RICHARD KAY: King Charles promised the Queen that he would look after Prince Andrew, but is he now regretting last week’s show of unity at Sandringham?

With the benefit of hindsight would the King have agreed to include Prince Andrew in the Royal Family’s Christmas parade at Sandringham?

At the time this fraternal decision seemed a typically Christian one from Charles. Ten days later as toxic new revelations about the Duke of York’s sleazy behaviour emerge from unsealed court documents in New York, the gesture seems not just astounding but possibly unwise.

What is all the more baffling is that the royals cannot hide behind the suggestion that they did not know quite how bad the allegations were going to be. The prospect of more sensational claims from the long fall-out from the unsavoury Jeffrey Epstein affair coming to light, had been telegraphed for weeks.

Andrew himself had been braced for a fresh round of claims for some time and although outwardly bullish in the face of the accusations which include groping a young woman’s breast and taking part in an underage orgy, he has been crushed by the never-ending stories. As one friend of the Duke said: ‘These are not new and are, as they have been in the past, emphatically denied.’

Perhaps the more damaging aspect of the latest disclosures is the growing realisation that Andrew, 64 next month, will never escape the tentacles of this grubby saga. And while his own lingering hopes of rehabilitating his public reputation are surely finally over, the issue for the royals is one of containment.

By embracing Andrew as they so overtly did last week, there was always a risk that it could backfire.

Friends of the King insist he did not invite his brother to the public element of the Sandringham festivities — the walk to church for the Christmas service — blindly. ‘It would have been easier to have asked him to stay away,’ said one. ‘But if the message of Christmas is anything, it is about family and togetherness. That’s also why he extended the invitation to Fergie as well.’

Another figure says that Charles may have been encouraged to act as he did precisely because he knew what was coming and wanted to throw a protective arm around his brother.

‘He has seen for himself the diminishing effect the allegations have had on the Duke over the years, what they have done to his personality and his confidence,’ the figure said. ‘He is not going to banish his brother; he feels a responsibility for him.’

It was this concern for his mental wellbeing and how tormented he has been that encouraged the King to include Fergie as a thank-you for standing by Andrew.

It is also understood that Charles had assured the late Queen that he would look after Andrew.

According to one insider it was because of his affection for his brother that the King ventured the idea that he might want to move from Royal Lodge, his vast mansion at Windsor with its costly upkeep, into something smaller and more manageable. ‘He thought it might give him something less to worry about,’ the insider said.

Stubbornly Andrew refused. But it has become a touch stone issue — and one, which the Mail reveals today, the King is determined to solve.

Grand Royal Lodge, once a monarch’s home, with its 30 rooms and 98 acres has come to be seen as the apogee of the crisis engulfing the Royal Family. Courtiers were always uncomfortable that a property with such an impressive lineage should be occupied by a figure disgraced in public eyes, but family members were more supportive. Besides, simply evicting Andrew has not been straightforward.

‘Forcing the Duke to give it up, however well-intentioned, would be seen as the King punishing his brother for something he insists he is innocent of,’ says a friend of Andrew. ‘And anyway he has a lease.’

All the same it is undoubtedly part of the ‘Andrew problem’.

So where on earth does Andrew go from here? Even before yesterday’s claims, and with no prospect of ever returning to official duties that involve any kind of public role, his image was already in the gutter.

It is also hard to see what further sanctions could be taken by the royals against the Prince. He has already lost his private office, his cherished military titles and does not use his HRH style.

It is four long years since he last carried out official formal duties and it is highly unlikely that he will ever again climb into the ermine trimmed robes of a Garter Knight or appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

For decades the Prince loftily appeared to observe that his royal birth had earned him the right to a life of entitlement.

The tragedy of it is that he could have been a life-long royal hero. During the Falklands War he piloted a helicopter with great courage as a decoy to lure Argentine Exocet missiles away from the British fleet. When he came home and jumped ashore with a rose clamped between his teeth his status seemed assured.

But when the Navy career — along with his marriage — ended he slid into another kind of life, one where money and shady businessmen dominated. His ten years as the UK’s special representative for trade and industry which also ended amid questionable allegations, was just the beginning.

Diplomats noticed that he was using the role as a means of ‘ploughing his own furrow’. As one former envoy once said , everyone was ‘reluctant to point this out for fear of putting their own careers on the line’.

There were also questions about how much he might have pocketed from his Dragons’-Den style charity for young entrepreneurs Pitch@Palace with which he is still involved and through which he reportedly sees a possible route back to public life.

As for Andrew’s personal diplomacy, even WikiLeaks revealed that a U.S. ambassador described the Prince in his trade role as ‘cocky’ and ‘rude’.

But it was the company Andrew kept that was the most troubling aspect of his decade as an unpaid ambassador for Britain. His friendship with the family of the murderous Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi strayed well over the official line expected at a time when the aged dictator was forming alliances with the West.

One of his new friends at this time was Saif, Gaddafi’s son, who was studying and being honoured with a phony degree at the London School of Economics.

‘He and Saif became incredibly close,’ recalled a mutual friend. ‘They had fun together. Andrew could open doors with his royal status and Saif could open other doors with his family’s money.’

On his many trips to Libya and on visits to other capitals and states around the world, the Duke never let his royal status drop. He travelled with a team of six, including equerries, private secretaries and protection officers, as well as a valet bringing his own 6ft-long ironing board to ensure the Prince’s trousers were pressed as he liked.

But the real catastrophe was his ill-judged friendship with Epstein who killed himself while in custody awaiting trial on federal charges of sex trafficking four years ago.

If Andrew hoped settling his multi-million-dollar civil case with Epstein’s former ‘sex slave’ Virginia Giuffre two years ago (with money provided by the late Queen) would bring the sordid saga to an end, he has been cruelly disappointed.

As well as being accused of ‘acts of sexual abuse’, documents released in New York on Wednesday night claimed Andrew called Epstein weekly and jetted to his private Caribbean retreat, nicknamed the ‘Island of Sin’.

The danger for him now is that another woman could make specific allegations against him and want her day in court, like Guiffre, or a pay off as well.

The documents, the first of a tranche to be unsealed on the order of Judge Loretta Preska, were gathered for Giuffre’s 2015 defamation case against Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. The socialite introduced Andrew to the financier, and is serving 20 years in a U.S. jail for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors.

In one witness statement, Johanna Sjoberg claimed Andrew groped her at Epstein’s house in New York in 2001 when she was aged 20, with Maxwell and Giuffre also present. Her statement, previously partly released, alleges Maxwell had shown them a puppet of Andrew. ‘And they decided to take a picture with it, in which Virginia and Andrew sat on a couch. They put the puppet on Virginia’s lap and I sat on Andrew’s lap, and they put the puppet’s hand on Virginia’s breast, and Andrew put his hand on my breast, and they took a photo,’ Sjoberg’s deposition said.

Questioned about the seating arrangements, she said: ‘Whether we were on a couch or a chair, I just remember the boobs part, the hand on the boobs.’

Buckingham Palace previously said her allegations were ‘categorically untrue’.

Another filing regarding a woman referred to Jane Doe No 3, which is believed to be Giuffre, alleges she was ‘forced to have sexual relations with this Prince when she was a minor in three separate geographical locations: in London (at Maxwell’s home), in New York, and on Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands (in an orgy with numerous other underage girls)’. Epstein instructed her to ‘give the Prince whatever he demanded and required Jane Doe No 3 to report back to him on the details of the sexual abuse’.

Giuffre has alleged she was trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell and forced to have sexual intercourse at these same three locations with Andrew when aged 17, which is underage in the U.S., claims which Andrew has categorically denied.

Friends of Andrew rallied to his support last night. They rebutted suggestions that he was in denial about his relationship with Epstein. ‘Quite the reverse, he has been tormented by it,’ says one close figure.

Of the latest allegations a friend of the Duke told me: ‘What they underline is the breadth and depth of Epstein’s relationships with the American establishment, which serves to illustrate the view that many have held: Andrew has always been a useful distraction for those Epstein associates who have rather more to explain.’