In defence of Andrew: Shame on everybody who has made this unhappy ex-prince’s life such a distress. This is why he is not the evil man so many paint him to be – as my very private expertise with him reveals, writes OLIVIA FANE

Last December, police revoked Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s firearms licence and made sure his large collection of guns were kept under lock and key. He was still allowed to shoot with friends – he just couldn’t be trusted alone.

My immediate reaction was to think that someone close to the disgraced ex-duke must have called the police to warn them that Andrew was contemplating suicide.

It’s tragic, really. I will put my head above the parapet and say that I don’t think it’s fair that Andrew has been so villainised. In fact, I say shame on everyone who has made his life such a misery in recent times.

Why, you might ask? Andrew and I were born in the same year – 1960. I lived nearby and we had friends in common. I was always eager to meet him, but on the only occasion I did – at a picnic on Ascot Racecourse – he was so shy and grim he couldn’t even meet my eye.

Yet from that brief meeting, I learnt this about him: he loathed being a prince. He hated the fact that every time he so much as blinked it was in the newspapers, and as next in line to the throne after Charles, he had nightmares of his big brother dying in an aeroplane crash and him having to be king.

At the time, the Press regularly referred to him as ‘Randy Andy’ due to his reputation as a womaniser and playboy – and I could see how miserable it made him.

In my girlish, romantic way, I even dreamt of rescuing the wretched prince.

Even now, I am writing this, half a century later, in the hope that I can raise a smidgeon of sympathy for the poor blighter.

Yes, the allegations made by the late Virginia Giuffre against the former prince are deeply troubling. If, as she claimed, she was forced, aged 17, into sex with a 41-year-old stranger, it is a terrible tragedy.

But, time and time again, Andrew has proclaimed his innocence. 

I’m sure he feels he has done nothing wrong, even if he did sleep with her. 

In her memoir, Giuffre described Andrew as ‘friendly enough but entitled’ – ‘as if he believed having sex with [her] was his birthright.’

That’s because he did believe it was his birthright: while the modern royals have done all they can to involve themselves in the traumas and cares of everyday folk, Andrew has remained steadfastly in the royal bubble. 

He grew up in a hedonistic age where older men frequently took much younger women to bed – without anyone batting an eyelid.

He therefore remains utterly oblivious to modern mores. 

It would not have occurred to him that he shouldn’t be cavorting with inappropriately aged girls (although never underaged as we would so love to think). 

In fact, once upon a time, that was the prerogative of princes. Young royals frequently behaved badly and, what’s more, society gave them permission to do so.

This was the world my own grandparents inhabited: enjoying long seasons in friends’ country houses, accompanied by their own servants, and, according to my father, enjoying a good deal of bed-hopping.

After the first few years of a marriage – once the legitimate heirs and spares of a title had been safely born – husbands and wives were offered separate bedrooms. 

My father derided Downton Abbey for ignoring these unpalatable truths. The important thing, he told me, was never to get caught. ‘If you did, you became a social pariah.’ Hypocrisy, in other words, was built into the script.

The mistresses of Edward VII are legendary. Andrew and I would both have been gripped by the TV drama series Edward The Seventh in the 1970s, which dramatised his affair with Lillie Langtry when he was the Prince of Wales – which he enjoyed with impunity.

In fact, so normal did I think it for princes to be sexually promiscuous, that when Princess Diana complained about there being ‘three’ in her marriage, I seriously wondered what she had expected. 

Did nobody warn her? My father was very much on Charles’s side.

Andrew obviously felt the same about this mega-perk of being a prince. His sexual appetite is indeed legendary. So is his extravagance, his sense of entitlement, his obtuseness. But Andrew is a human being, he is not evil.

I’ve often wondered about Andrew’s friends. Does he actually have any? Why did they not know and love him enough to persuade him not to be interviewed by Emily Maitlis ahead of that doomed 2019 Newsnight interview. 

I still haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it.

I cringed when I subsequently heard that, in the interview, he kept referring to Jeffrey Epstein as his ‘friend’. It’s so sad to imagine that this odious paedophile had tricked Andrew into thinking they were somehow buddies.

Perhaps Andrew was bored of the deference shown to him by everyone else. 

Perhaps he did eventually get sick of all that curtseying and palaver. 

Perhaps Epstein was the only one to meet him eye-to-eye with charm and flattery and even called him ‘bro’.

But I doubt they were ever friends, not even for a day, it seems to me. 

Andrew was as much Epstein’s victim as every other sucker. Epstein was only interested in his credentials as a prince – predicting that a friend in the British royal family might come in useful one day. 

All they had in common was a penchant for young girls.

Epstein’s list of party guests is notorious; who else will be brought low before the decade is out? I can imagine a time that inclusion on such a list for the rich and powerful held almost as much cache as owning a superyacht.

Yet it’s always Andrew that everyone points its fingers at and stick pins into. 

Hey, why didn’t Andrew check the age of the girls he was making out with? Did he forget to ask for their identity cards at the party? I’m sure, at that time, no one else was doing so.

Then again, Andrew always claims the girls he consorted with were willing. And why wouldn’t he have thought that? 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, while men are transfixed by a beautiful body, women go weak at the knees before power and wealth.

Andrew has lived the saddest life, a cartoon of a life. He was right to be miserable as a teenager: the prince’s role was thrust upon him, whether he liked it or not. Never for a moment has he been allowed to live a genuine existence.

For that privilege – which is surely the one true privilege in this life – one has to remain private and unobserved.

Yet we continue to pick on this weak, pathetic man, whose every photo shows him crumbling under the pressure of losing everything – even his home at Royal Lodge – and every person who has ever mattered to him.

What kind of people are we to delight in hounding him? We can spend millions of pounds and hundreds of hours in Parliament to make sure we don’t treat foxes as though they were wild, savage animals.

But princes and ex-princes? Tally-ho! Tally-ho! We’re on your trail.