Prince Andrew ‘ordered Royal protection officers to retrieve his stray golf balls’ while practising in Buckingham Palace

SPOILT Prince Andrew would get royal protection officers to retrieve his stray golf balls, according to newly-resurfaced reports.

A palace insider claimed members of the elite Royal police squad, who were supposed to be guarding the Duke of York, were ordered to act as ball boys for Andrew while he practised his stroke in the Buckingham Palace garden.

An officer on duty would be told to stand around 100 yards away from the Queen’s favourite son, and then run around retrieving the golf balls after he struck them.

Buckingham Palace has the largest private garden in London at the back, making it a perfect place for the golf-mad Duke to practice his swing.

In 2008, a source told the Mail Online: “Andrew would occasionally come into the gardens carrying his clubs and hit a few balls making his close protection officer collect them for him.”

Former Royal protection officer Paul Page, while on trial in 2009 for fraud, backed up the claim that Andrew would use the elite forces who were supposed to be keeping him safe as his personal golf caddies.

Page, who was Andrew’s protection officer between 1998 and 2004, told the Mirror in 2019 the prince was “abusive and rude towards us as police officers”.

He also claimed he saw the prince sweating while playing golf one time in the Buckingham Palace garden, despite his assertions in a 2019 Newsnight interview that he couldn’t sweat after receiving an overdose of adrenaline during the Falklands War.

The Duke’s love for golf is well-known, and he once sped away from a police officer who had pulled his car over because he was late for a golfing tournament.

It may have come as a particular blow, therefore, when earlier this month Andrew was stripped of several golfing patronages.

Before the fall-out from his friendships with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his jailed “madam” Ghislaine Maxwell, there were 24 golf-related affiliations on the Royal Family’s website in connection with Andrew.

But when the Queen stripped her son of his military titles last week, the golfing patronages all appear to have been removed as well.

In Page’s trial for a £3m scam, he also alleged Andrew would “entertain” female friends including convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell at Buckingham Palace without making them go through proper security checks.

This week, Page claimed in ITV documentary Ghislaine, Prince Andrew and the Paedophile that Maxwell visited Buckingham Palace so much he suspected she and Andrew were lovers.

In astonishing revelations about Andrew’s links to Jeffrey Epstein’s former “madam”, he claimed Maxwell visited up to four times in one day.

He said: “From the way she was allowed to enter and exit the palace at will, we realised… suspected, that she may have had an intimate relationship with Prince Andrew.”

One colleague “remembered her coming in four times in one day, from the morning until the evening,” he said.

He also told the documentary he saw Andrew’s bed piled high with stuffed toys when he had access to the Duke’s private apartment.

“It had about 50 or 60 stuffed toys positioned on the bed and basically there was a card the inspector showed us in a drawer and it was a picture of these bears in situ,” he said.

“The reason for the laminated picture was if those bears weren’t put back in the right order by the maids, he would shout and scream.”

In another embarrassing revelation this week, a former Royal maid alleged the “entitled” Andrew made her run up four flights of stairs to close his drapes, while he sat next to them.

Charlotte Briggs, who started working at Buckingham Palace when she was 21 in 1996, told The Celeb Report Online she was left in tears by the Duke of York’s foul-mouthed rants.

The “lazy” prince is said to have blown his top when he saw a tiny gap in his curtains, yelling at his maid: “Can’t you f***ing do anything right?”

She added: “This man fought for his country but couldn’t stand up to close his own curtains.”

Charlotte said nobody wanted the job of being Andrew’s butler thanks to his “reputation for tantrums and sweary outbursts”.

Among the Duke’s other bizarre requests were that his pillows – embroidered with the Royal Crest – had to be dead-centre in his four-poster bed with his pyjamas and teddies carefully laid out.

Buckingham Palace previously said that during Paul Page’s trial he made “a series of allegations about… members of the Royal Family, none of which were ever substantiated”.