Every red-blooded Englishman and Englishwoman should be cheering on Prince Andrew in his court case against Thames Valley Police.

For years now, police and prosecutors have got away with attacks on the presumption of innocence, subjecting unconvicted people to spectacular and well-publicised dawn raids, arrests and searches.

It is time somebody challenged this, and it turns out that Andrew (who proved in the Falklands that he has courage) is the person to do it.

As he is currently the most unpopular man in the country, far too few people have yet realised that he has a case. But I think he does, and so should you.

For many years now, the authorities have been frustrated by the system of jury trial. True independent juries are almost unknown outside the Anglosphere. And they really do get in the way of easy convictions. That is what they are for. They make the state less powerful. So governments don’t like them, and they ceaselessly whittle away at them. Even this week’s supposed reprieve for juries was spin. In fact, fewer people will now be able to opt for jury trial.

In this country, the beginning of majority verdicts after 1967 made it much easier to get a conviction. So did the introduction of teenage jurors. You can now have your life ruined on the say-so of an 18-year-old with no experience of life, if he or she happens to think you are guilty, or possibly just dislikes your face or accent.

This is very different from the pre-1967 days of respectable middle-aged jurors and unanimous verdicts – where one fair-minded person could, by patient argument, steer the jury away from a rash conviction.

In the USA, the attack takes a different shape. Unanimous verdicts survive in almost all the 50 states and in federal courts. So prosecutors try quite hard to avoid cases ever reaching such juries at all. The number of contested jury trials has fallen sharply since widespread plea-bargaining was introduced.

This system does not officially exist in the UK, but is beginning to take shape informally. Basically, defendants are told that if they go to trial and are convicted, they will face terrifyingly long sentences. Whereas if they plead guilty, they will be much less heavily punished.

This wouldn’t work if the accused thought they would get off anyway. Alas, in many cases they don’t think that. They can’t. The state has already portrayed them as guilty without actually saying so. This is why these pre-trial bits of street theatre, on both sides of the Atlantic, have become so common.

The accused person increasingly arrives in court having already been shown to the public in the worst light.

US district attorneys and police forces have developed a brutal way of getting convictions. It is known as the ‘perp walk’ and involves the arrested person being paraded, preferably in shackles and an orange jumpsuit, on the TV news.

You will have seen this from time to time in reports of major American court cases, and perhaps wondered if it could happen here.

There is a brilliant description of this process of humiliation and state-sponsored prejudice in Tom Wolfe’s tremendous 1987 novel The Bonfire Of The Vanities. The sort-of hero, Sherman McCoy, finds himself displayed to a hungry New York City media as the suspect of the day, on highly dubious charges.

The weakness of the case against him swiftly ceases to matter. His life is ruined anyway. The process of arrest, arraignment, fingerprinting and detention is itself a large part of the punishment.

In Britain, this sort of thing would (I think and hope) be banned under contempt of court rules, which don’t exist in the US. But what about other attention-grabbing forms of pre-trial drama?

As I say, you may think Prince Andrew (I can’t be doing with the King’s cowardly attempt to rob his own brother of his title) is a bad person. You may be right. I don’t know. Nor, in fact, do you. The only thing I do know is that he has not been charged with, or convicted of, any actual crime in a court of law. And therefore, under English law, he is presumed innocent.

So why was he arrested at home at breakfast time on his birthday?

If police wished to question him, must we seriously believe there was a grave danger he would have fled the country? Why not just ask him to attend at a police station, with his lawyer, and reveal afterwards that this had happened?

Why was he taken away under escort, held for hours and then released late at night, in time to be photographed in the back of a car looking suitably miserable?

What, in any case, do Thames Valley Police know about Andrew’s dealings with Jeffrey Epstein that requires a whole day to investigate? And when they went on to search his current and former homes, what were they expecting to find?

Ask yourself what it must be like to have your home invaded by grim-jawed strangers, poking into every corner and sucking their teeth as they stick their noses into your private existence?

This is itself punishment without trial, and if I were one of His Majesty’s judges, I would be pretty reluctant to grant permission for it without a very good reason to expect they would find anything. Did they? Will they ever be asked to account for this?

I am reminded of the police who appeared in the garden of Lucy Letby’s tiny suburban semi, erecting a tent and digging about the place. What did they expect to find?

Somehow the media found out about this expedition and, as a result, the nurse’s name became known very quickly, and a sinister cloud began to form around it.

Well, you may think Ms Letby is guilty. But what is your view of the shocking treatment of Cliff Richard in 2014, when the BBC were tipped off about a search of the singer’s Berkshire home. They broadcast the search live, including helicopter footage of officers entering the property and removing items, and named Cliff Richard.

He was abroad at the time and was never arrested or charged. He had the star power and the money to hit back, winning large damages. But what could a poor and powerless person have done?

Then there was the great squadron of officers which descended on the village home of D-Day hero and former Field Marshal Lord Bramall in pursuit of mad allegations made by the revolting liar Carl Beech. Beech eventually went to prison for his dishonesty. Why did the police accept this bilge so readily?

There’s also a growing number of melodramatic dawn raids (surely only justifiable if you think the person involved is about to flee).

Many of the people pursued by police in complaints about ‘inappropriate’ speech or unwoke internet postings also find themselves confronted by phalanxes of uniformed coppers and flashing fleets of police cars, surely only needed in the arrests of armed gangsters.

The King should at the very least be neutral in this matter. Letting it be known that he doesn’t support his brother’s action is a biased intervention in a major issue. If he hasn’t anything useful to say, he should keep out of it.