STEPHEN WRIGHT: Was there a cover-up to guard Prince Andrew?

It was the summer of 2020, and Prince Andrew was reeling from a series of scandals and own goals.

His BBC Newsnight interview about the Virginia Roberts affair had backfired spectacularly, forcing his resignation from royal duties, and he was involved in a bitter stand-off with a top US prosecutor who wanted to quiz him about his links to his erstwhile friend, the paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

Amid claims he was arrogant and out of touch, public opinion was very much against the Duke of York. How could he retrieve his public image, let alone clear his name, over the sordid – and hotly disputed – sex claims made by his accuser?

Then I received a call from one of his small, diminishing band of supporters. Someone in his inner circle who – rightly or wrongly – was utterly convinced of his innocence. In return for exclusive access to confidential documents, diaries, key figures and potential witnesses, would I be interested in investigating the veracity of allegations made by Miss Roberts, who’d claimed she had slept with Andrew when she was a teen? Something he has always strongly denied.

The loyalist was aware of my extensive work exposing the scandal of Scotland Yard’s VIP sex abuse inquiry, Operation Midland, which had helped to clear the names of Field Marshal Lord Bramall, ex-Home Secretary Leon Brittan, former PM Sir Edward Heath, and ex-Tory MP Harvey Proctor, who’d been the subject of the grotesque lies of Carl ‘Nick’ Beech.

Was the Queen’s second son also the victim of false allegations? Could he be compared to Lord Bramall, the D-Day war hero and ex-head of the Armed Forces, who was humiliated by the once fine Metropolitan Police, which stated publicly that the now-jailed serial fantasist and paedophile was a ‘credible and true’ witness?

My marathon series on the most disgraceful, cretinous police inquiry in living memory had underlined the importance of the presumption of innocence and testing the evidence. On this basis, I accepted the challenge of examining whether Andrew was the victim of false allegations. Had he, like Lord Bramall and co, been traduced?

The starting point of our four-month investigation was Emily Maitlis’s acclaimed BBC Newsnight interview with Andrew, which is the subject of a much-heralded three-part dramatisation, A Very Royal Scandal, which is released on Amazon Prime Video tomorrow. Co-produced by Maitlis, it stars Michael Sheen as the Duke and will no doubt renew public scrutiny of the case.

The car-crash interview in November 2019 caused Andrew enormous reputational damage.

The Prince said he did not recall meeting Miss Roberts, who now uses her married name Giuffre. On the occasion she said they first met in 2001 – when she claimed she was ‘trafficked’ to Britain by Epstein aged 17 – he claimed he had spent the day with his daughter Beatrice and taken her to a party at a Pizza Express in Woking, Surrey. He also questioned his accuser’s account of them dancing together at the London nightclub Tramp, when she alleged he was sweating heavily.

Infamously, the Duke said he had suffered from a medical condition at the time which meant he did not sweat. He also sought to cast doubt on the authenticity of a photograph that showed him with his arm around Miss Roberts’s waist, but conceded that it was difficult to prove whether it was a fake.

Andrew admitted he had ‘let the side down’ when he had failed to cut ties with Epstein immediately after the American was jailed in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a minor and registered as a sex offender.

Miss Roberts gave her own interview to Panorama in which she insisted the Prince was lying when he denied meeting her. She said that she had felt ‘ashamed and dirty’ after they had sex.

Far from helping the Duke, the Mail’s landmark four-part investigation in December 2020 arguably ended his career in public life.

During months of painstaking work, my senior colleague Richard Pendlebury and I obtained bombshell testimony from new witnesses, gained access to sensitive documents and the contents of diaries, and interviewed high-level sources. Our inquiries took us from London to New York, Boston, Florida, the US Virgin Islands, South Africa and Australia and resulted in revelations that cast doubts on some of the Duke’s claims of innocence, as well as undermining several of Miss Roberts’s allegations.

We revealed for the first time that the royal did stay at Epstein’s New York mansion during a trip when it is alleged he slept with Miss Roberts. Contradicting his lamentable TV interview, sources confirmed the Queen’s second son was indeed a guest at the paedophile tycoon’s Manhattan home in April 2001.

Andrew had told Ms Maitlis: ‘I wasn’t staying there. I may have visited but no, definitely didn’t… no, no, no activity.’

But our investigation discovered that both the Duke and a Scotland Yard bodyguard did spend a night at Epstein’s extensive townhouse. We also uncovered a gap of a few hours set aside in New York for what was called ‘Private Time’ in the Duke’s confidential tour itinerary.

We also exposed new doubts over the Prince’s extraordinary ‘alibi’ that he was at a party at Pizza Express on the day he had allegedly first slept with Miss Roberts in London a few weeks earlier. According to a family diary, the Duke had booked a manicure at home on the afternoon he said he dropped off Princess Beatrice at the party, and that neither she nor the party hosts could recall if he attended.

But our investigation also raised questions about the accuracy of Miss Roberts’s claims that she went clubbing in London with the Duke that evening, and her description of the bathtub where she said they later had sex. Our series also challenged the precision of her accounts of having sex with Andrew on Epstein’s so-called ‘Paedo Island’ on Little St James in the US Virgin Islands and at his ranch in New Mexico.

So, amid the claims and counter claims, who was telling the truth?

What can be said is that Andrew was humiliated after being forced to pay as much as £10 million to resolve Miss Roberts’s sexual abuse lawsuit against him.

In February 2022, it was announced the Duke had agreed to an out-of-court settlement with his accuser, which was agreed just weeks after she was given the go-ahead to sue Andrew for unspecified damages in a New York civil court.

Although the agreement contained no formal admission of liability from Andrew, or an apology, a statement said he now accepted Miss Roberts was a ‘victim of abuse’ and that he regretted his association with Epstein.

But that is not the end of the story.

More than two years after Andrew’s total capitulation, many questions remain unanswered about the scandal.

What were the exact terms of his compensation deal with Miss Roberts, was there a wider Establishment cover-up – as I suspect – to protect Andrew and other VIPs in thrall to Epstein, and what did Scotland Yard protection officers witness while accompanying the royal to his disgraced friend’s various properties?

In 2011, when I made the first of four trips to the US to investigate the scandal, I revealed credible claims that Andrew had attended naked pool parties at Epstein’s Florida mansion.

The extraordinary allegation was made by Epstein’s former handyman and butler, who said he met the Prince during three separate holidays at Epstein’s £4 million home in Palm Beach.

Juan Alessi, who spent 11 years working for Epstein, also told the Mail how the Prince enjoyed daily massages by young women (not underage) during his visits and how pictures of scantily clad females adorned the walls.

I remember thinking at the time, ‘This is no place for a senior royal to visit. What was he thinking?’

When I returned to Florida in 2015, after another twist in the Epstein story, I began investigating the grubby non-prosecution agreement that had allowed the paedophile to cheat justice over child sex charges in 2008.

At the time, a retired American detective who had close knowledge of the case warned me of the dangers of probing too hard into the story. He looked me in the eyes as he said I could be the target of a honeytrap plot to try to undermine me. Such were the evil powers at work protecting Epstein and his cohort of powerful friends.

It may read like something from a Hollywood script, but I did not doubt for one minute the ex-officer’s sincerity. He, too, had been previously targeted by private investigators working on behalf of Epstein.

It was on that trip that I became convinced that senior Buckingham Palace figures were concerned about the damage that the reporting on the Andrew scandal was causing the Royal Family.

One official allegedly said: ‘We don’t care about Andrew; this is about protecting the monarchy.’

It is perplexing that in a case so vast, where there was clearly organised sex trafficking involving scores of minors and young women, and other abusers, that only one person, fallen British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, is currently behind bars after being given a 20-year sentence for child abuse and sex trafficking in the service of her former boyfriend Epstein.

Having sat through weeks of the evidence at her trial in New York in 2021, and later interviewing one of the victims (who tragically died last year), I had no doubt that she was guilty and deserved to be sent to jail for a long time.

But my overriding feeling at the end of the trial was that Maxwell should not have been the only person to face justice. That others had got away with it. What about the drivers, pilots, domestic staff and young women who witnessed suspicious activity by Epstein and Maxwell, or actively recruited girls to be abused? What was found on all the computers and security videos seized from Epstein’s homes? There are so many unanswered questions, including why the US prosecutor’s request to interview Andrew back in 2020 was allowed to wither on the vine.

Epstein took his secrets to the grave when he died in a US prison in 2019, while another suspect in the child sex ring, Jean Luc Brunel, took his life while on remand in France in 2022.

And what of Andrew, once nicknamed ‘Air Miles Andy’ because of his fondness for overseas trips? Now 64, he rarely ventures far from his mansion, Royal Lodge in Windsor, and is reportedly in dispute with the King over paying for its upkeep and security. The future remains very uncertain for him, although because of his decision to pay off his sex accuser it is unlikely he will ever again face a grilling about the Virginia Roberts case. Certainly not an Emily Maitlis-style one.

After spending four months investigating Virginia Roberts’s allegations, it was impossible not to conclude in the end that the King’s brother was not, in my opinion, a victim of wild, Carl Beech-style allegations. He was the author of his own downfall and in no way could be likened to the late Lord Bramall, a man of real honour and integrity.