ANDREW'S LONG SHADOW

The princes sordid past has made it unlikely that his daughters will be willing or able to become working royals

- NICI DE WET

MUCH has been said about how close he is to his daughters, how they’ll stand by him no matter what, how they’ve been his pillars throughout all the drama and disaster.

There’s also been talk about how Prince Andrew is keen for his girls to enter the ranks of working royals and help bolster a family reeling from the cancer diagnoses of two of its biggest stars.

But those in the know say that’s unlikely to happen – not because Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie would be bad at the job. By all accounts the sisters are well liked and respected within The Firm and everyone has a lot of time for them.

But there’s one big thing standing in their way, if indeed they did ever want a more public role: their father. Andrew is a liability to the royal family and the princesses, no matter how popular they may be, will always be his daughters.

And the shadow that Andrew will never escape is following his children too – his eldest in particular.

This much was thrust front and centre by the recent release of Scoop, a Netflix movie that dwells on the duke’s greatest moment of public humiliation: the BBC’s Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis, where Andrew makes a royal fool of himself.

His tone-deaf replies to Maitlis’ questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

His insistence that he doesn’t sweat so he couldn’t be the sweaty guy Virginia Giuffre – his biggest accuser – danced with.

His assurance he didn’t have sex with a teenage girl at the London home of Epstein’s right-hand woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, because he’d gone straight home after fetching Beatrice from a party at Pizza Express.