Mountbatten-Windsor takes Thames Valley Police to court over the February warrants

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has begun legal action against Thames Valley Police over the search warrants that led to his arrest in February, the judicial office said on Monday. A private hearing is listed for Thursday afternoon before Mr Justice Hilliard. The immediate question for the judge is whether papers in the former Duke of York's application for judicial review can be made public. Thames Valley Police opposes that disclosure.

The warrants were issued by a judge at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, on 18 February. They covered two properties: Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, his former home, and a property on the King's Sandringham estate. Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested the same month on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The allegation, as the police investigation has been described in public, is that he shared confidential information with Jeffrey Epstein while he was the United Kingdom's trade envoy. He was released without charge. He was arrested on his 66th birthday.

Thames Valley Police confirmed on Monday that it is in proceedings over those warrants. "As these legal proceedings are currently ongoing, it would be inappropriate for us to comment further," the force said. It did not confirm the address list, the date of the warrants, or the state of the underlying investigation. Those details come from the judicial office and from the reporting of the hearing list. A High Court judge has already given Mountbatten-Windsor permission to challenge the lawfulness of the searches. Thursday's sitting is not the full judicial review. It is a fight about what the public can read before that review is heard.

The distinction matters. Permission to apply for judicial review means a judge has accepted that the challenge is arguable. It is not a finding that the warrants were unlawful. The Old Bailey judge who signed them on 18 February did so on material the police put before the court. Mountbatten-Windsor's case, as described by the judicial office, attacks the legal status of those warrants. If he wins, the search of Royal Lodge and the Sandringham property can be declared unlawful. If he loses, the warrants stand and the investigation keeps whatever material the searches produced. Neither result decides the misconduct allegation. That file is still with the police, and no charge has been brought.

King Charles removed his brother's princely title and dukedom late last year over the association with Epstein. Mountbatten-Windsor is the name he now uses in court papers. The Daily Telegraph, which first reported the challenge, described it as the first time a member of the royal family had challenged the lawfulness of criminal proceedings against them since the trial of Charles I in 1649. That comparison is the paper's, not the court's. The hearing on Thursday is a modern judicial review permission fight about disclosure, heard in private, with a police force as the defendant. It is not a state trial.

Royal Lodge is the address that will draw the most attention if the papers are released. Mountbatten-Windsor lived there from 2004. The Crown Estate and the King have pressed him to leave. The warrant put police inside a house that is already the subject of a separate argument about tenure, rent, and who pays for the upkeep. The Sandringham warrant is different in kind. It covers a property on the King's private estate, not a house the former duke held in his own name for two decades. A challenge that treats both warrants as one legal act will have to explain why a search of a grace-and-favour house and a search on the sovereign's estate fail for the same reason.

Misconduct in public office is a common-law offence. It requires a public officer, a breach of duty, and conduct serious enough to be criminal. The trade-envoy role is the office the investigation is built on. Epstein died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. Files released in the years since have included correspondence with Mountbatten-Windsor. The police have not said which documents, if any, the February searches recovered, and the judicial office has not listed them. Thursday's hearing can open or keep shut the application itself. It will not publish the search inventory.

The timetable after Thursday is short on public detail. If Mr Justice Hilliard keeps the papers closed, the judicial review proceeds without a public bundle. If he opens them, the grounds of challenge become readable: the information the police gave the Old Bailey judge, the addresses, and the argument that the warrants should not have been signed. Mountbatten-Windsor has no charge to answer at present. He does have a court date, a police force in opposition, and two houses that were searched on a warrant he says was not lawful.