Prince Andrew should have taken advice from Boris Johnson – he managed to make us forget about Jennifer Arcuri, after all

Less than four weeks before the trudge to the voting stations, the ever-burgeoning record of the prime minister’s private betrayals has had virtually no impact on an electorate

By one definition of the word, Prince Andrew was perfect.

Unfortunately, that definition is the one pioneered by that underrated lexicographer, Donald J Trump. As in: “My phone call with the president of Ukraine was perfect.’’

By any other metric, Andrew’s interview with Emily Maitlis was every bit as galactic a calamity as the 45th president’s mafiosi pow-wow.

That much is agreed by every sentient life form, with the possible exception of the one-sixteenth-witted Duke of York himself. When he told Maitlis: “I live in an institution,” you could hear a million voices murmuring: “You certainly should. Only not Buckingham Palace.”

Anyway, now the ague of shock is beginning to fade, the time approaches to stop fixating on all the uncalculated insults to the intelligence of viewers with an IQ a few points higher than his own.

This won’t be easy, because it feels too soon to bid farewell to the cray-cray: the trauma-induced inability to sweat; the pinpoint recall about Pizza Express juxtaposed with the amnesia about whether he met the 17-year-old girl in the photo; the honour code that obliged him to spend four days ending a friendship with someone he repeatedly said was barely a friend; and on a plinth of imbecility above the rest, “conduct unbecoming”.

Even the heroic deference that enabled Andrew Bridgen to absolve Jacob Rees-Mogg of his Grenfell monstrosities would be overstretched in the defence of this jowly dolt.

Yet the error that may linger when all the others have melded into an amorphous fog of bemusement concerns what happened before the interview.

Why did he listen to the experts who prepped him when the perfect (in the conventional sense) tutor was available a five-minute stroll from the palace?

If ever a man was ideally placed to train a royal to handle allegations related to grotesque sexual incontinence, it was the man with a professional duty to advise the royals.

Boris Johnson would have sorted him. He’s the Regius Professor of Surviving Sexual Scandal at the University of Mumbling Gibberish (formerly Blethering Drivel Polytechnic).

On Sunday, while the country was sniffing the post-Maitlis smelling salts, one of Johnson’s misdemeanours resurfaced.

(Statista (Statista)

It didn’t get much attention, partly thanks to Prince Andrew hoovering up the oxygen, and more because this is not a convenient electoral moment for the right-wing press to dwell on its pin-up’s peccadilloes.

But with apologies for her demotion to the undercast, a warm welcome back to the stage for Jennifer Arcuri.

The American wannabe tech entrepreneur featured in an interview herself last night, on an episode of ITV’s Exposure entitled “When Boris Met Jennifer”. Judging by the advance quotes, not many viewers were moaning “I’ll have what she was having”.

Exactly what she was having remains speculative. With what seems uncharacteristic coyness, Arcuri hasn’t explicitly confirmed that she was having an affair with the then Mayor of London, when he was throwing public money at her fledgling company and including her in official trips for which her abundant lack of experience seemed scant qualification.

Yet we might read between the lines when Arcuri addresses Johnson directly through the screen with: “I’ve kept your secrets and been your friend. And I don’t understand why you’ve blocked me and ignored me as if I was some fleeting one-night stand or some girl that you picked up at a bar because I wasn’t – and you know that.”

Arcuri tells a tale of casual cruelty that will do Johnson minimal, if any, electoral harm. For our bouncing Baby Trump, as for Daddy across the pond, a lack of chivalry is factored into the market price.

Opinion varies on whether it ought to matter if Johnson is a serial adulterer, and too callous to speak to Arcuri on the phone when she rang him in distress.

There are those, sophisticates or faux sophisticates according to personal taste, who take the studiedly French view that a politician’s sexual life is irrelevant.

Rupert Murdoch flirts with inconsistency about this. If it’s the inter-marriage Jeremy Corbyn coupling with Diane Abbott in a German field decades ago, that implicitly speaks to his unfitness to be prime minister.

If it’s the firmly married Johnson visiting Arcuri in her Streatham flat, who would wish to fill The Sun with impertinent intrusiveness of the kind? Even if he did allegedly commit the crime of malfeasance in public office, or at the very least was guilty of a crashing conflict of interest, as Arcuri says he admitted at the time?

But when it’s a cretinously entitled prince of the blood royal up to no good, albeit consorting with a convicted criminal rather than allegedly committing a crime, there is no doubting the significance.

Her Majesty has been let down; presumably to the likes of Murdoch, who spent 30 years trying to destroy the monarchy and put all his weight behind the campaign for Australian independence from the Crown, that is the sin of sins.

Quite how we came to the judgement that the brazen immorality and transparent mendacity of a wretched dim bystander in national life vastly outranks the same qualities in the prime minister is a question for an unreadably turgid sociology doctorate.

Somehow we have. Less than four weeks before the trudge to the voting stations, the ever-burgeoning record of Johnson’s private betrayals has no impact on an electorate that trusts his promises on the NHS as much as Corbyn’s.

On reflection, it might have been asking too much of Johnson to guide Andrew through his interview unscathed. On the form book, he would hardly have advised him to apologise to the young woman, or fake empathy for her and all the others groomed by Epstein for the delectation of sweaty (or sweatless) middle-aged horrors.

But he might have persuaded him to follow his lead by avoiding it entirely, and he would have cheered the prince up with a flash of trademark wit. He still could, and now more than ever Andrew needs that.

He may not take Arcuri’s calls, but in his capacity as chief consiglieri to the Windsors, Johnson might carve a moment from his frantic schedule memorising the words to “The Wheels on the Bus”, and ring Prince Andrew to tell him, “Now come on, old chap, chin up. At least you’re pretty sure how many children you have.”