He’s a nasty man who made me run up 4 flights of stairs to draw curtains, says ex-maid
A FORMER maid who labelled Andrew ‘a horrible, nasty man’ has said she doesn’t ‘give a toss’ what Prince Andrew thinks of her.
Charlotte Briggs took on the challenge of being Andrew’s maid – the ‘job nobody wanted’ because of the Duke of York’s ‘reputation for tantrums and sweary outbursts’ – soon after she started work for the royals in 1996.
Nothing could prepare her, just 21 at the time, for quite how demanding he could be.
Yesterday she told The Sun she was reduced to tears after Prince Andrew shouted ‘Can’t you f ****** do anything right?’ – because she left a small gap in the curtains he had ordered her to draw.
She said ‘lazy’ and ‘entitled’ Andrew, then 36, refused to close the floor to ceiling curtains himself, despite being sat next to them at his desk.
Instead he called down from his office for his maid – who had to run up four flights of stairs to do it for him.
In an interview that will come as fresh embarrassment to the beleaguered prince, she said: ‘He thinks he’s above everyone.’ Andrew moved back to the Buckingham Palace after his 1996 divorce from Sarah Ferguson and set up home on the ‘nursery floor’ of his childhood.
Miss Briggs, now 47 and a married mother of two, said he kept Fergie’s wedding dress in his wardrobe after the divorce and laid her make-up on a dressing table. ‘It was creepy,’ she said.
Miss Briggs, from Halifax, said she ‘often tried to hide’ behind curtains if she saw the ‘extremely demanding’ duke coming.
‘Everything had to be immaculate and he threw his weight around,’ she said, recalling how ‘arrogant’ Andrew ‘ruined my time at the palace and made it miserable’.
The pillows embroidered with the Royal Crest had to be dead centre on his bed and his pyjamas – and collection of teddies – carefully laid out. Miss Briggs said 72 soft toys had to be arranged in size order on his bed every morning, then rearranged in preallocated spots around the room when he was ready for bed. The process took an hour per day.
She added: ‘His two favourite bears sat on two thrones either side of the bed.’
Andrew behaved ‘like a spoiled brat’, she said. In contrast, Prince Charles, who she worked for just before Princess Diana died, showed ‘empathy and kindness’.
Miss Briggs said she does not care what Andrew feels about her revelations and has faced criticism in her home town. A spokesman for the duke did not comment yesterday.