Is there a more disturbing conclusion to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s once-royal journey than the infamous photograph capturing him with a pack of young women, flaunting a triumphant grin?

Captured at Sandringham—a place now off-limits to him—the seedy snapshot, released with the so-called Epstein Files, serves as an inescapable testament to Andrew’s dramatic downfall. For the Royal Family, it’s not just a mortifying reminder but a deeply invasive breach of their treasured privacy. This particular room, where they intend to gather for Christmas, has been tainted by this unsavory memory.

As the festive season approaches, the Royals strive to embrace the holiday spirit, but the task has become daunting. The Andrew affair has disrupted their lives more intrusively than ever before. The identities of the young women, over whom Andrew is nonchalantly sprawled in a dinner jacket, remain hidden, their faces obscured by U.S. government attorneys.

Nonetheless, one face in the disconcerting tableau is unmistakable: Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious associate, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for her involvement in child sex-trafficking.

Suddenly, the Andrew saga has intruded upon royal life in the most uncomfortable way yet. The identities of the women on whom the dinner-jacketed Andrew is sprawled are obscured, their faces blacked out by US government lawyers.

One figure presiding over this unsettling scene, however, is instantly recognisable: Jeffrey Epstein’s madam Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year jail sentence for child sex-trafficking.

For those royal adults arriving at the King’s Norfolk estate, no amount of Christmas spirit or lavish decorations will be enough to completely eradicate the sense that this year’s celebration has been somewhat soiled.

The picture of the ex-prince was taken (by whom it is not known) in the baronial drawing room, known as the Saloon, an intimate inner sanctum where the family traditionally gathers for afternoon tea on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas Day to watch Charles’s televised message to the country and Commonwealth.

With a wolfish grin on his face, the former prince is draped over the laps of five young women in the Saloon at Sandringham, while Ghislaine Maxwell looks on

The baronial drawing room, known as the Saloon, an intimate inner sanctum where the Royal Family traditionally gathers for afternoon tea on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas Day to watch the King’s Christmas message

It was also the location of the King’s summit with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in March.

The House of Windsor has navigated many a turbulent year – royal divorces, the death of Princess Diana and Covid – but its members have always come together for their extraordinary ritual of Christmas.

Never has this eloquent period piece of family intimacy been torn apart quite like this year, however. Stripped of his princely title, dukedom and all royal honours by his brother, Andrew has been banished from the gathering.

As his siblings and cousins were preparing to make their way to Norfolk yesterday, Andrew – looking even more grim-faced than usual – was seen at the wheel of a car near his Windsor home.

In 2024, he reportedly ‘chose’ to stay away – because of controversy over his links to a Chinese spy. This year, however, there was not even an invitation. Regardless, his absence will hover over the festivities like a dark cloud.

It has meant that even the good news that the King shared with the nation about his cancer earlier this month – his treatment will be reduced in the new year – has not entirely removed the sense of a lingering vulnerability at the heart of the Royal Family.

The emergence of the photograph, part of a damning trove of 300,000 documents released by the American authorities, has brought the Andrew crisis front and centre once again, raising

difficult questions about what took place in one of the Royal Family’s privately owned and most treasured residences.

The black and white photo is undated but, as the Mail has previously revealed, Andrew hosted a party for Maxwell at Sandringham in early December 2000 to mark her 39th birthday. Although not pictured, the depraved financier Jeffrey Epstein, who is accused of abusing hundreds of women and girls, is understood to have attended this questionable soiree.

The then Duke of York later shrugged it off as ‘a straightforward shooting weekend’ during his notorious BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis.

It was, apparently, anything but ‘straightforward’. ‘Louche’ might be a more apt description. Better still, ‘debauched’.

According to the royal biographer Robert Jobson, condoms, lubricants and drugs to enhance sexual pleasure were all found after the guests departed.

In his book The Windsor Legacy – serialised last month by the Daily Mail – Jobson revealed that bathrooms were littered with the party paraphernalia, including sex drugs known as ‘poppers’.

Quoting a palace source, Jobson wrote: ‘Staff were stunned to discover that the bathrooms were stocked not only with toiletries but poppers, lube and condoms.’

The picture, meanwhile, was just one of a series of images exposing the extent of the access Andrew offered to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell when it came to his social and royal orbit.

The Royal Family on their way to the Christmas day service at St Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham in Norfolk last year

They suggest a relationship that was sustained, familiar and conducted with little apparent concern for appearances or indeed reputational risk.

In one photograph released by the US Department of Justice, Epstein and Maxwell are seen with Andrew in the Royal Box at Ascot racecourse. They were his personal guests on June 22, 2000 – Ladies Day – when both the Queen and the then 99-year-old Queen Mother were in attendance.

Andrew later described Epstein as his ‘plus one’ and not a guest of the Royal Family. Seeing him in the Royal Box, it is hard to view a distinction.

Also released on Friday was a photograph of Epstein and Maxwell on a shoot on the hills above Balmoral Castle. It has been previously reported that they were guests on the Scottish estate in 1999. 

As the former prince’s biographer Andrew Lownie says, this new cache of material does not prove any criminality on Andrew’s part. But what it does do is undermine the narrative Andrew has relied upon for years, namely that Epstein was a marginal figure in his life, someone he saw briefly and then cut off once concerns were raised.

The new disclosures make that argument increasingly difficult to sustain.

‘Epstein and Maxwell did not gain proximity to Andrew by accident,’ says Lownie. ‘Royal households are not casual environments. Access is controlled, invitations are extended deliberately and boundaries are normally enforced with care.

‘That Epstein was able to move as freely as he did raises uncomfortable questions not only about Andrew’s judgment but about the failure, or unwillingness, of those around him to intervene.’

In one photo released by the US Department of Justice, Epstein and Maxwell are seen with Andrew in the Royal Box at Ascot racecourse. They were his personal guests on June 22, 2000, when both the Queen and the Queen Mother were in attendance 

Wearing a tweed cape, Epstein, with Maxwell and an unknown man, on a shoot on the hills above Balmoral Castle. It has been previously reported that they were guests on the Scottish estate in 1999

For a man who spent the first 22 years of his life as the second in line to the throne, the loss of his position, status and relevance has been shattering. His exclusion from the royal Christmas merely another humiliation. 

The writing has been on the wall for some time. At his last Christmas lunch there, in 2023, he was relegated to a seat at the bottom of the table.

For all its reputation as an event governed by strict protocols, Christmas lunch on the King’s Norfolk estate is a relaxed affair. Far from guests making their way to allocated chairs or lining up to take their places in a seated version of the line of succession, there are no place settings.

Only two seats are reserved: one for the King and the other for the Queen, who sit opposite one another midway down the dining table.

It is Camilla who subtly directs the traffic, suggesting where family members might sit. Her object is simple: to ensure that on this day, of all days, her husband is untroubled by family dramas.

Hence Andrew, once a favourite who always liked to position himself close to his late mother, Queen Elizabeth, found himself below the salt.

It was the same story when he attended a Windsor Castle lunch for Garter knights, where he was placed so far from the centre of things, staff joked that he was in ‘Siberia’.

All these manoeuvrings, however painful for the individual royals, are vital. Recent polls show a majority of Britons still support retaining the monarchy but, at 51 per cent, that majority is now wafer-thin. As recently as 40 years ago, more than 80 per cent of people backed the royals.

That decline is not all down to Andrew, of course, but the gracelessness with which he fought to remain in Royal Lodge, the mansion in Windsor Great Park that has become the focus of public distaste at his behaviour, has undoubtedly contributed to the atrophying support, especially among young people.

How he conducts himself in his last remaining months at Windsor will be crucial. Will he leave in a timely fashion in the early months of the new year? Or will he drag out his departure in a bid to stay in residence as long as possible?

Either way, the new revelations may force the King to impose his will on his brother.

Royals survive with their popularity intact as long as no one looks too deeply into them.

An audit of their portfolio of lavish homes – as has been mooted by the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee – could prove to be as thorny for Charles in 2026 as dealing with his brother has been in 2025. Which is why the King is looking forward to Christmas with a feeling of relief.

Sandringham and its familiar rituals offer a chance to take stock, recharge the batteries and prepare to go again.

In March, the King met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Saloon at Sandringham

The Queen with Prince Philip at Sandringham in 2018, where the Duke of Edinburgh resided after his retirement a year earlier

And why would it not? The desolate landscape of mid-winter Norfolk has long been a refuge from both public criticism and private trauma.

In 1992, the year of the late Queen’s annus horribilis, which saw three royal separations and anger over the news that taxpayers’ money would cover the damage of the Windsor Castle fire, it was at Sandringham that a PR fightback was planned.

Within weeks came twin announcements that triggered a turnaround in royal fortunes: the monarchy would pay the £36million to renovate the castle’s 115 gutted rooms, and the Queen (and Prince Charles) would start paying income tax on their private wealth.

Five years later, in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s tragic death, the Queen used her Sandringham break to approve plans showing that the lessons of her late daughter-in-law’s life would be learned. The new strategy included a less rigid approach to royal engagements that would see Queen Elizabeth taking tea in a Glasgow council house.

The Sandringham estate has played an equally important role in domestic matters. Prince Philip retreated there after his retirement in 2017 aged 96 – he settled in Wood Farm – and it was at Sandringham that the Queen hosted the 2020 ‘summit’ with Harry which led to Megxit.

Charles is no stranger to the healing balm that the Norfolk estate on the edge of the North Sea provides. Sandringham was where he began his semi-public coming-out with Camilla and where she was allowed to be chatelaine.

These days, of course, she is mistress of all the royal homes and, in her three years as Queen, has begun instituting subtle changes.

For example, Camilla prefers to use the white drawing room for the family’s Christmas lunch, rather than the dining room favoured by Queen Elizabeth.

Interiors have been updated. Curtains that had hung for most of her late Majesty’s reign have been replaced. Rather than being disposed of, however, they have been ‘recycled’ and will be hung at Dumfries House, the Scottish mansion Charles saved for the nation in 2007.

There have been other tweaks, too. Lunch is now just a two-course affair, turkey cooked and carved by the King’s head chef Mark Flanagan, followed by Christmas pudding. Cheese is on request only, with Princess Anne a fan.

But other things don’t change. Tom Smith crackers are laid at each place setting, together with ‘party streamers’ daintily arranged in silver caviar dishes.

It may only be papering over the cracks but, for the royals, a festive gathering without Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor just may be the best Christmas present of all.