Princess Beatrice: is Andrew's eldest daughter actually the royals' hottest asset?

Was she really involved in her father Prince Andrew’s car-crash BBC interview, as Netflix suggests in Scoop? Should she and her younger sister Eugenie take up working roles in light of King Charles and Princess Kate’s cancer diagnoses? And when did she suddenly become a tech guru advising Spotify?

These are just some of the questions that have been swirling around Princess Beatrice, 35, the eldest Princess of York and eighth in line to the throne, in recent weeks.

The mother-of-two, a non-working royal who married interior designer Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi in 2020 and has always been the more discreet of the two York sisters. She was reportedly advised to “keep a low profile” after Netflix’s controversial Prince Andrew film Scoop aired on Netflix last month and showed her accompanying the Duke of York to one of Newsnight’s negotiations with the BBC, dragging her into a PR storm.

The events of recent weeks, however, might have made keeping a low profile rather difficult. Last week it was announced that her ex-boyfriend, the self-professed New York playboy Paolo Liuzzo, was found dead in a Miami hotel room following a suspected overdose on February 7, painting the princess’ public appearances of recent months in a new light.

Hosting a charity tea party at St James Palace, filling in for the Princess of Wales at an event to mark Student Mental Health Week, and hosting a future of tech discussion at Spotify’s London HQ are among the appearances she’s made in recent months while grieving Luizzo. She dated him for a year from the age of 17 in what has been described as an intense and passionate first relationship. Insiders say she has been left “heartbroken” by the news of his death, with singer Ellie Goulding, supermodel-turned-entrepreneur Karlie Kloss and celebrity nutritionist Gabriella Peacock believed to be among the trusted inner circle rallying