Emily Maitlis: ‘Prince Andrew was unleashed. He wanted to tell me everything’
Series 3, episode 4: The Crown. A BBC van pulls up at Buckingham Palace to record a royal documentary. As in life, so with television: timing is everything. Had The Crown aired its new series one week earlier … Had the fictional Queen been spotted squirming at the TV crews in her midst … Had the distant memories of a now-banned palace interview been fresher in our minds … It is entirely possible, and more than probable, that the Prince Andrew interview would never have happened.
This is the discussion in the Newsnight office a couple of weeks after it aired. We still cannot quite believe it happened. We have to pinch ourselves seeing global headlines, day after day: the ramifications of all the painstaking observations he made to us in that hour of surreal television. I agreed to do an interview about the interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. “Was this your ‘Frost/Nixon’ moment?” they asked as I walked in. I had barely taken off my coat.
I gulped. It felt like the finest thing I have ever been asked, but I couldn’t find a way to respond without sounding like a muppet. They watched every frame. They could tell me the time of the clock hands in the opening shot. “What about his tie?” they asked. “Why was a member of the family of Windsor unable to tie a correct Windsor knot?” I was stumped. I realised they had pored over the interview more intensely than me, one finger permanently on pause and rewind.
People have asked what I was thinking as I sat there opposite the prince, preparing for the questions to come. How do you make small talk? How do you compose the tone you need for the hour ahead?
My overriding emotion was relief. I expected the interview to be pulled at every stage. It had been months in the making and got sign-off just 48 hours earlier. Even then it was pushed back by a couple of hours, then brought forward by one.
My fear was that any sign of procrastination, any shifting of the timetable, would ultimately end in cancellation. So I mainly felt joy we had got this far. The weight of expectation was second to that. No one knew the interview was coming. There had been no publicity. Indeed, the whole event had been kept intensely private.
The prince put me at ease; chatty, relaxed. He showed us the end of the room where they kept a projector – it was turned into a cinema every Thursday evening for the palace staff. As we adjusted our seated positions for the photos, he asked if I had ever been interviewed by David Frost. It was not calculated to shock me, but it did. In his eyes, Frost is the convivial Sunday morning telly host, thrower of excellent parties. But in my head, Frost is the arsonist-in-chief of Frost/Nixon fame. I wonder if he caught my look of alarm at the mention of the name.
I am always impressed by interviewers who can do the whole thing without notes. I can’t. I need reminders on my knee. Dates, first names, quotes in bold text. I am addicted to the highlighter pen, my papers generally a garish mix of type, Biro, unreadable scribble and lashings of luminosity, as if they belong to the unhinged. It has to be something that catches my eye in a moment of amnesia or panic. Over the years, I have practised how to lift an entire sentence with a brief glance down, while trying to hold the gaze of whomever I’m talking to. It is the little things that throw me – the wrong pen, the wrong font. An interview done standing up is a disaster. I need my knees to rest notes on.
It is these weird superstitions that can make or break your confidence in those moments before the cameras start rolling. The interview itself, perhaps bizarrely, is the easiest bit. He is there. I am there. The prep is done.
We had role-played the interview to prepare. We had imagined scenarios and responses, evasions and deviations. “Do I have to say ‘Sir’ after each question?” I pondered. My editor, Esme Wren, gave me a gentle look, as if I had gone slightly mad. “You are courteous and firm. This is a Newsnight interview, not a royal encounter.” It was her focused, steely, enquiring look I found myself channelling each time nerves deserted me.
We began to record. I thought about how reasonable he sounded. He was explaining why Jeffrey Epstein was never really his friend, more “a friend of a friend”. For one moment, I imagined I had got everything wrong, misunderstood the story entirely. But I stuck to the line of questioning. And it paid off.
Does he regret the visit to stay with Epstein? “Yes.” Does he regret the whole friendship?
It was around 16 minutes into the interview – and it was the answer that, for me, changed everything.
“Still not,” he said. And told me of the opportunities he was given by Epstein that were “actually very useful …”. It was such a candid admission, such a bald refusal to play the game with any wider apology or regret. It would become the pivotal moment of the entire hour. This is a man – a prince – who did not come to repent. He came to earn back his right to tell the story his way.
Once I understood that, everything else flowed from there. Andrew was unleashed. Unstoppable. After a decade of silent frustration, he wanted to tell me everything. He paused being “a royal” and found his voice.
He told me things he had no need to reveal. About his sweat problems and his trip to Woking, about his knowledge of Belgravia homes and London nightspots.
I do not need to tell you the rest. The interview. The memes. The Pizza Express reviews. My single (and inadvertent) contribution to youth culture.
And, after the allotted 45 minutes, we stopped. The prince was still charming, and even more relaxed. He took me off down the marble hall. We chatted about the famous King’s speech and he pointed out the ministers’ staircase, which the prime minister ascends each week to meet the Queen.
We ended on good terms. He had been generous with his time. We may even – now I think about it – have pulled away first. And then we bundled into a black cab back to the office. The interview was ours. Tiny computer memory cards wrapped snug in a folded old envelope. A curious clash of the digital and the deeply analogue. Our producer, Jake, clutched them to his chest. We were sworn to silence for another 12 hours, the recording itself under literal lock and key. Until the rollout began the next morning.
It has taken three weeks for my shoulders to finally drop. Three weeks to absorb that the interview we did that day may yet have the power to change the lives of Epstein’s victims. Three weeks of headlines and blanket coverage. Three weeks to realise that questions about the clock and the tie knot and the meaning of a glance or a gesture will continue and ultimately overtake us.
What began with a plan, a hunch and a Newsnight huddle now has a life of its own. It is no longer ours. It belongs somewhere bigger.
Emily Maitlis is the lead presenter for BBC Newsnight and the author of Airhead – the Imperfect Art of Making News
to the cartoon cinema. Yes, it was great, we saw Bugs Bunny, thanks for asking.” Protocol was a big thing, but it was unguessable. Things you would think were posh – the Queen’s speech – were not posh, and my aunt had to sneak off and watch it on her own. Things you would think were not posh – putting on your cracker party hat and not taking it off, not ever, not until you got home – were mandatory. Once, he asked me if I wanted lemonade and I said: “No, thank you – it might make me fart,” and I thought this was the most courteous and intelligent answer ever, since a classy person would definitely think ahead, but then I saw my mother’s face, and it turned out that is not what a classy person would have done.
Anyway, at some point in the late 80s, the tables were turned and everyone was coming to us. My sister and I were in our teens. We were maybe 10% more competent than your average teenage cook, but it would be a stretch to think we could manage the turkey, and I can’t remember whose idea that was. Probably mine. (I think my uncle came to our childhood home to eat 10 times in my whole life – and once to my first flat, when I made potted ham, and it was unbelievably disgusting, claggy and mealy, as if it had been chewed and then refrigerated. I offered him some bread, and he said: “Yes, that might help,” which was, again, fair.)
Having guests always seemed to involve eating in a room we didn’t normally eat in, so we would spend the day moving a bed out of it, and a lifetime’s stash of the stuff that collects behind stuff. Then we would move a table in and cover it with a sheet because we weren’t oversupplied with tablecloths. And then we’d stand back and stare at it for hours: does that look like a dining table? Or a really uncomfortable bed? Is any of this in any way posh?
So that was the drill this Christmas, and all this time the turkey was in the oven, sort of cooking. It definitely didn’t go in early enough, but the main problem was that the door wouldn’t close. For some reason, I thought this would be fine. That’s the most common argument I have now with my kids; me going: “It’ll be fine,” and them going: “NO, IT WILL NOT NECESSARILY BE FINE.”
The atmosphere was like a montage scene of the Tudor servants of a remote lord getting ready for the king to arrive, except those people would have known what they were doing with suet, and we were just acting nervous and a bit hysterical. And it was all absolutely fine. We had enough chairs, we had enough drinks. We’d got all the right stuff – we had smoked salmon, a stilton in a truckle, and nobody had gone off-piste and innovated. It was a bit stiff, but it was nothing like as boring as it normally was. There really wasn’t a hitch, except when we got the turkey out, and it wasn’t cooked at all.
You have to understand how incredibly regimented Christmas Day was: the salmon was always at the same time, there was always a walk afterwards, the lunch was always after the walk, the presents were always after that. Any spontaneous change to the order of events would have been more than an act of aggression; it just wouldn’t have computed. It couldn’t have happened because it had never happened. There was no way the turkey could have just spent longer in the oven, never mind the three more hours it needed in a much bigger oven.
It was like an anxiety dream where you have murdered someone, but forgotten to bury them: I was trying to carve it at the table, without anybody noticing the blood. I went round the bird’s extremities, finding modest portions of the least dangerous meat, and distributed them in order of my favourites, although also on a family-holdback principle, so I think my cousin’s wife did OK and my sister got potato. The stuffing I took out and fried, while pretending to make gravy that I think my mother had already made. Luckily, the dining room was nowhere near the kitchen because it was actually a bedroom.
My uncle was absolutely fine. It’s possible his eyesight wasn’t great. He was much more benign off his own turf, and did a lot of nodding and smiling. Who knows, he might have had a thing or two to say when he got home. Plainly, nobody died, otherwise I would have adopted a different tone to describe all this.
Formality has so much power: the most formal person sets the rules and everyone tries like crazy to meet and anticipate them, like sheep trying to avoid a fence that isn’t really electrified. A lot of its heft is in the things it leaves unsaid, which become immune to verbal challenge. Then you get the point where the potential downside is that you kill someone you are related to, and you sail straight past that point, to maintain the fiction that you can do formal as well as the next man. Reflecting on the event afterwards, I thought: in future, I’m not going to do those kind of manners any more. I’m going to do a rigorous separation between the stuff that hurts people’s feelings, and the stuff that dresses up as courtesy but is actually a set of class-based mechanisms of domination and control. I also learned that it’s harder to give people salmonella than you may think.