Prince Andrew could be handed coup de grâce from beyond the grave within days

If you think Prince Andrew has had a terrible week - another one, and possibly the most damaging yet - set your iPhone alert for next Tuesday. That's the day his nemesis, the late Virginia Giuffre, may well deliver the coup de grâce from beyond the grave. October 21 is publication day for Giuffre's posthumous memoirs, Nobody's Girl, completed shortly before she took her own life in April this year. From the leaks so far, it's explosive stuff. Giuffre was of course paedophile Jeffrey Epstein's most prominent accuser. Her allegations against Prince Andrew, to whom she consistently said she had been sex-trafficked when she was 17, destroyed his reputation and terminated his royal role.

She sued the duke for sexual assault but reached an out-of-court settlement with him in 2022. Estimates vary but it has been widely reported he paid her 10 million dollars to avoid a potentially damaging public trial. He made no admission of liability and continues to deny even knowing Giuffre, protesting that the infamous photograph of them together may well be a fake.

That claim looked shakier than ever last weekend with the emergence of an email Andrew sent to Epstein on February 28, 2011, the day after the incriminating photo was published in the Mail on Sunday.

The prince made no direct reference to it - there was no "who's that girl?" or "what's going on?" The message read: "I'm just as concerned for you! Don't worry about me! It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it. Otherwise keep in touch and we'll play some more soon!!!!"

"Play some more soon"? I doubt Andrew was referring to hide-and-seek or Monopoly. Those four sly, knowing exclamation marks are deeply creepy. Remember, Epstein had only recently been released from prison after being jailed for serious sex offences. Yet here was the Duke of York telling him they were "in this together". In what, precisely?

That email also reveals Andrew as a brazen liar. In his car-crash 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis, he insisted he'd broken off all contact with Epstein after the pair were photographed walking together in New York's Central Park in December 2010. The damning email was sent three months later - and as we can see, referred to plans for continuing personal contact.

Nobody's Girl runs to 400 pages. Its publisher, a division of Penguin Random House, says the memoirs share "intimate, disturbing, and heartbreaking new details about [Giuffre's] time with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their many well-known friends, including Prince Andrew." (The italics are mine).

So far those details suggest Andrew had a "thing" for Giuffre's feet, and, according to her, "felt having sex with me was his birth- right". More revelations are expected Tuesday. Maybe the duke should consider taking a flight to a distant sanctuary this weekend. A dress rehearsal for permanent exile, perhaps.

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"I was smacked as a kid and it never did me any harm." That was the commonest tweet or email to us on Good Morning Britain this week when we debated yet another move to outlaw physically chastising children in England (it's already banned in Wales and Scotland).

Well I'm going to go against that flow. I was smacked - and caned - as a boy, and it DID do me harm. I don't think my father (for it was he) hit me any more often or any harder than my friends' dads did, but BOY did I resent it.

It ignited a smouldering anger in me that I feel to this day. I didn't respect my father any more for it; quite the opposite.

I loved him, but being hit permanently impaired our relationship, though he never knew that. (He died suddenly at 49, before I could tell him).

I swore I'd never strike my own children, and I never, ever did. And you know what? That never did them any harm, either.

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My grandfather hated Dad's Army. He'd fought in the First World War trenches (and lost part of a foot and the hearing in one ear) so was too injured and too old for active duty two decades later for the Second World War.

But he joined his local Home Guard in Shropshire. And after watching the first episode of Dad's Army in 1968, he never watched another.

"We were nothing like that bunch of bumbling idiots," he told me. "We knew what we were doing. Most of us had been in France 20-odd years earlier. We knew how to fight. And how to die."

Grandad was gathered to his fathers years ago, but he would have been quietly satisfied to see this week a collection of papers found in an attic shows the Home Guard was an efficient fighting force, well trained and well-equipped.

The documents, which belonged to an Ipswich battalion Major, reveal intensive weapons training, exercises in sabotage and behind-the-lines death squad techniques.

Perhaps if Hitler had invaded, men like my grandad would indeed have been "the boys who will stop your little game".