A former maid at Buckingham Palace has revealed how she was berated by Prince Andrew over a tiny gap in his curtains and reduced to tears.
According to Charlotte Briggs, now 47, she began working at Buckingham Palace in 1996 when she was 21 years old.
Ms Briggs, from Halifax, West Yorkshire, claims the Duke of York yelled: ‘Can’t you f***ing do anything right?’, as she ran up and down the stairs to sort the ‘extremely heavy’ curtain drapes.
She said Prince Andrew was sat at his desk right next to the curtains, but insisted on her running through the stairs just to come and close his curtains.
‘This man fought for his country in the Falklands but couldn’t stand up to close his own curtains. It was utterly ridiculous but spoke volumes about him,’ she told the Sun.
She said as at when she started working at Buckingham palace, she was promoted within six months, to become Andrew’s maid, which she said was a job that ‘nobody wanted’.
‘In Yorkshire if a lad were to come home and insist on someone else drawing blinds he’d get a clip round the ear,’ Ms Briggs said.
‘He wouldn’t get away with that up here. That’s what folk do. They stand on their own two feet and get on with it.’
At the time, Andrew was 36 and had recently divorced from Sarah Ferguson. Ms Briggs says he would regularly have temper tantrums and expected everything to be done for him.
She said the duke’s pillows were embroidered with the Royal Crest, which had to be right in the centre of his four-poster bed.
She also said Andrew insisted on his 72 teddy bears being painstakingly placed in size order on his bed every morning.
Staff had a dedicated day of training on this and also had to move the cuddly toys to designated spots around the bedroom before the duke’s bedtime, Ms Briggs claims.
She says Andrew ‘think’s he’s above everyone’ but said other royals, including the duke’s brothers Prince Charles and Edward, were ‘wonderful’.
Prince Andrew is currently facing a sexual assault civil lawsuit brought by Virginia Giuffre in the US alleging she was trafficked by convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and made to have sex with the prince three times when she was a teenager.
Andrew vehemently denies the allegations and says he doesn’t even remember meeting Ms Giuffre.
