It is a photo that has been reproduced countless times around the world – and rightly so. Prince Andrew grins proudly as he clutches 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre’s bare waist in a Belgravia mews house. Ghislaine Maxwell, owner of the property, smirks at their side.

When Virginia, by then a mother of three, gave The Mail on Sunday permission to first publish that picture in February 2011, she believed it would shock the British authorities into investigating the ties between Andrew and paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein had employed her as a ‘sex slave’ in the prostitution ring that he ran with Maxwell, she told me. He had paid her for providing services that night to the 41-year-old prince, including sex in a bathtub. ‘It was made clear to me that my job was to do whatever pleased him,’ she later told me.

I’d been on the case of Andrew and his links to Epstein for some time – and news of my enquiries had already reached the financier, as the trove of documents released by the US Department of Justice makes clear.

Buried among them is this email conversation from February 25, 2011:

Epstein: ‘The reporter Churcher is calling around in new york now.’

Andrew: ‘No worries!’

Epstein: ‘Terribly sorry, I would have hoped this would have gone away.’

Andrew: ‘The MoS are the one paper here everyone least likes and is just gratuitously trying it on… Not bothered any further about it but will keep watch. A.’

Epstein’s antennae were twitching, yet Andrew seemed positively blasé – with good reason. For, if Virginia assumed the British authorities would respond to her bravery by addressing Andrew’s behaviour, she was wrong.

While the FBI interviewed Virginia in Australia, where she lived, in Britain her claims were all but dismissed. In 2015, a police spokesman said: ‘Officers assessed all available evidence at the time… This did not result in any allegation of criminal conduct against any UK-based nationals.’ And that, so far as the Establishment was concerned, was that.

Andrew, of course, has strenuously denied all wrongdoing from the outset. Yet allegations about his continuing friendship with Epstein and his conduct as a trade envoy were piling up even by the time Virginia agreed to speak out.

The scale and scope of those concerns were made clear when, in March 2011, former Foreign Office minister Chris Bryant called for Andrew to be dismissed as trade envoy. Writing in the MoS, he pointed to a ‘catalogue of inappropriate connections… bringing not just Britain but the Royal Family into disrepute’.

These included friendships with Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi and other dictators, links with a Libyan gun smuggler and businessmen in the ‘Wild East’ of former Soviet states, notably Kazakhstan. 

Kazakh businessman Timur Kulibayev had bought Andrew’s house, Sunninghill in Ascot, for £3 million above the asking price – raising obvious questions about the possibility of money laundering. 

The following month, Andrew was obliged to distance himself from his banker friend David ‘Spotty’ Rowland – who had accompanied him on a secret visit to meet Gaddafi, and who’d been denounced as shady in the Commons.

Later that year, we reported that, while acting as trade envoy in the Far East, Andrew stayed in hotel suites advertised at up to £7,700 a night at the taxpayer’s expense.

He was forced to quit his role following our revelations, but ‘Air Miles Andy’ continued to enjoy the high life, representing the UK Government on official business. Bryant concluded that ‘Downing Street would not entertain anything that might possibly be interpreted as an attack on a member of the Royal Family.’

So, the matter was quietly dropped – with journalists left to do the job instead. The turning point came last autumn with the discovery of three devastating emails by the MoS. First we revealed that, in 2011, Andrew’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson had called Epstein her ‘supreme friend’, despite denouncing him in public as a paedophile.

Then we revealed that several months after Andrew claimed to have cut off contact with Epstein, he told the financier: ‘We are in this together and must rise above it… let’s play some more soon.’

That was followed by our revelation that Andrew had asked his police bodyguard to investigate Virginia in the hope that she might have a criminal record.

King Charles was finally forced to act. He booted Andrew out of his home and stripped him of all remaining titles. And today, from the Epstein Files, we know much, much more.

While the legal process must take its course, Virginia would have been pleased by Andrew’s arrest and the welcome light of scrutiny. But it came too late for her as she took her own life last April at the age of 41.

She once told me: ‘I’ve gone from pain, to hurt, to anger. Epstein was a monster. He and Andrew were shameless. They have no remorse.’