Sky News was brought to a halt today for a breaking update on Andrew Mountbatten Windsor – and it doesn’t look good for the Royal Family. Deputy political editor Sam Coates was live in the studio as the first tranche of the so-called Andrew Files was released, going through the 31-page document line-by-line to break it down for viewers at home.

He explained: “Let’s cut straight away to some of the key bits. One of the biggest red flags that we can see is here, it is captured in an exchange between a top official and the head of Prince Andrew’s private office, Prince Andrew as he was then. That’s an individual called Captain Blair, principal private secretary to Andrew. It goes through quite a lot of the details about how the job of being envoy to the government for trade was going to work once he took over.”

Coates continued: “There’s a particular ask from the head of Prince Andrew’s private office. The Duke of York should not be offered golfing functions abroad, it says very clearly. ‘This was a private activity and if he took his clubs with him he would not play in any public sense.’

“Straight away in these documents, what you have is a red flag from a senior official who’d been talking to somebody who knew Prince Andrew intimately, worrying about a conflict of interest in the role Andrew was about to take up.

“You can see explicitly it was the Queen that wanted Prince Andrew to take over. She thought that the timing was perfect because the Duke of York’s active naval career was coming to an end, and this is what she wanted to do it for – she was very keen that the Duke of York should take on the prominent role in the promotion of national interest.

“Quite bluntly, the Queen wanted to up Prince Andrew, his profile, and make sure that he was playing more of a role. Nobody else was offered up by the late Queen.”

Coates then went on: “They had to be prepared in case they got journalistic enquiries about a reputed £100,000 demand for Andrew and his team for office expenses.

“Officials were told to say there has never been any demand for office expenses and that only expenses incurred in the role would be paid, by agreement with Buckingham Palace.

“But there is a question – why is that there in the first place? How had Buckingham Palace and the government got to the stage where they were concerned enough about that being an issue such that they prepared a denial?”