Will it all just end up going away for Prince Andrew? You’d be mad to rule it out. On Monday night, Channel 4’s Dispatches broadcast a programme that aired claims by Virginia Roberts Giuffre – who alleges she was kept as Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slave while a minor and beyond – that she had been required to have sex with Epstein’s friend Andrew three times. Once was in London, she alleged, shortly after the infamous picture was taken of Andrew with his arm round the waist of the 17-year-old Roberts Giuffre. Once was in New York, she also claimed, and once was in an orgy with other young women on the billionaire financier’s private Virgin Islands property, reportedly known locally as “Paedophile Island”.

Prince Andrew absolutely denies all these accusations, which were struck from Florida court records in 2015, having recently said he was “appalled by the recent reports of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged crimes”. Even though he continued to be friends with Epstein after the latter had served more than a year in prison for procuring an underage girl for prostitution. Only a discredited plea deal prevented multiple further accusers, whose existence was publicly known, from being part of the case.

So, yes, Dispatches was Monday night. On Tuesday, the Duke of York was unusually accompanied on a formal engagement by his eldest daughter Beatrice, who is not a working member of the royal family, having a separate career. She is to be married next year, as her sister Princess Eugenie was last October. The taxpayer dropped a couple of million on security for the latter event at Windsor, with the local council stumping up a further undisclosed sum for services such as stewarding and parking facilities. Eugenie’s wedding was televised on ITV, although it remains to be seen whether the family will decide that it’s worth going down that route again. Perhaps it depends where the whole investigation-into-Andrew’s-dead-underage-sex-trafficker-friend thing is at that particular moment.

Either way, there is some speculation that her father feels the need of the protective charm of family members at this time. Certainly, anonymous friends have been working hard on his behalf for a couple of months. These friends began by addressing the aforementioned photo of Andrew with Roberts Giuffre, his hand resting on the teenager’s bare hip as the duke and Epstein’s mutual friend Ghislaine Maxwell smile away. According to these “sources close to the duke”, the picture may be a fake, because Prince Andrew has “much chubbier” fingers.

If you’ve never heard such rubbish, you will likely boggle even more at the close sources’ more recent tack. Namely, that Andrew only flew to stay with Epstein in New York in 2010 in order to tell him they could no longer be friends. This was the same trip that took place after Epstein had been released from an 18-month jail sentence. This was the same trip where he and Andrew were photographed strolling and chatting together in Central Park, and where Andrew was photographed and filmed grinningly answering the door of Epstein’s mansion to a young woman. Was this the same trip where literary agent John Brockman reported being in the same room as Andrew and Epstein as they received simultaneous foot massages from two young, attractive Russian women? It’s not clear. Even without that, though, you have to think it’s EXACTLY how you too would end a friendship with a Tier-1 sex offender who you knew had recently got out of jail.

Then again, for all the radioactive horror of the Epstein story, the bizarre reality is that Andrew barely needs to bother coming up with weird or absurd explanations that keep making it worse. Because, once more, people are looking in quite another direction. Despite airing a full 24 hours later, the Dispatches details were almost entirely drowned in the continuing tide of media coverage of the documentary the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had participated in the night previously, in which they spoke of their struggle to deal with their media coverage.

Given the sheer volume of stuff already punditted about this, I won’t add much to the pile. Personally, I’d resign from being sixth in line to the throne or whatever Harry is, and do one to Hollywood, where Meghan can be the biggest movie star in the world for her 40s, and he can be wheeled shyly out at her premieres, like Hugh Grant at the end of Notting Hill. But I’m willing to accept it might be more complicated than that.

Ultimately, though, we should be more interested in what happened to the courage, moral and otherwise, of those who continue to regard the decor of their baby’s nursery or whatever as a bigger story than persistent allegations of Andrew’s relationship with Epstein, which has been very far from satisfactorily resolved.

Alas, there does come a point where we have to consider what kind of hive mind reckons the one story is so much more worthwhile than the other, despite the obvious misery of Harry and Meghan and the enduring misery of the likes of Roberts Giuffre. As part of this column’s tireless – tireless! – commitment to public service journalism, this feels like the time to psychologically profile the most dedicated and virulent Meghan-haters, who somehow haven’t a word to say about Prince Andrew’s extensive links to a massive, raging, paedophile sex-case. To wit: GUYS, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? DON’T LOOK THERE! LOOK OVER HERE INSTEAD!

Listen, no one’s saying that you’re a paedo if you have spent at least 30 times more broadcast energy/column inches on condemning Meghan for such things as etiquette infractions in the royal box at Wimbledon than you have on Prince Andrew being repeatedly linked to a huge international underage sex-trafficking scandal involving his deceased close friend Jeffrey Epstein (denied, as above).

Or wait – am I saying that? Of course not! Well, pretty sure. But seriously: if that’s you, you DO have a problem. And you DO have to go on a kind of register that I am compiling, with the working title “The Meghan Offenders Register”. Don’t worry, I’ll sign it for you. At present, you don’t have to go door-to-door in your neighbourhood and tell people who you are. Namely, a person who has tipped all over a new mother for relatively minuscule things, while not really thinking Prince Andrew being accused of being embroiled in something so much bigger is worth your time/word count.

As I say: at present, you don’t have to go house-to-house. Ultimately, though, we kind of know what you are. And that thing is pretty hideous. Something has gone very badly wrong. And listen, I’m a liberal. If it were up to me, society would set aside a lot more money for research into how people like you get to be people like you. You could then be helped via state-of-the-art treatment programmes, because, in a lot of ways, it is a mental deficiency. Unfortunately, people are so grossed out and incensed by how you are that they don’t want to rationally deal with the problem, put money into it and begin the difficult work of trying to fix you for the greater good. So, yeah, it’s a cycle. Others will offend because of you.

In conclusion, then, what follows can only be a cut-price care plan. But here goes: every time you hear Virginia Roberts Giuffre, now a mother of three herself, telling her story, but decide there’s something about it that makes her not worth listening to … please try to chemically castrate those thoughts. Please don’t act on your perverse urges to attack Meghan and Harry instead for things that just aren’t that big of a deal. And once more, please, in the name of basic decency: DON’T LOOK THERE! LOOK OVER HERE INSTEAD!