On Thursday night, after the King announced his brother was to be stripped of his remaining titles and thrown out of his house, I spent some time looking at a photograph of Virginia Giuffre. Not the famous one, where Andrew’s arm is wound around her waist, his hand resting on the spot where crop top meets bare skin; but one she highlighted in her memoir, Nobody’s Girl.

In this photograph, she is not posing for the camera. Rather, she has been caught off-guard, standing behind Ghislaine Maxwell at a party, her delicate features in profile, her blond hair trailing her shoulders. Like the other photograph, it was taken when she was 17. “Later, a fellow survivor told me it was the reason she broke her silence,” Giuffre wrote. “[It] says something a thousand words couldn’t. Everyone knew — that was a child.”

In truth, she looks like a ghost child: washed out, waif-like, already half-erased. It has an eerie, soothsayer quality to it, her frailty a flash-forward to her unravelling and death by suicide in April this year, at the age of 41. According to Guiffre, by then she had already been sexually abused by her father and trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein. She was in the process of being handed round “like a basket of fruit” to his celebrity friends. Epstein used the currency of young girls to buy proximity to the rich and the powerful.

Virginia Giuffre, centre, talks to the press outside a Manhattan court in 2019 (Image: Bebeto Matthews)

Andrew, then fourth in line to the throne, remained friendly with Epstein after his fall, the pair bound by grubby secrets. The Pimp and the Prince: a dark fairytale in which there was never any guarantee the villains would get their just deserts.

Epstein picked up Giuffre in the summer of 2000 when she was working as a spa attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Or to put it another way........

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