As new allegations about Prince Andrew’s ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have recently emerged and incited a new round of backlash against him, the disgraced royal has receded from both only royal work, but from spending time in public in general.
According to The Mirror, Andrew has “holed himself up at his Royal Lodge home” since the newest revelations about his connections to Epstein began to be made public, including allegations detailed by his accuser, Virginia Giuffre, in her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, which was released this week.
Andrew, who announced last week that he would voluntarily relinquish his royal titles amid of the ongoing scandal, has ” shut himself off from the outside world inside his sprawling Windsor estate,” according to the Mirror’s report. There’s plenty of room for Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, who have continued to live together in the 30-room mansion even after divorcing in 1996. In fact, the Mirror notes that the estate is so large, the exes each essentially have separate wings of the enormous home to themselves.
As for what Andrew does to pass the time in his half the Windsor mansion, the outlet says his days have “seemingly revolved around video games and watching TV” since he began spending most of his time at home.
“He loves games like Call of Duty, war games with helicopters. He certainly doesn’t play FIFA, he’s got no interest in football,” a source told The Sun about Andrew’s home-bound hobbies, adding that the royal “really enjoys war films and watching golf on TV.”
Royal biographer Ingrid Seward told the outlet that a friend who had recently visiting Andrew and Ferguson at their home reported to her that Andrew was engaged in screen time during the visit.
“The prince was in a huge sitting room and Andrew was just lying there on a massive sofa watching TV on the biggest screen my friend had ever seen,” Seward shared. “It seemed to take up the whole of a wall.”
Not all of Andrew’s newfound hobbies involve television and video games, however. In a piece for the Daily Mail, royal correspondent Richard Kay wrote that the former Duke of York, who is himself a decorated veteran of the Royal Navy, where he flew as a helicopter pilot during the Falklands War, has also reportedly taken up plane-spotting, a hobby that allows him “to watch flights landing and taking off at airports all over the globe,” according to Kay.
“According to a visitor to Royal Lodge, the prince has become obsessed by the app beloved of plane-spotter nerds,” Kay wrote of the military veteran, whose Falklands War flights included dangerous decoy missions “to draw Argentine missiles away from the ships of the British task force.”
Andrew’s self-imposed exile in Windsor didn’t begin with the most recent round of backlash against him.
As the Mirror reports, the increasingly-infamous royal has rarely been spotted out of his home for a few years now, often leaving only for drives in his car and to go on the twice-weekly horse rides that have accounted for most of his leisure time (at least outside of his house) since his late mother, Queen Elizabeth passed away in 2022. Before the Queen’s death, Andrew was known to visit her frequently at Windsor Castle for tea.
These days, Seward says, Andrew doesn’t have much on his calendar.
“His life is very empty, he’s very lonely and I think he’s probably extremely bored,” Seward explained of Andrew’s time spent at home in Windsor.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.marieclaire.com ’
