In a recent write-up of Stephen Fry’s star turn in the West End as Lady Bracknell, it is reported that when a certain well-known prince of Wales sought an introduction to Oscar Wilde, he remarked, “Not to know Mr Wilde is not to be known” — a curious remark for the future King Edward VII to make (and one strangely worthy of Lady B.). The royal sentiment made me think at once of the boy’s club of prominent men who supported, protected, and excused Jeffrey Epstein during his career as a quasi-pimply financial adviser. Clearly, no matter how eminent these men might have been in their careers, they sought the cachet of being listed in Epstein’s little black book.

Are we ever going to look back on Jeffrey Epstein — and I think I speak for literate humanity here — as a great, if misunderstood, artist? As we do Wilde, I mean. I doubt it very much. I doubt it as much as it can be doubted. But I know better than to tempt the goddess Futura. The smidgeons of Epstein’s correspondence that I ‘ve come across have a brutal concision that might might confer an awful afterlife on his letters. Whether or not he develops a reputation as as a demotic Wilde, he will nonetheless have taken a permanent place among the phenomena of generally disreputable people and things who are nonetheless not just accepted but positively welcomed because, in the sunshine of the moment, they shine with a glint of the admirable, the chic, and exceptions are made. They bercome what they French call incontournable. They are what Americans have for a long time been calling cool.

(There is an entirely different and much more serious kind of cool, to wit the musical quality hailed by the masters of mid-century classic jazz as approaching the brutal concision of J S Bach.)

It is probably a bad idea for leaders (a class that includes royal princes) to trifle with the cool, no matter how appealingly “human” and ordinary it makes them appear — perhaps for that very reason. We necessarily expect leaders to stand, quite literally, for the proposition that our standards, whatever they may be, merit upholding att all times, and that at the very least  lapses from upstanding conduct ought to have nothing whatever to do with fun. Once the serious people have stooped in the name of pleasure (even if it’s only the pleasure of knowing somebody whom everybody else knows), they risk becoming indistinguishable from entertainers like Jeffrey Epstein.

I read somewhere that Epstein’s little black book contained twenty-six contacts for Andrew Duke of York, including two for equerries. Did the hapless Hanoverian ever grasp the connection with his great-great-grandfather? Not on his own, I should think. It wouldn’t have done him any good.