Monday’s devastating Panorama report on the astonishing sexual activities surrounding the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein suggested there were as many questions to be answered by his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell as by the supposed recipient of her alleged ‘pimping’, the Duke of York.

Ah, Miss Maxwell! What memories her name evokes for Oxford United supporters of a certain generation.

Lovely to a degree, she was ever likely to be present – a director of the club no less – on occasions of significant success. This would have included, most significantly of all, the club’s 3-nil victory over Queens Park Rangers to win the 1986 Milk Cup.

The youngest, and favourite, of club chairman Robert Maxwell’s brood of nine children, Ghislaine (born on Christmas Day, 1961) lent her name to the luxury yacht, Lady Ghislaine, from which the fat fraud fell/jumped/was pushed to his death off the Canary Islands on Guy Fawkes Night, 1991.

Her ‘socialite’ status. incidentally, appears curiously to have survived the family disgrace that followed the exposure of his crimes. It seems passing strange, however, that such a one as she could have proved acceptable to members of the royal family.

How odd that Queen Elizabeth II should have considered her a suitable guest at the 40th birthday bash for ‘Randy Andy’ at Windsor Castle. Not the least surprise in the Panorama shocker was the duke’s admission that she was the principal invitee, with the odious Mr Epstein her ‘plus one’.

As I write, Ghislaine has gone underground, vamoosed, and is therefore unable to answer such questions as whether – for instance – she regarded Epstein’s victims as “s**t under her shoes”, as one of them, Virginia Roberts (now Giuffre), told Panorama’s reporter Darragh MacIntyre.

On this unsavoury topic, it might be thought that Ms Maxwell could speak with authority about what it feels like to tread in do-do, it being her late father’s disgusting habit not to be too careful about where he left his own in office, home or yacht.

That there was always some poor minion to pick it up is a point well made by Tom Bower, in his eye-popping biography of the tycoon. (Bower, incidentally, has performed the same service in respect of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of whom I write below).

Some details of the Maxwell story were of course well known to me as someone working as a journalist in his home city of Oxford for nearly half a century.

In my earliest days with the Oxford Mail and Times, he was not considered worthy of mention in print, this being not long after the a Board of Trade’s bombshell judgment that he was unfit to have stewardship of a public company. (Catastrophically, of course, he was later to have stewardship again.)

“Fifty words maximum!” was the stern injunction of the news desk when I was sent in 1973 to cover the 25th anniversary celebrations of Pergamon Press at Headington Hill Hall, “the country’s largest council house” – it belonged to the city of Oxford – as ‘the Bouncing Czech’ (another fine nickname) always styled it.

The place was decked out in a way that might have been envied by any of the Communist-bloc tyrants Maxwell so much admired, with giant portraits of the man himself in multiple around the walls.

All changed in terms of coverage, of course, when he bought Oxford United, which seems likely to have been one reason for his acquisition.

By then, I had got to know – and very much like – the Maxwell sons principally involved in their father’s business, Ian and Kevin.

The latter I first encountered during his days as an undergraduate at Balliol College, where his older brother Philip had already studied and which was to accommodate his sister Ghislaine a few years later.

It seems remarkable that this most ‘woke’ institution – as we would now think of it – should have shown itself able to manipulate its admissions policy to assist one family establish an educational tradition in this way.

As I have noted before, Brasenose College showed similar understanding in allowing both children of its alumnus Michael Palin to study there. How cosy!