Inside Beatrice and Eugenie’s crisis talks: ‘Delicate’ Sarah’s UK hideout, Andrew’s ‘house arrest’, the princesses’ reactions – and the ‘dire’ financial implications now hanging over them and husbands

The image will live long in the public consciousness. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, slumped in the back of a car as he is driven away from Aylsham Police Station, his khaki shirt a little crumpled, his manicured hands clasped together.

But it is the look on his face, in his eyes, that is most arresting of all. His jaw slack, the late Queen’s former blue-eyed boy stares straight ahead in what? Shock? Anger? Guilt?

For the three women who know him best – his daughters Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and their mother Sarah Ferguson – the shot will be particularly distressing.

To see your father, however flawed, appear so vulnerable in a photograph beamed around the world cannot fail to wound.

The sisters and their mother are most likely to understand what the disgraced former Prince Andrew is actually feeling and thinking at this seismic moment in royal history.

And it is they who must pick up the pieces of the man who was once the rock of their unconventional, but undoubtedly tight-knit, little nuclear unit.

Yet the sisters must do so while also taking care to distance themselves from any wrongdoing and cling on to the status and lifestyle they once took for granted, while protecting their husbands from the toxic fallout of their parents’ links to the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

 A difficult tightrope. And with Andrew unlikely to be seen in public for some time, all eyes will be on the trio who once dubbed themselves ‘the tripod’.

They are, according to sources who spoke to the Daily Mail, ‘utterly horrified’ by this week’s turn of events.

Sarah, who is understood to be hiding out in the UK, maintains the loyalty of a small band of confidants who remain protective of her.

‘People have been talking about her secretly getting out abroad but that would involve planning and money and stealth and she hasn’t got any of those things,’ a source close to the former Duchess of York told the Mail this week.

She is ‘laying low with friends’ but is ‘in constant tears and very distressed’.

‘She is not in a good place. She is a very delicate human,’ said the source, who describes her as ‘insecure and naive’.

Some of her close associates even fear for her life. ‘We have all spent a lot of time with her and we all care for her. We are all worried that she might harm herself, it is that bad.’

Royal commentator Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty Magazine, has followed the relationship between the former duke and duchess, who once described themselves as ‘the happiest divorced couple in the world’, since they met and for three decades since they split.

‘I would love to see her rush to his side. God knows he would have rushed to hers, were this the other way around. But she is busy looking after number one. I doubt we’ll see her for a while,’ Seward says.

Indeed, Sarah has not been seen in public since September, when she was pictured driving out of Royal Lodge, her home with Andrew until very recently.

In truth, any shoring up of Andrew is likely to fall to Beatrice and Eugenie.

The pair, says a source, ‘are very distressed’. Seward maintains they will be feeling ‘extremely upset’ by their father’s arrest.

‘I’m sure they weren’t expecting it,’ she says. ‘It’s really embarrassing and distressing for them both.’

A source close to the family says the sisters will be holding ‘crisis talks’ this weekend, not only with each other, but likely with their uncle, King Charles, who remains fiercely protective of them.

Not only do they stand to lose financially, and in social status, but what trust is left in their father-daughter relationship is at stake.

‘All the doubts will have come crashing in – those holidays they had as children, the funds their father put in their bank account, all the lovely things they enjoyed,’ says Seward.

‘Somewhere in their minds, they’ll be wondering where that money really came from.

‘Sadly, they’re going to start doubting everything their father ever told them.’

One who knows the princesses well insists they remain dutiful daughters in their interactions with both maligned parents, but the relationships are fraught.

‘People are saying that they are not talking to them [their parents] but it is more complicated than that. This is your father, this is your mother, so there will never be a right and a wrong.

‘But the girls feel that they can’t be seen with their parents because everyone is watching. It makes a really difficult situation even more difficult.’

Both in public and private, Andrew has always denied the claims made by Virginia Giuffre, that she was forced to have sex with him after being trafficked by the late sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein and his then-girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, in 2001. But his arrest on Thursday – not for sex crimes, but for alleged misconduct in public office – takes speculation about his past misdemeanours to a whole new level.

And one imagines it will take more than the pleas of a beleaguered father to convince his daughters of his innocence this time around.

‘Although the girls have made a commitment to sticking together and presenting a united front, they do take very different approaches to their father,’ the insider explains.

‘Eugenie will stay silent, but Beatrice will be very conflicted. Although no believer that her father is an innocent, she is aware that his mental health is suffering – something “stiff upper lip” Andrew may not recognise. She took the decision to be seen with him and Sienna [her eldest daughter, aged four] at Royal Lodge in late January just before the Epstein files dropped.

‘She will almost certainly keep some sort of contact with her father, but out of sight.’

Eugenie, meanwhile – the feistier of the two and known for speaking her mind – will not hesitate to make her feelings towards her father clear.

Both were already smarting from mentions of their names in the Epstein files – among them, a Christmas card from Andrew to Epstein which included photographs of them aged 21 and 23, and a reference to a visit they made, alongside their mother, to the late financier just days after he was released from prison for child sex crimes in 2009.

Beatrice has cropped up more than her sister. It was she, after all, who encouraged her father to go ahead with the car-crash BBC interview in 2019, and who allegedly sat beside her mother while she called a journalist in 2011 to say it was ‘wrong’ to call Epstein a sex offender.

But Beatrice’s involvement in her parents’ entanglement with Epstein has not always been willing – nor has it been welcome.

She was said to have been ‘blindsided’ when her father used her as an alibi (namely, that he was taking her, then aged six, to a children’s party at Pizza Express in Woking) to explain in that infamous Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis that he could not have been at a Mayfair nightclub with Virginia Giuffre on the same evening in March 2001.

‘Bea baulked at being used as an unwitting alibi and at the nonsense of it,’ a source said.

‘Father and daughter had quite a heated discussion about it once the Newsnight team were on their way with their scoop in the can.’

Beatrice and Eugenie will have been unable to contact their father during his 11 hours in custody on Thursday. Whatever missives they had planned for his 66th birthday morning – FaceTime with his four young grandchildren, perhaps; a call from Eugenie, who was spotted skiing in the Swiss resort of Gstaad for half-term with her husband and children; or, on Beatrice’s part, a low-key visit to Norfolk to cheer him up – will have been cancelled at short notice.

Instead, they must take stock of the huge impact of their father’s shock arrest on their families’ lives.

According to Ingrid Seward: ‘They’ll be feeling incredibly angry with Andrew, and probably pretty cross with their mother as well. Her name has come up time and time again in the Epstein files, and it doesn’t look good.

‘They’ll be asking how both their parents could be so stupid.’

Indeed, one friend who spoke to the Mail this week and insisted Sarah was ‘not a bad person’ observed: ‘You would think after 40 or 50 years in that world that she would be more savvy, but she is not.

‘She has just made mistakes, but let’s be clear that she is in a different category to Andrew.’

Says Seward: ‘The sisters are the only two who can share this; they are glad to have each other.

‘And it’s not just the emotional side of things they have to worry about; there are financial implications of all this, too.

‘This is now a global story and it could have dire consequences for their work, and for their husbands’ businesses.’

Indeed, Beatrice’s husband, property developer Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi has reportedly lost several business ventures – one of which was the proposed redevelopment of Royal Lodge – as a result of Andrew’s fall from grace.

And Eugenie’s husband, Jack Brooksbank, will be concerned for the financial fortunes of his wine merchants, as well as his marketing job in Portugal.

Royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams says the princesses, who have retained their HRH titles amid the scandal engulfing their parents, may also have to face a lower-profile future, especially when it comes to their voluntary work.

Beatrice is involved with four youth organisations, while Eugenie is co-founder of the Anti-Slavery Collective, a charity whose focus includes sex-trafficking victims. Understandably, there have been recent calls for them both to step aside.

‘Beatrice and Eugenie must realise that this is likely to mark the end of their own charitable ventures,’ says Fitzwilliams. ‘Quiet and humility would be appropriate.’

Another, who knows all three women well, concurs, telling the Mail this week: ‘The girls need to take the initiative, to give up their HRHs voluntarily and stop clinging on to their charity work. They should step up and support their parents and be seen to do so.

‘That is the only thing which would bring them a shred of respect, to behave decently rather than running and hiding after being on the gravy train for all their lives.’

As for Sarah, she has remained firmly out of the spotlight – and will no doubt continue to do so. Amid growing outrage over her ties to Epstein, she is said to have spent time with friends in the French Alps, before travelling to the UAE, where she met Eugenie, who was in Doha, Qatar, in her role as a director at art dealer Hauser & Wirth.

Andrew’s arrest plunges her future into greater uncertainty. Though there is no suspicion of wrongdoing, nor involvement in the activities that have led to her ex-husband’s arrest, she is – by association – tainted by the same pariah status.

‘Sarah will want to keep her head down,’ a source says. ‘She is vulnerable because of her closeness to Andrew.’

‘Sarah Ferguson must realise her hopes of a comeback are doomed,’ says Richard Fitzwilliams, who describes the former Duchess as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘vulgar’. ‘Her charities and businesses have collapsed [her humanitarian charity, Sarah’s Trust, closed ‘for the foreseeable future’ earlier this month].

‘She must be concerned as to what else may come out.’

She has not been seen at Sandringham since Andrew moved there, having been ousted from his Windsor home earlier this month, but the pair are said to be in close contact.

Alone at Wood Farm Cottage, the five-bedroom royal residence in the grounds of Sandringham to which he was banished while his new home of Marsh Farm is refurbished, sources say Andrew has been under something akin to ‘house arrest’.

‘His movements are restricted – he is not to leave the grounds without permission nor without a chaperone – and visitors must be pre-approved,’ an insider says.

‘His communications were being monitored. The King provided a small team – a cook, housekeeper, general factotum – to look after him. They are effectively warders, rather than servants.’

It is to this stark and lonely set-up that Andrew returned on Thursday evening.

Indeed, Ingrid Seward doubts whether Beatrice and Eugenie, so dumbfounded are they by the allegations against their father, will reach out to him at all.

‘It’s really up to him to reach out to them now,’ she says. ‘It’s his duty as a father to get in contact. But whether Andrew feels he can, after everything he’s put them through, remains to be seen.’