How do you solve a problem like Prince Andrew? With great difficulty

If there is consensus on any subject in British public life, it is that no fate is too bad for Prince Andrew.

- BY MELANIE MCDONAGH

One unnamed minister told the BBC “he should be thrown under a bus”; Helena Kennedy, the human rights lawyer, declared he should “go and live in Switzerland or somewhere” and it looks as if he may not be permitted to remain in Royal Lodge, his large home in Windsor Great Park. Robert Jenrick, a shadow minister, observed that “the public are sick of him”.

With much of this it is hard to disagree. Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous autobiography, Nobody’s Girl, makes a harrowing read, including the part about her three alleged sexual encounters with Prince Andrew — allegations which he emphatically denies. She recalls that the first time they met, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's partner-in-crime, asked Andrew to guess Giuffre’s age: "The Duke of York, who was then 41, guessed correctly: 17. ‘My daughters are just a little younger than you, he told me, explaining his accuracy,” she says.

That particular element, if true, is hard to take. My own daughter is 18; that alone would have made me savagely protective of someone like a 17-year-old Giuffre. Her account, if true, suggests Prince Andrew was wholly incurious about her and he seems not to have questioned how or why she ended up being offered to strangers as a toothsome sexual treat by the gruesome twosome, Epstein and Maxwell.