Emily Maitlis on Prince Andrew interview: ‘I knew he had said some extraordinary things’
| Updated:
Emily Maitlis tells Lewis Goodall about her 2019 interview with Prince Andrew, and the new Amazon Prime drama based on her hour at the palace.
Listen to this article
Read time: 6 mins
In brief…
- Emily Maitlis interviewed Prince Andrew in Buckingham Palace in 2019, after months of attempts by her BBC team.
- A new Amazon Prime TV show tells the story of how it happened, and what the fallout for the Royal was.
- Emily reveals how the interview was arranged under the eaves of Buckingham Palace, and why she locked herself in a toilet to eat chocolate before the cameras started rolling.
What’s the story?
It has taken Emily Maitlis five years to fully appreciate the impact of her 2019 interview with Prince Andrew.
Even now, she still wonders whether her hour with the disgraced Royal was "a pivotal moment in British history" for the relationship between the British public and the Royal Family.
"It was a sense of, 'okay, this wasn't just an interview'," she tells her News Agents co-host Lewis Goodall.
She believes her interview sparked a “realignment” of public perception of the Royal Family.
The story of how her chat with Prince Andrew came to be, and what happened afterwards, is the subject of A Very Royal Scandal, a new Amazon Prime drama starring Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson.
Emily Maitlis shares the secrets of her Prince Andrew interview
How the interview came together
Working on Newsnight at the time, BBC journalists had been in conversation with the palace since spring 2019 to try to secure an interview with Prince Andrew.
Emily’s Her team initially rejected an offer due to palace conditions that no questions were asked about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, as accusations of sexual misconduct mounted against the US financier.
He instead spoke with a rival news channel, although "nothing was said" about his relationship with Epstein – and no one is making TV shows about that interview.
"It wasn't until August of that year, when Epstein was found dead in a prison cell in Manhattan, with all the questions circulating, that my producers got back on it," Emily says.
"There is a moment in the drama where Andrew gets the phone call about Epstein's death, and he literally says, 'Is this good for me or bad for me?' It's a slightly comical, but human moment that you hear about the death, and you just think: how does it look for me?
"And at that point, we start the conversations."
A Very Royal Scandal - Official Trailer | Prime Video
Emily reveals how she, and her team, had three meetings at the palace about the interview, including one with both Prince Andrew and Princess Beatrice.
"It was right at the top of Buckingham Palace. So you can feel the pointy roofs, under the eaves, and the room didn't feel big enough for Prince Andrew and all of us," she says.
"We had these little teacups rattling on our knees, and we're hunched around this table and he starts telling us, essentially what we're going to ask him.
"He basically sat down and said: 'Well, there's only three questions you need to know – should I have gone to stay with him? Did I meet the girl? [Virgina Roberts] And then he wanted to talk about Pitch at the Palace."
Virginia Roberts alleged she was trafficked to Prince Andrew by Epstein and had sex with the Prince. Pitch At The Palace was an entrepreneur scheme run by Prince Andrew, which has been inactive since the pandemic.
Emily says they left the tiny attic meeting unsure if they had done enough to secure the interview.
"He was slightly pompous, very in control. He dominated this very small space, as you'd expect.
"He's a senior member of the royal family, so of course he was going to be in charge.
"Our job was just to sit and listen and try to be reassuring."
Andrew had one other stipulation, Emily recalls. He wanted her and the BBC team to prove that a photo of him with his arm around Virginia Roberts, taken at Ghislaine Maxwell's London home and published in the UK press, was a fake.
She says he claimed there was "no way" those were his fingers.
Emily says her team did what they could in a short time frame to address the validity of the photo.
"It's impossible to say what clinched it," Emily adds.
"I hope that he trusted us. I hope that he'd seen some of our work and the interviews and everything that the team had done previously."
"It's always the fear with these interviews, that as soon as somebody starts to wobble, it never happens – in my experience."
Emily arrived at the palace with three changes of clothes in case of an emergency such as a coffee spill or, worse, ending up "in stilettos in Buckingham Palace Garden with my foot trapped in crazy paving."
What happened in the palace?
Emily says she arrived at the palace after very little sleep and almost immediately locked herself in the toilet.
"I suddenly realised that the interview would take place over lunchtime, and I didn't want my tummy to rumble, so I started eating dark chocolate from my handbag.
"I thought, the one thing I can't have in this really important interview is any ridiculous noises."
But if it wasn't her stomach that derailed the interview, it could have been her nerves, with Emily saying she was acutely aware of how the interview could go wrong, and how BBC staff had lost jobs over dealings with Royals on previous occasions.
"We decided that if this came off, it might be the only document of record that could ever be used in a court of law in the US by some of Epstein's victims, or the women that were making these allegations.
"I felt it was really important to let him speak. The whole interview was not meant to be an adversarial, confrontational sort of thing. It was meant to hear from the horse's mouth.
"This was the one chance we had to hear his version of events."
She describes having an hour with Prince Andrew "a precious gift" for a journalist, more used to tight timeframes and reporting for news bulletins.
"I wasn't trying to rush him, and I was really happy that he had all the time to make his case, to lay out his explanations."
But as everyone who has seen the interview will know, just because he wasn't rushed, doesn't mean he was given an easy time.
"I had to be told, this is not a Royal interview. It is an interview about sex trafficking and about a friendship between a paedophile and a royal.
"It's a very different thing."
What happened after the interview?
Leaving the interview, Emily says she knew Prince Andrew had said "some extraordinary things" but says she was "locked in the moment" and didn't have a chance to process it.
"But I knew what I'd heard in the last hour," she says.
"Importantly for me, he'd done the interview.
"I had asked the questions. He hadn't slammed the questions, refused them or ignored them. He'd answered the questions, and that was all we could ever ask."
What's the interview's lasting legacy?
Emily says the new drama, and fascination around what happened in that interview five years ago, highlights the "tension" between the British public and the Royals.
"I don't think we yet know how the story ends, but I think we know how it changed Andrew's life, because we saw that really quickly," she says.
"Stripped of royal duties, stripped of his uniform, stripped of his place at these big family occasions.
"We don't yet know how it played out for the victims of Epstein, and truthfully, we will not have a trial."
A Very Royal Scandal, she adds, is very clear not to suggest guilt or innocence on the part of the prince.
"We've just kind of left it there because we may never know.
"But in terms of the shape of the royal family, it does seem that it began a kind of realignment."
Listen in full on The News Agents.
