Prince Andrew should withdraw from royal duties – his priority must be to protect the Queen 

There have already been acres of analysis of Emily Maitlis’s patient evisceration of the Queen’s second, and favourite, son. I will add a few observations of my own. Members of the late Jeffrey Epstein’s staff have claimed walls in the hallways of his various houses were lined with pornographic photographs, artwork featured giant, squeezable breasts, and sex toys were left in the bathroom for maids to put away. The billionaire financier apparently took no trouble to hide his sleazy predilections. Shame is for the little people.

For Prince Andrew to say he visited those homes, and took trips to Epstein’s private island aboard a jet which locals called the Lolita Express, without ever suspecting that his host was a total creep is, in every sense, hard to swallow.

Watching the interview, set in a Buckingham Palace ballroom whose grandeur struggled to lend dignity to the tawdry subject, it was striking that the prince had great difficulty remembering anything that might land him in trouble. But when it came to providing an alibi, suddenly he was Sherlock Holmes.

On the date in March 2001 that his accuser, Virginia Roberts (now Giuffre), claimed he had sex with her at Ghislaine Maxwell’s Belgravia house, Andrew recalled that he had collected Princess Beatrice from a Pizza Express party in Woking. He couldn’t suppress a de-haut-en-bas smirk when he said that he remembered it so clearly, “because going to Pizza Express in Woking is a very unusual thing for me to do”.

Many of Her Majesty’s subjects might consider it unwise to be snobbish about a pizza place that is a treat for most British families. Especially when your own recreations included hanging out with an Olympian sleazeball who is alleged to have used your friend Ghislaine to procure underage girls to be the hors d’oeuvres at his orgies. Miss Maxwell strenuously denies any wrongdoing.

I have to suppress a shudder every time I see that photo of the Duke with his arm around young Virginia’s tiny waist while Ghislaine hovers behind them with a cat-got-the-kitten-for-the-randy-old-dog smile. The picture is to Prince Andrew what Monica Lewinsky’s dress was to Bill Clinton: an incriminating stain that no amount of carefully-crafted denials can expunge. But is it genuine?

One of the Duke’s feeble claims that it can’t be, because he never wore such casual clothes in London, has quickly been disproved. If it turns out to be authentic, I’m afraid it means that a father who took his 12-year-old to a party one afternoon spent that evening with a girl just five years older than his daughter. Do you think Andrew ever made that basic connection between the two kids? Or did the 17-year-old, who alleges she was flown over as a human sex toy for the delectation of Jeffrey’s various friends, fall into the category of “staff” for a Royal who appears to have no curiosity about people beneath his station?

Whatever the legality or otherwise of the Duke’s actions, what strikes you is the complete and utter failure of moral imagination. The man is an emotional dunce. As the mother of a daughter not much older than Virginia was then, I look at that slip of a girl, who has fallen into the company of powerful perverts, and I want to tell her to put a jumper on over her skimpy top (“It’s March, you’re in England, it’s cold, sweetheart”). I want to ask her what she’s doing there with Epstein and Maxwell. Does she know that trafficking young females is illegal and she doesn’t have to do the disgusting stuff Epstein wants her to do, even if he happens to be friends with a prince of the realm.

As the father of young daughters, did the Duke think those things? Or was he too keen to keep in with his billionaire buddy who “had the most extraordinary ability to bring extraordinary people together”? And then feed young girls to them on a silver platter? Extraordinary is the word, Your Royal Highness.

“I never saw them,” he told Maitlis. She had confronted the Duke with testimony that girls were in and out of Epstein’s New York mansion where Andrew stayed in 2010 during the four days it took him to inform the convicted paedophile that their friendship was no longer appropriate. Telling Jeffrey over the phone would have been “the chicken’s way of doing it”, he said lamely.

Let’s be honest, it would also have deprived the Duke of what he called “absolutely vital” networking opportunities with “US eminence”. The rich and famous, including Woody Allen, gathered for a dinner party to mark Epstein’s release from jail after he’d served a 13-month sentence for soliciting a minor for prostitution. (Staying at the British Consulate in the same street, which Prince Andrew was entitled to do, would have been disappointingly dull by comparison.)

John Brockman, a literary agent who was present during that 2010 visit, claims he saw Prince Andrew receiving a foot massage from a young Russian woman. Naturally, the Duke, who is apparently blessed with a superpower whereby people worth less than $10 million are rendered invisible, doesn’t recall it.

All credit to Emily Maitlis. She managed not to laugh out loud when her interviewee, asked if he had any regrets, conceded: “I admit my judgment is coloured by my tendency to be too honourable.”

Try telling that to the latest Epstein accuser. On Monday, a 31-year-old woman said that Epstein had taken her virginity when she was 15 at his New Mexico ranch, “in front of a wall of framed photographs of him shaking hands and smiling with celebrities and political leaders”. Epstein invited the frightened child to his private island with a promise that she would meet Prince Andrew. “It was clear that there was something very wrong with his lifestyle, and it didn’t take a victim to see that,” the woman said pointedly. “We were not hidden.”

It really couldn’t be clearer, could it? The big booby was used by Epstein to lend a gloss of Royal respectability to his foul deeds. With his tragically ossified, aristocratic code of conduct, the Duke genuinely seems to think phrases like “I let the side down” and “unbecoming manner” are an adequate response to the abuse of young girls by Epstein on what is rapidly becoming apparent was an industrial scale.

His only regret is that he, a member of the Royal family with its exceptionally high standards, has been caught up in such a ghastly business. He neither seems to grasp, nor care about, the suffering the late Jeffrey Epstein and his extraordinary “opportunities” caused those far less fortunate than himself.

The Duke’s tone throughout the hour-long interview was of someone who had been asked to clear up a minor incident at the golf club. It was just awful. He even admitted casually that he had seen his friend Ghislaine earlier this year. Yet another appalling error of judgment.

The Balliol-educated Ms Maxwell, if she ever comes out of hiding, will surely face FBI questioning over allegations she picked up young girls at spas and introduced them to Epstein (previously her own boyfriend) with very specific instructions for his “massage”. Whatever the ultimate truth about her alleged involvement, when I see the picture of Ghislaine Maxwell hovering over the lovely young Virginia Roberts, I think of baby rabbits being fed to reptiles. The image makes me recoil from the woman. Why doesn’t the Duke?

The Epstein story looks like it’s about sex. Actually, it’s about money. Money talks. With wealth that vast you can seduce the world’s most famous or powerful men onto the Lolita Express – Nobel laureates, Prince Andrew, Stephen Hawking (Stephen Hawking!) – and they will be flattered, not ashamed.

Far from lancing the boil of putrid insinuation, the Newsnight interview has only dumped the Duke deeper in the mire. Sponsors of his main charitable project, Pitch@Palace, are fleeing the sinking rat. Yesterday, Standard Chartered Bank became the latest institution to cut ties with the toxic Royal. Now that he’s fair game, critics have come forward to claim instances of Prince Andrew using racist language. Secret court documents detailing explosive new allegations against Epstein are said to contain the Duke’s name and he may well be notified by US judges before the end of the year, giving him a chance to respond to the allegations. 

Most damagingly of all, perhaps, Virginia Roberts-Giuffre, now 35, has given an interview to BBC’s Panorama repeating the accusation that she was forced to have sex with the Duke three times. If she can provide concrete evidence that the photograph of the two of them together is not a fake when Prince Andrew told Maitlis “I can absolutely categorically tell you it never happened”, then that really is the end for him.

Monarchists may feel Prince Andrew has paid a high price for naivety and for not being the brightest bulb in the chandelier. It is murky stuff, and it may yet get murkier. There is growing pressure on Dame Cressida Dick, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to act, and soon. Don’t rule out the Prince being taken in for questioning a lot rougher than Maitlis’s. Lawyers representing Epstein accusers in the US are calling on Prince Andrew to fly to the States and tell the FBI what he knows.

The damage caused by his foolish, recklessly complacent interview is incalculable. “A train-wreck crashing into a fuel tanker,” as one lawyer who specialises in reputation management called it. The Duke of York’s priority now must be to protect his mother, the Queen, as she has protected him, always bestowing a new medal to make up for the latest embarrassment.

Spreading faster than a forest fire, the scandal is said to be taking its toll on the 93-year-old monarch, with Prince Charles away in New Zealand and Prince Philip increasingly frail and unable to offer her support. The Queen doesn’t deserve it. Some decisive action is needed. An announcement that Prince Andrew is withdrawing from royal duties until the Epstein case is resolved would help the monarchy to get back some control over the narrative. If the Duke refused the Sovereign Grant (which replaced the Civil List), it would show a welcome humility: the public doesn’t want to fund the friend of a paedophile.

I guess you could say it is Prince Andrew’s bad luck that he finds himself in the first generation of Royal males who may be held to account for their treatment of girls from below stairs. In her legal deposition to a US court, Virginia Roberts Giuffre vividly recalled that day in London 18 years ago when she was woken by a smiling Ghislaine Maxwell. “Today, you are going to meet a prince,” Maxwell told her.

What is alleged to have followed was the dark opposite of a fairytale. “Ghislaine asked Andrew how old he thought I was, and he guessed 17, and they all laughed. Ghislaine made a joke that I was getting too old for Jeffrey. She said: ‘He’ll soon have to trade her in.’ It was widely known that he liked young girls.”

I believe her. How about you?

Read Allison Pearson at telegraph.co.uk every Tuesday from 7pm