In Britain, Prince Andrew has come to symbolise sybaritic upper class excess, but in the oil states of the Gulf he is most notorious for whitewashing one of the cruellest and most dictatorial regimes in the region.

The torrent of negative publicity engulfing Prince Andrew has focused primarily on his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and his relationship with Virginia Giuffre. But his role in befriending and giving respectability over more than 20 years to the monarchy in Bahrain – despite its horrific record of torturing and imprisoning pro-democracy dissidents – is almost as morally culpable, though in an entirely different way, than anything he did in Epstein’s palatial residences in New York, Miami and the Caribbean.

Toxicity and buffoonery

I first became fully aware of Prince Andre

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