EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: Is King Charles cutting Andrew’s security?

By Ephraim Hardcastle for the Daily Mail

22:04 05 Jun 2024, updated 22:09 05 Jun 2024

Does King Charles really want to force Andrew out of Royal Lodge by cutting off his £4million security and personal allowances?

Not according to senior courtiers who remain convinced Charles has no intention of heaping further humiliation on his disgraced brother. 

Andrew is also believed to have the financial resources to honour his 50-year lease. 

And because he spent most of the £15million proceeds from the sale of Sunninghill Park on renovations, his home remains in good repair in keeping with the lease’s terms. 

Besides, landlords The Crown Estate, lumbered with empty Frogmore Cottage and Apartment 1 at Kensington Palace, don’t want another white elephant in the form of a vacant thirty-room Royal Lodge to maintain.

Will the King continue his mother’s tradition of bestowing a personal gift on his departing PM? 

Her Majesty favoured silver-framed signed photographs or cufflinks, with favourites receiving a rare book or porcelain. 

Alec Douglas-Home got fishing tackle. If the King retains the tradition, might Rishi Sunak check-out with a useful present like an upper-class gamp (umbrella)?

Now settled in London after a spell in New York, Sienna Miller, has devised a strategy to avoid recognition in public. 

‘If you have a cap, a hood and sunglasses, people are going to wonder who the f*** you are,’ she explains. 

‘Instead, I get people coming up to me saying, “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Sienna Miller?” And I say, ‘Yeah, I get that all the time’.’

Rishi’s smoking ban was not the only legacy policy smothered by the election. 

Despite his support for Charlotte Carew-Pole’s Daughters’ Rights campaign it has withered on the vine. 

Charlotte, whose mother-in-law is a lady-in-waiting to Princess Anne, wanted the law on succession changed so her daughter, rather than a younger brother, could inherit the family baronetcy. 

With two private members’ bills in parliament either could have succeeded with government support. Alas Rishi, the father of two daughters, has failed to make life fairer for girls.

Ingrid Seward, author of My Mother And I, reveals the late Queen regretted inviting Roald Dahl to sit next to her at a Buckingham Palace lunch when he ignored her conversation about horses –prompting her to snub him for the rest of the meal. 

‘Afterwards, Dahl told me he thought she was one of the dullest people he had ever met,’ says Ingrid.

Princess Diana’s mother Frances Shand Kydd, who died 20 years ago, was unimpressed by Paul Burrell’s claim he was her daughter’s ‘rock’. 

‘This was a term she used regularly to many people,’ noted Frances. ‘She called me her rock. Such terms were used to many people, but not only [Burrell].’ 

Having ballooned in weight, has Burrell graduated from cherished rock to jumbo boulder?