Inside Andrew and Fergie’s humiliation: The secret ‘explosive’ dossier that spelled their end, a new tranche of devastating emails, the Royals’ ‘insurance policy’ and how ‘fuming’ William wielded the knife: BARBARA DAVIES

When push came to shove at the Palace this week, there was really only one way things would go.

In the end, His Majesty the King came to realise what those closest to him have been whispering in his ear for weeks. The Andrew problem was not going to disappear. It was time to grasp the nettle and wield his power.

Prince William, in particular, a royal insider told me this week, has been ‘smouldering on the sidelines’ ever since the release earlier this month of a pompous, self-aggrandising statement by Andrew in which he used the royal ‘we’ to conclude he would ‘put my duty to my family and country first’ and ‘no longer use the honours which have been conferred on me’.

His stubborn refusal to admit any wrongdoing and, even more galling, his arrogant bid to dress up his actions as honourable, also stuck horribly in the nation’s collective craw.

Queen Camilla, too, it is understood, was ‘really riled’ by that earlier half-hearted statement and had been urging her husband to take decisive action against his younger brother or risk irreparable institutional damage to the Royal Family.

Thursday night’s bombshell statement – significantly signed by both ‘Their Majesties’ – saw the long-suffering King finally bare his teeth at the shamed sibling his own mother, the late Queen, once doted on.

With a decisive flick of the royal fountain pen, Prince Andrew was reduced to Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and humiliatingly stripped of his titles and honours.

Forced to quit the lavish 30-room Royal Lodge in Windsor, the 65-year-old’s next home is set to be far from the public gaze, in a relatively humble cottage on the Sandringham estate.

And yet the move to banish him from court, as I discovered this week, is one many in royal circles have long been pushing for.

The Daily Mail learnt this week of the existence of a ‘highly explosive’ Andrew and Fergie dossier compiled by Palace officials which documents 30 years of the couple’s activities, more of which later.

And inside the family, no one has been calling for Andrew’s banishment more than William.

‘He was fuming that the King had previously fudged dealing with Andrew and allowed him to make an earlier statement making him seem very honourable,’ says a royal insider speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail.

This week’s extraordinary strike against Andrew is, in fact, the fourth time in recent years that the 76-year-old King has tried to deal with his beleaguered brother.

Sources say he was among those who encouraged Andrew to take part in what turned out to be a car crash BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019, in which he denied ever meeting his accuser Virginia Giuffre and lied about his friendship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The then Prince of Wales believed his brother’s proclamations of innocence and thought, along with the Queen and Princess Beatrice, that the interview would ‘clear the air’. ‘That ended in disaster and woe betide anyone who mentions his involvement now,’ says the royal insider.

In the run-up to the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022, Charles again attempted to draw a line under the matter by pushing Andrew to settle a civil sex assault claim brought by Ms Giuffre out of court. He and the Queen, it is understood, funded the £12 million settlement between them.

Since then the Andrew problem has lurched from one scandal to the next. It became ever more pressing this year with the publication in August of an unauthorised biography, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie, serialised by the Daily Mail, as well as a posthumous memoir by Ms Giuffre, who took her own life this year aged 41.

Due to be published in the UK this month, Nobody’s Girl details Ms Giuffre’s allegations that she had sex three times with Andrew as a 17-year-old trafficking victim, peddled around the world by paedophile billionaire Epstein and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.

Sources have told the Daily Mail that Charles and 43-year-old William met in Balmoral in September and had agreed to wait until the publication of Ms Giuffre’s book before deciding what action to take. But then the Palace got hold of advance copies. Queen Camilla, a long-time campaigner against sex abuse and domestic violence, is said to be among those who read it.

Palace officials were also briefed that a whole new tranche of Epstein documents, some implicating Andrew, were about to come to light in the US.

Some of those leaked emails, as the Mail on Sunday exclusively revealed last month, exposed Andrew’s ongoing secret friendship with Epstein despite his insistence that he had ended it in 2010. In one, sent in 2011 after the publication of a photo of the former prince with his arm around Ms Giuffre in London, Andrew told Epstein: ‘We are in this together’ and expressed a wish to ‘play some more soon’.

While the King was then persuaded action needed to be taken – in the form of the less stringent statement released by Buckingham Palace last month – he still clung onto the idea, as did his late mother, Queen Elizabeth, that his younger brother was ‘innocent until proven guilty’.

‘The late Queen went to her grave believing in Andrew’s innocence in the Epstein scandal,’ says the royal insider. ‘It doesn’t fit well with the King to have to treat Andrew as harshly as he has to. William and Camilla take a harder line which has caused a lot of family angst.’

William was notably unable to hide his loathing of his uncle at the Duchess of Kent’s funeral in September when the two were snapped side by side.

The Kent family are said to have considered not inviting Andrew to the service. In the end, according to a source, they asked him to use a side door at Westminster Cathedral, ‘to avoid a fuss’ and, for the sake of discretion, he and Sarah Ferguson were allocated seats in the south aisle, close to that door.

According to the source: ‘There was genuine shock from everyone when Andrew and Sarah arrived by the front door, strutted down the aisle and afterwards joined the family on the steps for the Duchess’s departure. They treated it like a jolly family outing.’

It was yet another clear sign that the then Duke and Duchess of York remained utterly in denial about their position within the Royal Family and, crucially, how they were regarded by the British public. Their delusion was evident again this week amid reports that the pair, known as the ‘Odd Couple’ in royal circles, had set their caps at separate ‘his and hers’ royal homes on the Windsor Estate – Frogmore House for him, Adelaide Cottage for her – even as the House of York was crumbling around their ears.

The prospect of the King being forced to pay for Sarah Ferguson’s upkeep was particularly outrageous given her own deceitful friendship with Epstein, her notorious profligacy, and, not least, the fact that she has been divorced from Andrew for close to 30 years.

One of her friends told the Daily Mail this week that ‘the honest truth is that she has nowhere to go and no one to go with. Her future is hanging in the balance’.

Nevertheless, Fergie, who complained that ‘I absolutely have not a pot to p*** in’ in the wake of her 1996 divorce, will also be forced to vacate Royal Lodge where she has lived with Andrew since 2008.

According to the insider: ‘It would be a PR disaster for the King to help her. If she really has nowhere to go then Andrew should let her move in with him in a private arrangement as has happened for the past nearly 20 years. Or maybe one of their daughters has a granny flat.’

Indeed, while their parents have been reduced to commoners, Beatrice and Eugenie remain princesses with their HRH titles.

Thanks to money put in trust by the late Queen and Queen Mother, they live in the manner to which they have always been accustomed, splitting their time between homes in and out of London. But over the past couple of years they have distanced themselves from their father.

In recent months, as their mother’s complicity in the Epstein scandal was laid bare, they have also faced the agonising decision over whether to stand by her or, for the sake of their own reputations, pull back and focus on their own young families.

The princesses were out of the country this week as their father’s degradation was made complete. Eugenie was in Paris with friends while Beatrice travelled to Saudi Arabia for an investment event.

Suggestions this week that William put pressure on his cousins to get Andrew out of Royal Lodge are not true, although he is said to have met with Beatrice and been in contact with her and Eugenie by phone over the past fortnight.

‘He would never target them for the sins of their father,’ says the royal insider. And if there’s any future trouble from their shameless parents, officials could resort to using that secret dossier.

Currently under lock and key in a safe, it has been added to since the 1990s with the help of servants, security officers and embassy staff overseas and is seen as an ‘insurance policy’ should the former Duke and Duchess ‘decide to try their luck’.

While it is said Andrew would never turn on the institution in which he was raised, particularly given his daughters are still inside it, that ‘luck’, in Sarah Ferguson’s case, might be seen to refer to the potential threat of her writing a tell-all memoir or, as she has in the past, giving interviews to the likes of Oprah Winfrey. Fergie, it is said, is ‘rocked’ by the speed with which their fates have been sealed. ‘To see it all taken away so swiftly and brutally has really set her on the edge,’ says the insider.

Last month saw several charities drop her as patron. Her downfall is as complete as that of her former husband.

There could, of course, be worse to come for the newly-created Mr Mountbatten Windsor. Calls are mounting for him to face a police probe over the Epstein scandal.

Virginia Giuffre’s brother Sky Roberts has called for the former prince to be prosecuted, saying that while he ‘commends the King’ for his action, ‘we need to take it one step further – he needs to be behind bars.’

Andrew is also under pressure to cooperate with the FBI in its investigation of Epstein, who was found dead in a Manhattan jail in 2019, with his death recorded as suicide. It is understood the FBI has previously asked him to meet them at the US embassy in Nine Elms in London but Andrew has always declined. Now he is a mere commoner, he may find it hard to ignore their invitations.

As the royal insider puts it: ‘The King may have left it too late for the Palace to stay above the fray. If he hoped to draw a line under it, he is heading for a big disappointment.’

Andrew is said to be ‘quite sanguine’ about his forthcoming move to Sandringham. It was here, he told Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, that he once hosted Epstein and Maxwell at just an ‘ordinary shooting weekend’.

If in the past he was a stickler for bows and curtseys from staff, then should Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie visit him, by rights he should be bowing to them.

He is unlikely to have room in his new abode for anything more than a cook or housekeeper. He will also lose the luxury of meals delivered from the kitchens at Windsor Castle.

It’s unthinkable that he will join the King and the rest of his family when they congregate at Sandringham next month to celebrate Christmas. It goes without saying, too, that he will never be welcome at nearby Anmer Hall, the country home of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

There is speculation in some quarters that, in the end, he will take flight, away from the drama of a police investigation, to the Middle East where he is reported to have been offered the use of a palace by the Abu Dhabi royal family. Bahrain, where he also has close contacts, is another possible destination. ‘The only person who knows his secrets and he can talk openly to is Sarah Ferguson although he is a very insular man,’ says the insider.

Indeed, until this week it seemed that the one surefire thing left to the disgraced pair was their unswerving loyalty to each other.

Fergie once described them as ‘the happiest divorced couple in the world’, a state no doubt aided by the provision of a free luxury roof over her head.

Now, with the writing on the wall, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and Sarah Ferguson appear ready, finally, to part company.

Andrew has, at least, been spared the humiliation of the ‘degradation ceremony’ once carried out to remove disgraced Knights of the Garter when royal heralds read an ‘Instrument of Degradation’ in the chapel before tossing the former knight’s banner, crest, helmet and sword into the moat.

The last ceremony was held in 1716 for James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormonde, who went into exile after being accused of treason.

Aside from various overseas nobles, Andrew is the first disgraced nobleman since Ormonde to be deprived of the honour.

The space in the chapel where his banner once proudly fluttered will, as custom dictates, be left bare, a lasting memorial to his utter disgrace.