As I write, former prime minister Gordon Brown has just called on the man he called “ex-prince Andrew” to testify before the US Congress as to what he knew about Jeffrey Epstein and what he saw on his island. To be precise, he didn’t “call” for it. He answered a BBC interview question with an incredulous “of course he should”. He virtually spat the words out.

And it’s that sense of the obvious that has perhaps been missing from so many of the questions we’ve been asking.

In 2019, the former prince told me “if push came to shove” and his lawyers advised him to testify, then he would be “duty bound to do so”. Well I’d gently suggest push has now very much come to shove. The question really is why the pushing took six long years.

I remember asking him, in the Buckingham Palace ballroom, if he would help “provide closure” by answering the “many unanswered questions”.

The phrase I used makes me wince when I read it back. It wasn’t “closure” the Epstein survivors demanded – it was justice. Conviction and incarceration in the places that merited it.

But his response was far more tin-eared. “If there was… in the right circumstances, yes I would. Because I think there’s just as much closure for me as there is for everybody else and undoubtedly some very strange and unpleasant activities have been going on. I’m afraid to say that I’m not the person who can shed light on it for a number of reasons, one of which is that I wasn’t there long........

© iNews