The Epstein files heap fresh embarrassment on Prince Andrew

Four days in, and 2024 shows every sign of being yet another annus horribilis for Prince Andrew. After – by his, admittedly reduced, standards – a triumphant Christmas, in which he processed to church at Sandringham with the rest of the Royal Family and, bizarrely, an apparently rehabilitated Fergie, the cold clear light of reality has intruded once again.

To kick things off, Andrew is facing the prospect of not one, but two docudramas raking over the humiliation of his Newsnight interview. (The potentially consolatory fact that he is to be played in them by Rufus Sewell and Michael Sheen respectively has been dampened by the fact the famously handsome Sewell is having to wear prosthetics to play the not-so-grand Duke of York). But much worse is that the metaphorical lump of coal in the stocking, his association with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, has turned up once again to make the eleventh day of Christmas a miserable one.

Granted, the revelations in the court documents, newly released in connection with the case against Ghislaine Maxwell, are not in themselves anything that has not already made it into the public domain.