It must be clear by now that this isn’t going to stop. It’s been nearly two decades since Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and over five since Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s car-crash interview on Newsnight. The story never dies. It just gets bigger, and ever more damaging, and increasingly corrosive of public trust.

Instead of subsiding, it seems to grow, like roots under the earth, touching everyone – politicians, royals, scientists, entrepreneurs, even leftist activists. Every sector of our cultural life has its own little mini-Epstein scandal, a subplot that plays into the main storyline. There is no point hiding, or concealing information, or fighting disclosure. The best possible approach is full transparency, get out in front of it, then deal with the fallout.

And yet even now there is hesitancy, reluctance, excuses. The Government and the Royal Family feel like they are dragging their feet, needing to be pushed into openness rather than engaging with it willingly.

The latest wrinkle in this story concerns emails between Mountbatten-Windsor, Epstein and a man named David Stern. They relate to the period when the then-prince was serving as trade envoy, between 2001 and 2011. Stern was Mountbatten-Windsor’s aide and confidant, but he called Epstein “my boss”. During Mountbatten-Windsor’s official duties in his taxpayer funded trips, when he was supposed to be representing British interests, he seems to have in fact been mostly concerned with Epstein’s interests, helping to pursue various deals as part of a complex network of foreign companies, money, energy and power.

Even now, after everything that has happened, securing access to information about his time as trade envoy is difficult. Andrew Lownie, author of the recent Andrew biography Entitled, made a Freedom of Information request for Foreign Office emails related to a Kazakhstan trip in 2008 and an Azerbaijan trip in 2009. These were refused on health and safety grounds, with officials saying that disclosure could “endanger the physical or mental health, or the safety, of individuals involved in these arrangements”. Other requests have been refused on the basis of commercial sensitivity, national security, or an exemption for royal communication.

These are the standard excuses departments use to kill FoI requests, evidence of a growing culture of secrecy which instinctively tries to prevent publication. It’s bad enough at the best of times, but in this case it is grossly irresponsible. It is too big, too important, for departments to fall back on their default obstinacy.

It’s not just the Government. The Royal Family is still too slow to recognise the scale of the issue it is dealing with. For such an ancient institution, which is hardly known for its dynamic cultural quick-wittedness, it has had a decent-enough crisis. Mountbatten-Windsor, who of course denies all accusations against him, has been stripped of his titles, booted out of the Royal Lodge in Windsor and cast into the social wilderness with the unmistakable stench of pariah status. It’s more than you can say for the Trump administration.

But there are still questions to answer which are not being answered. Until 2019, Mountbatten-Windsor had an office in Buckingham Palace. In 2010, Epstein emailed an associate saying he was having dinner there, then later emailing Mountbatten-Windsor to ask whether he should bring three women. One woman has said she was flown to his residence to have sex with him in the same year. Indeed, former prime minister Gordon Brown says the published files show Epstein’s private jet making 90 flights to or from UK airports.

Does the Royal Family have a register of who has been on the properties? Does it know how many were connected to Epstein, what condition they were in, whether anyone checked their wellbeing, what the security procedures for them were?

Virginia Giuffre, a survivor of the Epstein sex ring, was flown to London in 2001, at the age of 17. She settled a civil case against Mountbatten-Windsor in 2022. Did the Royal Family help finance this settlement? Did the King or any other member of the family discuss it with Mountbatten-Windsor before Epstein died?

BBC Analysis editor Ros Atkins has been collating these questions and asking them of Buckingham Palace. Publicly, their response is thoughtful and considerate, with a statement saying that the King and Queen’s “thoughts and sympathies have been, and remain with, the victims of any and all forms of abuse”. But when Atkins issues those questions, the palace declines to comment. That’s not good enough.

It’s easy to think, as the scrutiny machine goes into overdrive, that the full light of public exposure is now being shone on the Epstein story. Multiple police forces are investigating. MPs are limbering up with potential inquiries. The press plasters it over the front pages every day. The great institutions of British society are all suddenly moving forward with determination.

But scratch the surface and there is still a sense of reticence, of resistance, a sense perhaps that this will all blow over and you just need to sit out the scandal another few weeks.

You can’t and you won’t. It’s too big, too long lasting. It is less a single scandal than a kind of scandal-generation machine, pumping out a near-daily series of revelations.

Recent reports suggest that Epstein boasted about his relationship with Peter Mandelson and Mountbatten-Windsor, saying: “I’ve got the UK sewn up.” That suggests a complete national exposure to foreign business interests, a vulnerability which has been easily exploited.

These revelations paint a damning portrait of how power operates in Britain: of young girls used like a kind of currency, in exchange for access and favours, by men who have all the money in the world – but no intelligence, no self-awareness, and no sense of decency.

This is not the full story of power in Britain. Every day, senior figures in Parliament, the judiciary, the government and the Civil Service go out and work hard to make people’s lives better. They behave with a sense of duty and judgement. But the Epstein version of power, the corrupt dark mirror of it, is the one which tallies with populist paranoia about the elites and corrodes people’s faith in their society.

The only way to address it is with full transparency, with an instinct towards disclosure, no matter how weird and counter-cultural it might seem. The stakes are high. And the story isn’t going away.

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