There is no news that has given me greater pleasure in recent months than the increasingly frequent bulletins charting the downfall of the Queen’s second son.

It began with the removal of his royal title in October, rendering Prince Andrew just plain Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The hyphen is vital – you may have missed this at the time because your mind was probably on higher things, but Andrew is said to have lobbied for at least having his new public moniker spelled without it. But no. In it went on – presumably – the orders of the King, which is exactly the kind of granular attention to the pursuit of a younger sibling’s misery that I, as a fellow older sibling, truly relish.

Also, y’know, as a subject and citizen fully behind heaping as many humiliations as possible on to anyone as firmly and unconcernedly enmeshed as Andrew apparently was in the web woven by Jeffrey Epstein. Thus my continued particular delight in King Charles’s decision not just to move his brother out of the 30-roomed Royal Lodge but to have redesigned the garden near his new place in Norfolk to include a maze and “healing plants”. This is the moneyed equivalent of a normal brother holding his finger an inch away from the other’s eye and proclaiming triumphantly over objections “But I’m not touching you!” and I am here for it.

And then last month Andrew was actually arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The former prince strongly denies any wrongdoing.

The UK has been the first to move tangibly, if even in the smallest way, against one of the many, many, many, many, rich entitled men whom we know to have been part of Epstein’s terrible circle and who are still living their lives mostly untouched. That gave me a faint but genuine sense of that rare, rare thing – patriotic pride. We, the UK, did something good and we did it first. We set a small example to others. Nice.

However. Andrew is one thing. And Fergie, his ex-wife, is probably a part of that thing to, although there is no suggestion of illegality in her behaviour. Their children, however, are not. Which makes the reported decision of King Charles and Prince William to effectively to ban them from attending Royal Ascot this year so that they are not photographed with any senior royals, I think, a very bad one.

You can understand the impulse, of course. Their parents have been associated with some really awful things, some really awful people and the evidence of how close that association was, yielded by the US Department of Justice’s release of millions of Epstein-related files, is mindblowing. You don’t want to be anywhere near it. It’s not just toxic to the royal brand, it’s viscerally upsetting at an individual level and Charles and William must feel it deeply.

But it’s a simple principle, isn’t it? You don’t visit the sins of the father (and/or the mother) upon the offspring. Especially when it often seems that the offspring were dragged into this.

Andrew, for example, invited Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell) to Beatrice’s 18th birthday celebrations – the private and the public – two months after the US issued a warrant for his arrest. And, it is believed that Sarah took her daughters along to lunch with Epstein in 2009 after he was released from prison.

By distancing themselves from the York family rather than distinguishing between the generations, the King and heir are pandering to the lowest common denominator amongst the people. They are doing the simplest, easiest thing and expecting only the simplest, easiest thing from the public.

What they should be doing is encouraging the slightly more difficult – but still eminently possible – reaction. They should be demonstrating rationality and generosity and thereby demanding it of us too. And it would be pushing at an open door.

Most people feel at least some sympathy for the two princesses. I think they were the first thought a lot of us had during Andrew’s spectacularly dreadful interview with Emily Maitlis on Newsnight. How could any child bear the embarrassment on this scale? The Pizza Express in Woking alibi. The inability to sweat because of an overdose of adrenalin during his service in the Falklands War. His “tendency to be too honourable” as the reason for staying in touch with Epstein after his conviction as a sex offender. And so, beyond cringemakingly, on.

Banning the pair from Ascot, ostracising the entire family – this is a cowardly reaction. If we’ve got to have them, I expect more from our figureheads. And they should expect more of us.

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