Who has the fattest fingers: Prince Andrew or the person who types his press releases? Without wishing to shock you, it’s possible that these two individuals are sometimes the same person. Furthermore – and if your mind is already close to blowing, please look away now – it could be that the entities described as Prince Andrew’s “friends” in a sympathetic Evening Standard story on Wednesday are ALSO Prince Andrew himself. I know! He’s literally never worked harder. At the age of 59, he’s finally got a full-time job. Unfortunately, it’s convincing people he’s not a sex case.

The Duke of York is, absolutely indisputably, a friend to sex cases – or sex case [singular], in the form of his late friend Jeffrey Epstein. No point cavilling there. That particular aircraft carrier has sailed. Still, before we go on, all this clearly demands a recap.

As you may know, Prince Andrew is currently what convention demands we style as “in the news for all the wrong reasons”. The story has long concerned his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who, at the time of his death in jail earlier this month, was awaiting trial for running an international underage sex-trafficking operation. It also concerns Virginia Giuffre (then Roberts), who alleges she was recruited as a child as Epstein’s sex slave, and on whose bare hip Prince Andrew’s hand is pictured in a now-infamous photograph. Giuffre claims she was forced to have sex with the Duke of York three times when she was 17. He categorically denies this.

But rather than Epstein’s apparent suicide making it all go away, the focus on the prince’s friendship with him, and its nature, has intensified. Some of Epstein’s private-jet logs, on which Prince Andrew’s name reportedly occurs several times, have been uncovered, while footage of the prince peering cagily round the door of Epstein’s New York mansion, some time after he was released from jail, has emerged. Last week, emails emerged in which a literary agent recounted seeing Andrew in said mansion, receiving a foot massage with Epstein, apparently from two well-dressed young Russian women. The duke was said to be complaining about public focus on his night-time activities.

Perhaps troubled by the continuing inability to just make this shit go away, Buckingham Palace chose Saturday afternoon to put out a press release in which Andrew attempted to – what’s the euphemism? – clarify his position on a number of points. This turned out to be a curious document, different in layout from typical palace communications, and best described as a wildly disingenuous word salad. Milton it was not – although it did have the flavour of something proofread by him in his final years.

Having been pored over, it was suspected by some royal watchers to be the work of Prince Andrew himself. Who can say? It wouldn’t be the first time, with the prince having occasional form for going over the heads of staff and issuing things himself. Either way, let’s take a look: “At no stage … did I see, witness or suspect any behaviour of the sort that subsequently led to his arrest and conviction.” The suggestion seems to be that a court-convicted sex offender needs to commit his crimes physically in front of Prince Andrew for the prince to suspect he might be guilty of them.

Moving on: “I can only reiterate my regret that I was mistaken to think that what I thought I knew of him was evidently not the real person, given what we now know.” Without wishing to raise the tone by quoting Steven Seagal in Under Siege: what is this babbling bullshit? You knew he had been convicted of procuring a 14-year-old girl for prostitution and served jail time for it, in a case with huge amounts of supporting evidence and the testimony of more than 50 women telling similar stories. The rest – all the rest – is bullshit. Especially the bit about caring about the victims. You know the best way to look like you give one hundredth of a toss about the victims of sex cases? Don’t be friends with the sex case in question! Don’t stay with them in their mansions, don’t get foot massages with them, don’t get filmed looking surreptitiously round the front door as a procession of very young women come and go! It just looks … bad.

As indicated, this stuff isn’t complicated. But even if it were, it’s important to remember that, unlike most people who pay their taxes to support him being helicoptered between golf courses, Prince Andrew has a dedicated team of people whose job it is to advise him which one of his friends is a weapons-grade scumbag. I’m vaguely paraphrasing the official palace job description here. But it doesn’t matter if we call them public relations experts, background vetters, wrong ’un sniffer-outers, or simply sentient humans over the age of 18 who can read. The royal family has got a team of them, who would have made these points about Epstein very, very clearly and very, very often.

Anyway, back to this week. Surprisingly, Prince Andrew’s oddly timed, unprofessional-reading statement didn’t make all the shit go away, just as grinning sweatily in the car seat next to his mother on the drive to the church at Balmoral the previous weekend hadn’t made all the shit go away, either. Again, to fall back on another news cliche, the press release “raised more questions than it answered”.

Yet worse was to come. On Tuesday, more than 20 of Epstein’s accusers gathered to testify before a judge in a Manhattan hearing. Outside the courthouse, Giuffre declared of the prince: “He knows what he’s done and he can attest to that. He knows exactly what he’s done – and I hope he comes clean about it.” Her lawyer added that he’d made “multiple” requests to Prince Andrew to “answer real questions”.

Well now. This is the route that bring us to this Wednesday’s debut of the “chubby fingers” defence. Even as the rest of the media were obsessing over the breaking news that Boris Johnson was to ask the Queen to prorogue parliament, the Standard went with a splash headlined: “Prince Andrew hits back over ‘witch hunt’: Duke of York insists claims by Epstein’s ‘sex slave’ are ‘categorically untrue’.” Yup, a three-scarequote headline. Your basic fairytale.

Right off the bat, we need to note the timing of this, coming as it did as most media outlets were understandably taken up with prorogation – a course of executive action so clearly batshit and messed-up that Courtney Love is boggling at it. (“I love your country. This is insane. Crying,” she tweeted later that day.) In short, Wednesday lunchtime was a very good time to bury bad news. You know what’s best dealt with under cover of a constitutional crisis? That’s right! A nonce-titutional crisis.

And with that piece of kidding around, it feels wise to proceed straight to vehement ducal denials. As the Standard had it: “A source close to the Queen’s second son responded to accuser Virginia Roberts – who declared yesterday: ‘He knows exactly what he’s done’ – by saying: ‘Yes, he does know exactly what he’s done ... nothing.’” As this defender went on: “He is guilty only of showing misplaced loyalty to a friend.” Mmm. Is this a version of the classic job interviewee’s answer to the question “What’s your worst quality?” “I would say loyalty’”? Damn straight. If loving our friends is wrong, then which of us wants to be right?

Anyway: fat fingers. One “source” cited the famous photo of Prince Andrew with Giuffre and opted to tell the Standard: “Look at his fingers in the photo. The duke has quite chubby fingers, they don’t look right and nor does the height of the duke and the girl.”

Is this … is this really, honestly what they’re going with? Finger girth? If so: wow.

It feels very late in the day to be pointing this out to Prince Andrew and his “close friends”, but he is a senior royal, on the civil list, and the allegations surrounding him and the close friend he knew was a convicted sex offender are of an order requiring something more than a finger girth theory. Until that is grasped, the search for something to make all this shit go away continues. Do consider this story as “developing”.