Emily Maitlis has expressed relief that the Metropolitan Police are investigating allegations that Prince Andrew attempted to enlist their help in launching a smear campaign against his sexual assault accuser.

The journalist remarked that Andrew’s downfall seemed unavoidable following his notorious interview with her on Newsnight six years prior.

During the 2019 interview, which Andrew hoped would vindicate him, he controversially stated he did not regret his association with Jeffrey Epstein. At that time, Epstein was a registered sex offender and faced accusations of trafficking Virginia Giuffre while she was a minor.

However, earlier this month, the Mail on Sunday disclosed that Andrew had secretly communicated with Epstein, stating, “we are in this together,” just a few months after he claimed to have severed ties with the convicted pedophile in December 2010. The email concluded with a playful promise: “We’ll play some more soon!!!!!”

This leaked correspondence offers undeniable evidence contradicting Andrew’s assertion in the Newsnight interview that he “never had any contact” with Epstein post their widely-publicized meeting in New York City’s Central Park in December 2010.

In a recent disclosure, just days after Andrew relinquished his Dukedom, it emerged that he allegedly attempted to persuade the Met Police to unearth damaging information about Ms. Giuffre by providing them with her confidential social security number—a matter currently under investigation.

Speaking to Victoria Derbyshire on the BBC Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show, Maitlis said: ‘I think if there have been people responsible for trying to make her life even more unbearable than it was, then I would like to see justice done.’

She added that the latest revelation that Andrew continued email contact with  Epstein suggested he had not finished his friendship with him.

Pictured: Emily Maitlis (left) and Prince Andrew (right) in the now infamous 2019 BBC Newsnight interview 

In the interview, Prince Andrew (right) told Emily Maitlis (left) that his last contact with disgraced paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was in December 2010 – despite emails revealed by the MoS showing a message sent from Andrew to Epstein as late as February 2011 

She said: ‘Signing off, let’s play some more soon, does not suggest that he had ever finished that friendship, that he had ever broken off with Epstein.

‘And so you’re left really questioning why he said that, whether the conversation ever existed, and how much more there is in that interview that we have to now go back and question and look at again.’

Maitlis said Prince Andrew’s move to relinquish his royal titles was ‘inevitable’. 

‘It feels like it’s been a long time coming this. I mean, the interview was done nearly six years ago, and in the weeks and months after it, he renounced, relinquished a lot of his royal duties, a lot of his public duties, a lot of his charities, his patronages.

‘And yet there has been this sort of drip, drip effect, and we’ve all had to follow. Will he be at Sandringham? Will he be with the family for Christmas? Will he be allowed at the coronation or the jubilee, whatever it is?

‘And in a way, I think this was an inevitable place that the palace was going to end up at, I mean, pretty soon after we realised the ramifications from what he said. So yes, I think six years has been quite a long time to wait for this.’

Pictured: Prince Andrew (left) with Virginia Giuffre (middle) and Ghislaine Maxwell (right)

Maitlis also told the Observer she believes Andrew ‘lied to me about his contact’ with Epstein and thinks more will come to light about the Epstein files. 

‘The email that emerged last week categorically showed that what he said [about his last contact being December 2010] was untrue,’ she said.

‘I have become more alive to all the inconsistencies. It makes you rewatch, revisit everything again.

‘I think we know now that [Prince Andrew] lied to me about his contact with Epstein.’

In his disastrous 2019 interview, Andrew told Maitlis that ‘categorically I don’t remember meeting her at all’.

Pressed repeatedly whether he was saying ‘categorically’ that he could not remember Ms Giuffre, Andrew replied: ‘Yep.’ 

He also suggested that an infamous photograph of him with his arm around Ms Giuffre’s waist could have been a crude forgery, saying: ‘Nobody can prove whether or not that photograph has been doctored but I don’t recollect that photograph ever being taken.’

But in a message to Epstein on February 25, 2011, two days before the MoS published an interview with Ms Giuffre and revealed the picture, Andrew appeared to accept he could have met her. 

Apparently updating Epstein on the MoS’s approach to him for comment ahead of the story being published, he wrote: ‘Categoric denial of Sexual Relations. Possible that I met her in a group with others and possible there is a photograph.’

He accused the MoS of ‘just gratuitously trying it on… ably abetted by Miss Roberts [Virginia Giuffre] who they will have contacted as her identity will have been known from court records, I assume.’

The Prince added: ‘Not bothered any further about it but will keep watch.’

The revelation comes as a bombshell email obtained by this newspaper exposes how Andrew asked his taxpayer-funded Met bodyguard to investigate Virginia Giuffre and passed him her date of birth and confidential social security number.

Astonishingly, Andrew then told Ed Perkins, Queen Elizabeth’s deputy press secretary, that he had asked one of his personal protection officers – part of the Met’s elite SO14 Royalty Protection Group – to dig up information about Ms Giuffre.

He emailed Mr Perkins hours before this newspaper first published the infamous picture of the duke with 17-year-old Ms Giuffre, which would ultimately bring about his downfall.

‘It would also seem she has a criminal record in the [United] States,’ he wrote. ‘I have given her DoB [date of birth] and social security number for investigation with XXX, the on duty ppo [personal protection officer].’

It is not suggested that the officer complied with the prince’s request, while Ms Giuffre’s family last night said she did not have a criminal record.

Her relatives said our revelations ‘expose the lengths to which those implicated try to discredit and defame survivors. The truth will surface and there will be no shadows in which they can hide’.

A spokesperson for the Met told the MoS late on Saturday that they were ‘actively looking into the claims made.’

Prince Andrew was approached for comment.