Emily
Maitlis: ‘Prince Andrew was unleashed. He wanted to tell me everything’
Newsnight
was granted a rare audience with the royal ... and after a decade of silence,
he was unstoppable. Its presenter shares the secrets of the interview of the
century
Emily
Maitlis
Thu 19 Dec
2019 06.00 GMTLast modified on Thu 19 Dec 2019 11.00 GMT
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
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