VINE: What motivated Sarah Ferguson to take daughters to see Epstein?

The latest and final cache of Epstein files is a tableau of horrors, ranging from Peter Mandelson in his pants to an astonishing picture of the creep formerly known as Prince Andrew on all fours kneeling over a prone young woman, a hungry, glazed expression on his face.

Meanwhile, the list of names around whom now hangs a distinct whiff of what Mandelson calls Epstein’s ‘dog muck’ reads like a Who’s Who of the past three decades.

Even heavily redacted, the emails, testimonies and photos paint a picture of depravity that most people would find hard to comprehend, of an elite so insulated by money and status they clearly believed nothing and no one could ever touch them. But also, by that same token, that no one would ever believe their victims.

For a while, they succeeded. For years all attempts to expose the full extent of what was going on were written off as mad conspiracy theories, their accusers framed as fantasists and gold-diggers, journalists and investigators intimidated and blocked by highly-paid lawyers.

Attempts to discredit Andrew were the work of anti-British republican factions, desperate to tear down the monarchy; questions around Epstein’s links with men such as Trump and Bill Gates and Bill Clinton were likewise orchestrated by their enemies. It was all a fabrication, nothing to see here.

There is so much that is unconscionable about it all, each new revelation more shocking than the last. But the bit that I find hardest to fathom is Sarah Ferguson’s involvement – and specifically her mystifying decision to introduce her (at the time) young daughters into Epstein’s orbit.

I used to sympathise with her, believing she was more sinned against than sinning, a cack-handed but essentially harmless, warm-hearted individual who was just trying to navigate the ups and downs of life in the spotlight.

But now I see what a fool I was. Maybe even a useful idiot, since I have more than once come to her defence, both in private and in print.

Now that the full picture has emerged, we see that she’s far from harmless. Because even assuming Ferguson (I can no longer bear to refer to her as ‘Fergie’, it’s far too jolly a moniker for someone who has turned out to be so toxic) did not know the full extent of his depravity, she knew full well that he had served time for soliciting a child for prostitution.

And yet not only did she take her daughters to visit the convicted paedophile at his Palm Beach mansion just five days after he had been released from jail in July 2009 (a fact first revealed last October by The Mail on Sunday), it now transpires that she later discussed Eugenie’s (her youngest) sex life with him in the crudest and most flippant of terms.

‘Just waiting for Eugenie to come back from a sha**ing weekend!!’ she wrote to Epstein in 2010. What a deeply odd thing for a mother to say about their child. Deeply odd, and deeply inappropriate.

Why would you say something like that to a man with a conviction for sex trafficking? Knowing Epstein’s predilections, most mothers of young daughters – Eugenie would have been just 19 in 2009 – would have kept a careful distance.

And yet Ferguson does the exact opposite: not only does she personally deliver her girls to the lion’s den, arguably putting them in harm’s way, but she also sexualizes Eugenie in a way that is unforgivable. And, let’s be honest, really quite creepy.

What’s she trying to say with that comment? Why wouldn’t she just say, ‘she’s away at the moment’? Why bring sex into it? Was she trying to titillate? Or was she just being spectacularly tasteless?

Who knows. Over the years Ferguson has shown such a spectacular lack of self-knowledge it’s possible she simply thought she was being funny. She herself would probably say it was just a throwaway remark, meaningless and harmless. But that’s part of the problem: Ferguson has never understood the concept of boundaries. She has never known when to stop, whether it’s in her pursuit of the good life or her desire for money. She has no taste, no decency and no self-control.

What kind of woman acts this way? My daughter is 22, roughly the same age the Princesses would have been at the time, and although she generally has her wits about her, I would never dream of knowingly thrusting her into the orbit of someone like Epstein. What parent would?

The answer, perhaps, is one blinded by her own greed and desperation. A few months after their visit, she sends Epstein a panicked email.

‘I urgently need 20,000 pounds ($27,521) for rent today. The landlord has threatened to go to the newspapers if I don’t pay. Any brainwaves?’ Elsewhere, there are legal letters about arrangements for paying off her creditors, and Epstein himself claimed he helped her out financially for the best part of 15 years. Was there no part of her that worried about her girls being compromised if any of this ever came out?

As for Andrew himself, their father, where was he in all this? I think we can all safely conclude by now that he DEFINITELY knew what kind of man Epstein was. The job of a father is to protect their daughters from men like him, not parade them in front of him, as he did at Beatrice’s 18th.

For the girls themselves, these latest revelations must be very hard to take. It’s bad enough that their father has been so irreparably compromised; now their mother has been too.

I don’t know them at all and have no idea what kind of people they are; but you would need a heart of stone not to feel desperately sorry for them both, especially since they have children of their own.

It’s not exactly one for the family photo album, is it? ‘Here’s a picture of grandpa looming vampirically over some young girl’, or ‘Here’s granny’s friend Jeffrey with his mate Harvey Weinstein and a lady called Ghislaine, both of whom are in jail, at your aunt Beatrice’s birthday party’.

Or at Christmas, after a few sherries; ‘Go on, gran, tell us the one about when you asked grandpa’s friend Jeffrey to marry you because he was such a “legend” only for him to turn out to be a paedophile slash sex trafficker slash Russian spy.’

Given everything, it would be a miracle if both Beatrice and Eugenie didn’t need years of therapy to come to terms with the reality of their parents’ depravity. It makes the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s long list of grievances seem trivial by comparison.

As for the notion – heavily promoted by her few remaining supporters – that Ferguson is just a victim of her own naivety, just a slightly bumbling Sloane Ranger who mistook Epstein’s intentions and had no idea who or what he really was, I’m afraid that doesn’t alter the fact that she failed utterly in her ultimate duty as a mother, which was to protect her own girls from the repercussions of her dance with the devil that was Epstein.