The real victims of Prince Andrew’s interview are survivors of Epstein, not the royals

Editorial: Whatever the truth, one fact does not change. He remains the eighth in line to the throne. No embarrassment heaped upon himself, his family or his country is sufficient to change that fact

Most of Prince Andrew’s hour-long interview with Emily Maitlis was too ridiculous to be shocking, but shock should be the emotion that lasts.

More shocking even than the decision to agree to the interview, a decision over which the Prince’s PR adviser is understood to have warned against and then terminated his own employment, were the multiple opportunities he was given to condemn his former friend, and to empathise with his many victims, all of which were turned down.

With her very final question, Ms Maitlis asks the prince: “Is there anything you feel has been left unsaid that you would like to say now?”

This was his very last chance to say what should have been said at the very start. That his friend was a monster. This was a chance to offer, if not some contrition – for the prince considers himself blameless – but some empathy, with the victims of those terrible crimes, for the ruined lives.

Instead, he spoke on several occasions of how “the opportunities that I was given to learn either by him or because of him were actually very useful”.

So much of the interview is damning and jaw-dropping in equal parts. That he had “no recollection” of meeting a 17-year-old girl with whom he is photographed, that the photograph “may” have been doctored, that he can’t have been “sweaty” when they are alleged to have met in a nightclub, because his service in the Falklands rendered him incapable of sweating. And that, on the night in question, he had in fact been to a Pizza Express in Woking in the late afternoon, so couldn’t possibly have been in a London night club several hours later.

We happen to be in the middle of a general election campaign. One of the surest truths of campaigning is also one of the oldest – when you’re explaining, you’re losing.

If these are the hoops through which the prince must jump to try (and, let’s face it, ultimately fail) to convince the viewing public that you have not done the deed of which you stand accused, well, you are not making a success of things.

Of an act this sinister, facilitated by a man so vile, more impassioned defences might be available.

Whatever the truth, however, absolutely whatever the truth, one fact does not change. It is the one mentioned above. Prince Andrew remains eighth in line to the throne. No embarrassment heaped upon himself, his family or his country is sufficient to change that fact.

There are no sanctions available, no consequences, beyond public approbation.

To the very last, the prince still regards his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein as having been, first and foremost, a learning opportunity.

And it was, of course, an opportunity afforded to him by no circumstance beyond the good fortune of his birth.

Those are good fortunes that can never be removed. Such is the way with monarchy. Opportunities that have never been earned cannot truly be lost.

Losing, of course, is what happened to the victims, the ones who don’t appear to have troubled the prince’s conscience for a second.