Prince Andrew and Fergie's 'spiralling home costs' saw key royal slam 'tacky' move
Claims have emerged that Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson have paid almost no rent in the Royal Lodge for over 20 years - and it's not the first time they have been pulled up on their finances surrounding a royal residence
Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson have come under fire yet again after it emerged that they have paid almost no rent for Royal Lodge for over 20 years. Andrew signed a 75-year lease for the 30-room Windsor home in 2003, and has continued to reside there with his ex-wife ever since despite stepping back from public life.
It has now emerged that after paying £1 million for the lease, he has only paid “one peppercorn” of rent “if demanded” per year . The home also costs millions of pounds per year in upkeep, with questions mounting over how Andrew can afford it.
While Andrew and Sarah are now facing mounting calls to vacate the Royal Lodge , just days after announcing they would be renouncing their royal titles amid the ongoing Epstein scandal, it is not the first time the formerly married couple have reportedly been reined in over their spending (or lack there of) on a royal home.
When the couple tied the knot in Westminster Abbey in 1986, they were showered with thousands of luxury gifts from the A-list celebrities who were invited to their star-studded nuptials. Among the presents they received to celebrate their marriage was the promise of their own royal residence, with the late Queen footing the bill.
After the newlyweds toured countless of existing properties all around the country, they decided they would build their own home to service all of their wants and needs. Thanks to a generous cash gift from the Queen of £250,000, the couple started construction on their Berkshire home named Sunninghill Park.
Long before their first marital home had finished being built, the late Queen Elizabeth was forced to step in and put her foot down and cut off Andrew and Fergie from overspending on the lavish property.
With the couple very quickly hitting their quarter of a million pound budget, the former monarch was at breaking point with her son, and tightened her purse strings to stop their excessive spending.
On the Channel 5 documentary, titled Fergie, Andrew & The Scandal of SouthYork, royal author Andrew Lownie recalled the moment that the late Queen became fed up with the over the top spending on the extravagant property.
Lownie said: “The Queen, I think, eventually put her foot down and said, you know, this is crazy. At that point, they hadn't built the swimming pool and the tennis court, and who knows whether the helicopter pad was there then either.”
Talk TV’s Royal editor Sarah Hewson added that when the couple maxed out their budget in the middle of 1990, one year after construction began, the Palace refused to pay anymore money to the grand home.
Hewson said: “By this stage, Sunninghill Park was proving to be a financial headache, in particular, for the Queen, notoriously financially prudent who was having to foot the ever-escalating bills.”
Rather than scaling back the plans for Sunninghill Park, Fergie turned to other avenues to gather the money, opting to turn to Hello! Magazine to do a 45-page spread in exchange for £200,000.
“Fergie had a very enterprising idea that she would do a photoshoot for Hello!” said Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty Magazine. “Nobody in the royal family had ever done a shoot like that."
“Although the Queen never commented publicly on it, she was less than pleased,” added Hewson. “She saw it as lacking decorum and that it was an invasion of privacy. Prince Philip, he just thought it was downright tacky and distasteful.”
In October 1990, Andrew and Fergie finally moved into their extravagant home, just two years before they announced their separation. In 1996, they finalised their divorce and put Sunninghill Park on the market in 2002 for a whopping £12 million. The house sat on the market for five years before being purchased, falling into a state of disrepair.