Prince Andrew encounter left my friend speechless - 'still can't quite believe it'

"Is Prince Andrew a bad man, a stupid one, or both?" I asked royal historian Andrew Lownie this week (Lownie wrote bestseller The Fall Of The House Of York, published earlier this year). "Oh, both," he replied simply. "He's a horrible bully too." Let me tell you my own Andrew story. It comes first-hand from a trusted friend and former colleague. I won't name him because he spoke to me in confidence, but once upon a time he was employed by Sarah Ferguson in a private capacity, which required him to visit her at Sunninghill Park, the home she and Andrew shared at the time.

This was long before Andrew's friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was public knowledge, and the Prince's reputation was relatively undamaged. But within a few minutes of my friend's arrival at Sunninghill Andrew walked into the room my friend was chatting in with Sarah. "He started addressing me in easily the most offhand, contemptuous way I have EVER been spoken to," my friend told me a few days later.

"Gratuitously rude doesn't begin to cover it. It came completely out of nowhere. I was speechless. I was there basically doing the two of them a favour but he treated me worse than dirt.

"Fergie appeared completely unfazed, as if this was completely normal behaviour. It just went on and on, and eventually I just quietly gathered my things and walked out without a word. I still can't quite believe it."

The most revealing of this week's revelations were, for me, the emails that pinged between Andrew and Epstein MONTHS after the then-duke solemnly assured Newsnight's Emily Maitlis that he'd broken off all contact with the paedophile.

In fact, they conspired to blacken their accuser Virginia Giuffre's name, swapping her personal details (social security number, date of birth etc) and malicious gossip that she had a criminal record (she didn't).

Yet Andrew maintains he has absolutely no memory of her. What a liar. What a bully. A black prince indeed, but thankfully and assuredly now a black prince on borrowed time.