A.N. WILSON: If the Queen has been forced to pay Andrew’s bills, it will turn into a disaster

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Having previously denied, until recently, any memory of even meeting Virginia Roberts, Prince Andrew has agreed to pay an undisclosed quantity of megabucks to his accuser.

Of course, the cash settlement is not an admission of guilt. Maybe the foolish Andrew really meant it when he maintained, until only a short while ago and in defiance of the laws of common sense, that he wanted his day in court.

But whatever the case, if anyone in Buckingham Palace had dared to hope that the whole ugly matter could now be forgotten, they have made a catastrophic mistake.

Be in no doubt: This fiasco is the worst scandal by far to have engulfed the Royal Family since the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936. It makes ‘Megxit’ look like a cup of tea spilt at a Palace garden party.

Nor can we comfort ourselves with the thought that at least every senior member of the Royal Family displays impeccable judgment.

Only yesterday, Michael Fawcett, Prince Charles’s closest aide, found himself once again at the centre of allegations that he had offered honours to the billionaire Saudi ‘businessman’ Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz.

Scotland Yard is now investigating claims linked to the Prince’s Foundation. Charles denies any knowledge of the alleged offer of honours or British citizenship on the basis of donations to his charities. That may be so, but quite apart from Andrew’s misdemeanours, this is not just bad PR. It is the sort of damaging story that – as the country inevitably contemplates what the succession might look like – could fatally erode trust in Charles’s affiliations, and by extension, his very kingship.

Andrew’s own crisis began as a sex scandal. Now it is a money scandal. And in some ways, that is much worse.

Why? Because however tragic Miss Roberts’s experiences at the hands of the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein were – and I have no doubt they were too appalling for words – the question of who ultimately paid to buy the silence of this alleged rape victim cuts to the heart of the monarchy.

We, the taxpayers, do not merely feel some idle curiosity about this. No, we have the duty to demand an answer to the question: Where did the money – reported in some quarters as up to £12 million – come from?

How did Andrew, on his tiny Navy pension and his £250,000 stipend from the Queen, find the fortune to settle out of court?

However that question is eventually answered, it will prove a PR disaster not only for Andrew – who surely deserves the opprobrium –but for the entire Royal Family.

The money can have come from only one of three sources, or a combination of them.

First, the millions came from the Queen’s ‘private’ fortune.

If so, the Sovereign may have effectively financed what the respected former chief crown prosecutor Nazir Afzal suggested was ‘blood money’.

Let us be very clear about this: If the Queen is seen to have paid Andrew’s bills to help to silence an underage rape victim, it would be the most appalling public scandal.

It is the taint of association with her ghastly younger son that the 95-year-old monarch really does not need in this, her Jubilee year.

The Queen and her Palace courtiers have so far masterfully managed to distance her from her second son.

But if it emerged that the monarch had paid off Miss Roberts, she would be drawn, however unwillingly, into the sordid orbit of Epstein and his revolting jailbird ex-madam Ghislaine Maxwell (a pair whom Andrew saw fit to invite to his own daughter’s 18th birthday party). That is almost too awful to contemplate.

The second potential source of the money used to fund Andrew’s settlement would be the sale of his vulgar Swiss chalet and perhaps of his ranch-style Sunninghill Park, a hideous building in the Stockbroker Belt, for which a contact of his paid way over the odds, and which was promptly demolished.

No doubt this is what the Prince would like us to believe: That he has pluckily realised his assets and sold all to pay for the lawyers out of his own pocket.

But that, too, does not exempt him from some searching questions. We remember, for example, that in 2007 he sold Sunninghill to a Kazakh oligarch named Timur Kulibayev – curiously, for about £3million more than its market value.

Perhaps the sale of the Swiss chalet won’t turn out to have been a transaction as pure as the snow on Verbier’s pistes.

And how was the chalet financed in the first place?

The third possible source of Andrew’s money, however, is what most concerns us.

And the reason for that should be obvious: Because we would be the source, as taxpayers. In 2020, the Sovereign Grant cost the tax- payer almost £70million – more than double the £32million it cost in 2012.

But that is just one aspect: The Queen’s income from the Duchy of Lancaster (some £25million per year) and Prince Charles’s from the Duchy of Cornwall go directly to the two of them.

This is despite the fact that as Dame Margaret Hodge MP, the former chairman of Parliament’s financial watchdog committee, said: ‘To allege that [the Duchy of Lancaster] is [the Queen’s] private estate is a little bit disingenuous.’

Have these funds been used to help Andrew along with his legal worries? If so, directly or indirectly, we have been paying his legal defence. And we do not take kindly to the thought of paying rottweiler lawyers to shovel hush money at alleged victims of child sex-trafficking – or despicably calling them ‘money-hungry sex kittens’, as Andrew’s overpriced attorneys described Miss Roberts.

Remember, Andrew has form in offering terrible value for money, even by the desperate standards of second-tier royals such as him.

Far too frequently during his unlamented time as this country’s ‘special envoy for business’, eyebrows were raised in the Diplomatic Service as Andrew – described by one Gulf diplomat as a ‘buffoon’ – would turn up in a taxpayer-funded jet with his entourage of long-suffering staff.

This might have included, for example, the valet with an ironing board that had to be carried everywhere, because the Duke of York did not like other people’s iron- ing boards, the maid who was expected to arrange his cuddly toys in just the right order around his bed, or the footman who had to serve his mineral water at room temperature.

Most of this nonsense, ultimately, was paid for by us – as has most of Andrew’s life to date.

It is a measure of how much the British people revere the Queen that they have been prepared to overlook the oafish bad manners of Andrew and the vulgarity of his extravagant ex-wife.

I believe that Andrew’s gargantuan payment to Miss Roberts will be the moment that the country at last rethinks its financial relationship with the royals. How could we do otherwise?

This money cannot, can never, be overlooked. We have moved away from worrying whether or not he sweats, whether he ate pizzas in Woking with his children, or danced the night away with someone scarcely older than his daughters.

We are no longer even asking whether his story or Virginia’s is true. We ask instead: Who bought Virginia’s silence?

And until the answer is forthcoming, we will continue to ask the vital question: Is the cost of Andrew’s legal scrapes and latest splurge of millions – like his extravagant lifestyle, his chalets, his jets, his dodgy friends in America – being borne not by Andrew himself, but at least in large part by the British taxpayer?

If that is true, this out-of-court settlement has delivered a blow to the reputation of the monarchy which is every bit as damaging as the story of what this unpleasant man did or did not do, decades ago, to a luckless 17-year-old girl.