When Andrew Albert Christian Edward Mountbatten-Windsor was born in 1960 his arrival was marked with a 41 gun salute in Hyde Park and a super duper energetic peeling of the bells at Westminster Abbey.
Between now and Andrew’s birthday on February 19, when the Sandringham housekeeper perfunctorily defrosts a Sara Lee mud cake to leave on the doorstep of his new home Marsh Farm (a former working farm that really looks like it might still have the whiff of the sty in the curtains) Andrew’s final humiliation will have arrived.
Next month, when he turns 66-years-old, Andrew will likely ‘celebrate’ the day in his “pokey” new home, the smallest property he has ever lived in.
There will reportedly be no live-in staff. No reams of garages for his Bentley and other cars. No $50,000 hunting rifles.
No barnacled-on Sarah Ferguson down the corridor cadging a spare room, no priceless art from the Royal Collection, and no 70-strong teddy bear collection. (Really and truly.)
All the signs point to the imminent departure of the former Duke of York from his 30-room, historic manor home Royal Lodge in Windsor with him set to be finally dumped in his new, tiddly place in rural Norfolk in a town where the biggest attraction is an actual bog.
Moving vans have been seen at the soon-to-be-vacated Lodge, while workmen beaver away renovating the Farm, including erecting a whopping fence.
As far as status downgrades go, his shift from the Lodge to the Farm is the equivalent of Andrew going from the private jet flying ranks sniffing at the standard of Beluga on off to discount economy middle-seat purgatory.
So far 2026 is shaping up to be the most glumsville, depresso year of the former duke’s life – the royal family’s unflattering nickname for him has gotten out, one of his daughters won’t speak to him and he’s about to go mano-a-mano with a toaster for the very first time, as he learns to start the day without a footman serving him his eggy soldiers under a solid silver cloche.
At least Andrew’s level of general delusion has shown no signs of subsiding.
According to the Daily Mail, he and Fergie had hoped to push out their Lodge departure to later this year so they could celebrate what would have been their 40th wedding anniversary there.
Every year, the Daily Mail says, the former marrieds, who divorced in 1996, mark their July 23 big day with a dinner or a party for friends and had wanted the “chance to host one last knees-up in its extensive gardens.”
It’s an unusual tradition for two people who have been divorced for three times as long as they were legally hitched.
No wonder, and this is truly delicious, that it has also been claimed that inside the royal family the ex-Yorks are known as “the Odd Couple”.
For Andrew, when he arrives in Norfolk, it will be a lonely future.
Fergs is going her own way after nearly 20 years of them living together and there are differing reports about where she will end up. One has her headed to daughter Princess Beatrice and son-in-law Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi’s $7 million chichi Cotswolds farmhouse to bunk in their converted cowshed while another has claimed she is house hunting in Windsor, though how and where she could find the coin to pay rent is a mystery.
Meanwhile, their daughter Princess Eugenie has “cut off all contact” with Andrew, per the Mail, while the Telegraph says she has actually stopped speaking to both of her parents.
She reportedly emptied out her bedroom at Royal Lodge before Christmas.
Getting Andrew out of the Lodge is another story entirely as he fails to do anything like actually cleaning out his very own Augean stables.
A royal source told the Mail said that the Lodge is “in quite a state … He is trying to block [the move] out. His personal rooms have to be kept clear of any sign of packing cases.”
A former secretary is helping sift through boxes full of documents, photographs and letters, “some of which are potentially sensitive.”
(How many, we might idly wonder, have a Palm Beach or New York or Caribbean Island post mark? How many postcards with ‘XOXO Jeff’ scribbled on them?)
Andrew has also been separated from his 72-strong teddy bear collection.
In a crushing blow for man-children clinging onto sad, paging-Freud remnants of childhood everywhere, Andrew has “disbanded” the infamous army of soft animals that were kept on his bed at Buckingham Palace.
(Staff were reportedly required to put them back in exactly the same order every day.)
The only one he is said to have kept is a monkey which he had used to use “to test” Palace maids “by hiding it in unlikely locations to see if they spotted it and returned it to its rightful place in his bedroom.”
The teddies are not the only casualties of his downsizing, as he goes from a property the actual size of a hotel to Marsh Farm, a property that looks like a City banker’s plain Jane weekender.
Never before in his life will he have ever lived, and perhaps even stayed, anywhere so small and certainly had to make do without live-in, on-tap staff, ready to tend to his whims and hankering for jam roly poly at 4am.
The Mail has reported that “his hopes of taking one or two faithful retainers from Royal Lodge have also been dashed.”
Rather he will have to survive with only a cleaner, gardener and cook being sent over from his brother’s Sandringham estate on an “ad hoc basis”.
This lack of staff reportedly “hasn’t gone down well” with the overindulged former princeling. (Andrew versus this thing called a ‘kettle’ might be the great grudge match of 2026.)
Gone too are Andrew’s Purdey shotguns, which can cost $50,000 each.
In November Metropolitan Police firearm officers had an “awkward conversation” with a “furious” Andrew about giving up his gun licence.
“Eventually, having been calmed down by Sarah, Andrew accepted that he needed to surrender his licence and handed over the guns he kept at the Lodge,” a source exclusively told the Mail.
“The guns seized were handed over to the King rather than being impounded as would normally be the case.”
However, the former duke has, reportedly, kept his collection of ceremonial swords.
(Does anyone else imagine him taking them down to play out Agincourt while making swooshing light-sabre noises?)
Recent photos show that preparations for the unemployed ex-duke at the Farm are being busily carried out, like the installation of Sky TV, the erection of a six foot fence, installing CCTV cameras and the extension of a no-fly zone from nearby Sandringham.
How much of this, I can’t help but wonder, is about keeping bad sorts out and how much about penning the troublesome dosser of a former duke in?
At least he can count on having his siblings sorta, kinda, a bit in his corner.
Princess Anne and Prince Edward think, per the Mail, that Andrew’s punishments have “gone too far” and they have “been vocal with both the King and William about [their brother’s] treatment”.
The King, reportedly, ‘regrets’ not letting Andrew retain the use of ‘prince’ given his mother was Queen and father a prince of Greece and Denmark in his own right.
(If Charles had done this, I personally think it would have been the stupidest decision made by a British King since Harold Godwinson decided not to worry too much about what that grabby William of Normandy was up to in Hastings.)
Already, the Mail says, Charles has “backtracked on some sanctions – reinstating Andrew’s access to the royal stables at Windsor”.
Handy for Andrew.
Where better for the ex-duke to mull his vertiginous downfall thanks to his friendship with a convicted sex offender than atop a nice pony?
Let us now, on a final note, turn our thoughts and prayers to that one secretary left in Royal Lodge as I type, I’m assuming furiously feeding old drinks receipts from Baku strip joints through a shredder while simultaneously handing a teary, self-pitying Fergie tissues.
If anyone deserves an OBE in next year’s New Year’s Day list for their brave work, it’s this poor, unnamed soul.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.news.com.au ’
