Prince Andrew’s “Straightforward Shooting Weekend” Reportedly Included Party Bags, Poppers And Condoms

Prince Andrew once tried to wave away that infamous Sandringham gathering with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell as a “straightforward shooting weekend.” Just a simple country house interlude, apparently. Nothing odd, nothing improper, nothing worth a second glance. The trouble with that line, of course, is that hardly anyone believed it at the time and it looks even more absurd now.

Royal biographer Robert Jobson has now offered a far uglier picture of what staff at the late Queen’s Norfolk estate were allegedly left to deal with after the 2000 gathering. Speaking on The Royalist podcast, Jobson said palace staff were “appalled” when they came in to clear up, finding condoms, lubricant and poppers among the debris. Worse still, he said it later emerged these were not simply items left behind in bedrooms or bathrooms, but “party bags” apparently distributed to guests by the host. At Sandringham. Two weeks before the royal family arrived for Christmas.

The lube, the poppers, and the condoms

Jobson walked listeners through what the staff discovered.

“They included sex drugs like poppers and condoms and lube and all this sort of stuff, which wasn’t really the sort of thing they expect to be dealing with — the Palace staff — two weeks before all the royals descended on them for Christmas when the Queen would be turning up…It later transpired that, actually, they were like party bags. They were given out by the host. We can only presume the host is Andrew — because he was there at his mother’s house — to give to all the guests. So this was a little surprise when they arrived. They’re turning Sandringham, the Queen’s private home, into like the Playboy Mansion. It was pretty awful.”

That is bad enough. A room full of sex paraphernalia at the late Queen’s private estate, just before the family arrived for their traditional holiday celebration. The staff, who have seen plenty over the years, were genuinely shocked.

But then Jobson dropped the real bombshell, in which he alleged that Andrew handed out little goodie bags filled with sex drugs, condoms, and lubricant to his guests at his mother’s house. Like a depraved Father Christmas distributing the tools of a very specific trade.

Of all the disgusting details in this story, something about the pre-packaged party bags has broken everyone’s brains. Andrew sat there, presumably with Epstein and Maxwell, assembling little gift bags of debauchery for his friends. At Sandringham. Where the Queen would be celebrating Christmas two weeks later.

This was no “straightforward shooting weekend.” It was not even a conventional tale of aristocratic excess. What it suggests instead is a level of entitlement and moral rot that is genuinely difficult to comprehend.

The photograph that says everything

The Justice Department’s Epstein file dump recently unearthed a photograph of Maxwell and Andrew taken at Sandringham. The image shows Maxwell laughing as she smiles down at Andrew, who is lying across the laps of five people whose faces have been redacted.

“We can only presume, I suppose, Epstein taking the picture,” Jobson said.

Five people whose faces are hidden. The convicted sex trafficker behind the camera. The disgraced prince sprawled across multiple laps. And the Queen’s home as the backdrop.

The Starkey deflection no one asked for

Of course, David Starkey could not resist adding his own lurid gloss to the whole affair. In a February 2026 interview pointedly titled “Queen Elizabeth II got it wrong with Andrew,” Starkey argued that the late Queen had “mishandled the monarchy spectacularly” and made Andrew’s scandal more dangerous by failing to deal with the deeper weaknesses inside the institution. In the middle of all that, he praised Prince Philip as the family’s great unused intellect, then claimed Andrew inherited Philip’s “whoring” and suggested Philip’s alleged infidelities were long “swept under the carpet.” That is Starkey’s characterisation, not independently established fact, but it is revealing all the same.

It matters here because Starkey and Robert Jobson are approaching the same royal mess from different angles. Jobson adds fresh detail about what allegedly went on at Sandringham, while Starkey is effectively saying the palace has a much older habit of concealment and indulgence. Put those two strands together and the picture is grim for the monarchy.

When even conservative royalists and establishment historians are openly talking about cover-ups, serial misconduct and institutional failure, it suggests the problem is no longer confined to critics on the outside. Not that the palace deserves sympathy, but it is still an interesting marker of how badly the facade is cracking.

What did Charles know and when did he know it?

Jobson also addressed the uncomfortable question of what King Charles knew about his brother’s activities. According to the biographer, Charles spoke to Andrew about the Epstein relationship around 2013 or 2014, when the controversy was drawing intense scrutiny.

“I know that the king and then-Prince of Wales, but the king now — and Andrew had a conversation in which he gave guarantees that he had not been involved in, I’ll quote here, ‘anything untoward.'”

Andrew gave guarantees. Andrew assured his brother that everything was fine. And Charles apparently accepted those guarantees.

Now we have photographs, party bags full of sex drugs, and staff accounts of what really happened at Sandringham. Either Andrew lied to his brother, which seems entirely plausible, or Charles chose not to ask too many questions.

Neither option reflects well on the monarchy.

The bigger picture

This is how aristocratic life has always worked, and none of it should surprise anyone. What do people imagine happens at those grand country weekends behind gates, staff lines and polite press silence? These families perform restraint in public while living by a very different code in private. Wealth, rank and generations of deference shield them. The royal family has shown that detachment often enough, whether in King Charles accepting bags of cash from a Qatari donor as if it were perfectly routine, or in the wider assumption that rules and consequences apply to other people.

Prince Andrew will likely never face anything close to real accountability. That is the grim truth. His conduct disgusts the public, but Andrew hardly looks like an isolated aberration. When figures like David Starkey suggest Prince Philip’s alleged infidelities were simply “swept under the carpet,” they point to a wider culture of concealment. The same shadow hangs over Lord Mountbatten’s posthumous abuse allegations and the royal family’s disturbing proximity to Jimmy Savile. The pattern is clear: the institution does not confront damaging behaviour so much as absorb, bury and survive it. Andrew became impossible to contain not because the palace suddenly found standards, but because his conduct collided with Jeffrey Epstein.

Robert Jobson’s book is hardly going to delight the rest of the family. But if royal biographers and court historians now feel free to speak this bluntly about a late queen, a disgraced prince and the private failings of dead patriarchs, the obvious question is when that candour will reach the heir and the future king, and which inherited traits might look rather less flattering under full public scrutiny.