely as a regularly form and beneficiant good friend but in addition as a form of Kim Kardashian avant la lettre, forging a multimillion-pound earnings from offers that ranged from kids’s books to Weight Watchers endorsements. However each of them spent at an exhausting charge, leaving many questions on simply the place their cash got here from—particularly after Fergie was caught on tape in 2010 promising to promote entry to her former husband to a tabloid reporter, who was in disguise as a Center Jap sheikh, in alternate for greater than half one million {dollars}.
In line with Lownie, the couple first met American financier and intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein in 1989, roughly a decade earlier than Andrew now claims. The fabric round Epstein’s ties to Andrew is attention-grabbing and typically new, and it has prompted a firestorm within the British press, however it’s additionally chaotically organized and contextless. Lownie demonstrates that Andrew was not an off-the-cuff good friend, however a long-term intimate of Epstein—and one whose worth the financier knew, calling him his “Tremendous Bowl trophy.” A extra considerate e book might need thought of the broader social world through which Epstein operated for canopy—one the place, as sociologist Ashley Mears documented in her e book Very Necessary Individuals, the supply of younger girls who’re seen as sexually obtainable is a crucial type of social connection between the wealthy and highly effective.
From left: Melania Trump, Andrew, Gwendolyn Beck, and Epstein at a celebration on the Mar-a-Lago membership in Palm Seashore, Florida, on Feb. 12, 2000. Davidoff Studios/Getty Photographs
Andrew was near many individuals in that world, from Center Jap playboys, to Central Asian autocrats, to U.S. billionaires, to alleged Chinese language spies. A lot of his life-style, earlier than the Epstein scandal, got here with the implicit blessing of the British authorities, which used him as a “particular consultant” on commerce to curry favor with international despots.
The corporate that Andrew retains appears significantly horrible, however it’s exceptional simply what number of con artists and little one abusers have latched themselves onto numerous royals. Brown brings up Rolf Harris, the once-beloved Australian artist and singer who painted Elizabeth in 2005 for her eightieth birthday—solely to be convicted for serial intercourse offenses towards kids a number of years later. Jimmy Savile, a star posthumously revealed to be one among Britain’s most prolific sexual predators, was an unofficial advisor to Charles and compiled a public relations handbook for the royal household after some tactless remarks by Andrew. Laurens van der Submit, a South African author who was Charles’s long-term good friend and non secular guru, was additionally posthumously revealed to be a serial liar who sexually abused a 14-year-old woman.
A younger Andrew waves from a window (at left), with Elizabeth and three different kids proven in one other window, of the royal prepare, circa December 1965. Fox Pictures/Hulton Archive/Getty Photographs
Elizabeth stored herself behind sufficient layers of reserve to largely keep away from this breed of creep and hanger-on. Her kids, needier and fewer canny, didn’t. However Andrew went a step past, not solely offering royal patronage to males like Epstein however collaborating on this planet of intercourse, coercion, and exploitation. As extra Epstein materials emerges, the total extent of Andrew’s involvement might turn out to be, as with different outstanding figures near one of many world’s most related pedophiles, even clearer.
One among Andrew’s (unnamed) former family members claims that the prince’s favourite e book, which he reportedly reads over and over, is The Proficient Mr. Ripley. Patricia Highsmith’s thriller a couple of sexually ambivalent sociopath who charms, after which destroys, a wealthy loafer is a traditional. For Andrew, it might be one thing of a cautionary story.
