It could well be dubbed the Queen’s ‘Andrew Horribilis’, the night her ‘favourite’ son unwittingly lit the touch paper to the end of his career as a working royal in a TV appearance that will certainly go down in the history books and caused seismic damage to the monarchy.
Sitting 15 feet behind Prince Andrew in a room in Buckingham Palace as the cameras rolled was the woman who set it all up: the whip-smart, uncompromising Sam McAlister, producer for BBC’s Newsnight current affairs show.
A former criminal defence barrister, McAlister is lauded in the TV news industry for her steely tenacity and dogged resilience – qualities that undoubtedly paid dividends in securing the exclusive that stunned the world as the prince repeatedly failed to show a glimmer of remorse or apology in that now infamous car-crash interview.
But as she watched what turned out to be the scoop of the century unfold before her eyes, McAlister was as much in shock as the 1.7 million viewers who tuned in on the night of 16 November 2019.
“I don’t think anyone envisaged that the answers [to interviewer Emily Maitlis] would be as bad as they were,” says McAlister, who recounts the extraordinary tale of how it all happened in her new book Scoops.
It’s a jaw-dropping read that begs a catalogue of questions about the inner workings of the royal machine. It also gives fascinating insight to the mindset of Prince Andrew who, though stripped of his royal duties, remains ninth in line to the throne and one of four counsellors of state, authorised to carry out the official duties of the Queen should illness or absence abroad prevent her from doing so.
A shot in the dark
The road to securing the interview was long, but not as rocky as you would imagine, McAlister says. The roadblocks that royal correspondents regularly come up against simply weren’t there, which makes this interview all the more incredible.
McAlister’s first request for a TV interview with Andrew was in response to an innocuous press release about his business initiative Pitch@Palace.
It was a shot in the dark in a royal world she admits she knew nothing about, and she had “zero expectation” that the prince would agree to the sort of no-holds barred interrogation required by Newsnight, famed for its uncompromising journalism.
She was right; the answer was a firm “no”.
But six months later McAlister received a call. “Prince Andrew was now open to a broader chat, one that wouldn’t have any parameters.” Intrigued but sceptical, she took up the invitation to go to Buckingham Palace for a chat with Andrew’s private secretary Amanda Thirsk.
McAlister had done her research and knew Thirsk to be “formidable, well-educated, competent and someone who wouldn’t suffer fools gladly” and she was all those things when they met. But curiously Thirsk was willing for her boss – Prince Andrew – to face the rigours of a Newsnight grilling.
“My expectation in going along was to try to negotiate onto the table all the news issues that were pertinent to Prince Andrew at that time. At that juncture Prince Andrew wasn’t the contentious figure that he’s become now,” McAlister explains. “The Epstein connection was a news issue that we would have to mention, but it was not the main event for us. The more pertinent issues were Brexit, the future of the monarchy, Harry and Meghan, what was going to happen to the Queen after she was no longer in charge.
“I managed to negotiate all of those, unbelievably, but then there was a red line. And we don’t do red lines. The prince would not talk about Jeffrey Epstein, who at that stage was probably a last question for us, but of course became every question after that negotiation.”
The Epstein problem
Newsnight declined the interview, but McAlister picked up the trail again when events pushed Prince Andrew’s desperately ill-conceived friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein into the ugly glare of the world’s headlines.
“Eight weeks later, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. Twelve weeks later, he was dead. Twenty weeks later, I had managed to persuade Amanda Thirsk that Prince Andrew’s position – of silence in the face of global scrutiny – was untenable,” McAlister writes.
After a further meeting, McAlister, presenter Emily Maitlis and the show’s deputy editor Stewart Maclean were called in to talk to Prince Andrew in person. That meeting was both bizarre and eye-opening and resulted in the interview no-one believed could happen.
“In my head, Prince Andrew would be boisterous, garrulous, he would probably have a good sense of humour, he might be a bit chippy, he was going to be big, he was going to take up the room, he was going to be quite dominant, and I was not disappointed in my expectations on any of those fronts.
“He was, in my view, very good humoured given the situation. He was very friendly given the situation. He was extremely open in the negotiation. He was congenial. But the most interesting thing about him, I found, was how he really listened to things I said and then he reciprocated with questions and answers. That’s extremely unusual for somebody who has his kind of power and background.
“I speak truth to power. I don’t care who you are and, in a sense, he was exceptional in the way that he dealt with us in terms of his openness, honesty and the way he was responsive to the points I or Emily or Stewart were making.”
Looking back McAlister says she was most surprised that in all her dealings, she managed to sidestep the royal advisers – those “men in suits” that both Meghan and the late Princess Diana had complained about, who they suggested pull the strings behind the scenes at Buckingham Palace.
“The question, ‘where were the people around him?’ I think is a really interesting one,” McAlister says. “I don’t do shock, but if I did, I was shocked by the fact that at no juncture ever during all of that did I meet a lawyer. At no juncture, other than very briefly on the day of the interview, and then only as somebody who wafted in and then straight out of the room, did I meet somebody who worked for the Queen or any other part of the royal household.”
Andrew’s curve ball
Andrew did bring an adviser along though, and this was another shock. It was his eldest daughter Princess Beatrice. “It was a real curve ball. When he arrived and said, ‘I’ve brought someone with me’, I was thinking finally, here’s a lawyer and he or she is not going to like me and this is all over. But then he said, ‘it’s my daughter, Princess Beatrice’. Now the only thing worse than negotiating with a member of the royal family about allegations of sexual impropriety, is doing so in front of his daughter.”
Throughout the next two to three hours of negotiations Princess Beatrice was polite, professional and very involved, taking lots of notes.
“She had a list of questions that she asked and they were all very sensible, about practicalities and content. It was clear that she was a very thoughtful young woman and that she had her father’s best interests at heart, as you would considering [she had] the most difficult situation of sitting there and listening to those kinds of allegations day after day after day, about the man whom you probably love most in the world. I’m sure she believes her father, 100 per cent. because that’s what daughters do with dads they love. That’s just human nature.”
In a world in which hardly anyone questioned the prince, McAlister says her secret weapon in the negotiation was her directness, her “lack of deference” and to an extent her “cheekiness”.
“As we talked, I gave it to Prince Andrew very bluntly. ‘Sir, I have lived in this country for over 40 years and, until now, I only knew two things about you. It’s that you’re known as ‘Air Miles Andy’ and ‘Randy Andy’ and I can absolutely tell you that the latter really doesn’t help you in your current predicament.'”
After a pause Andrew laughed and McAlister knew in that moment she had won his trust. Prince Andrew started to talk about his ‘alibi’ for the night when Virginia Giuffre claimed he sexually assaulted her. “He told us about Pizza Express. A children’s party. He mentioned the sweating, or lack thereof. He admitted that he’d made errors of judgement,” says McAlister. “It was jaw-dropping stuff.”
But throughout it all she felt the real key to Andrew agreeing to the interview was Princess Beatrice. “She was the rainmaker. She would be the difference between yes and no. As we concluded things, he turned to Princess Beatrice and said that they had a lot to discuss and they should go, straight after, upstairs, to talk about it, over a cup of tea, with Mum.”
Good grief! Andrew meant The Queen. McAlister was astonished. “In my view it all came down to a theoretical conversation after our negotiations were completed. Let’s imagine he did go and speak to ‘Mum’ and he says, ‘Mum I just had the most amazing meeting. Emily Maitlis is fantastic. Sam’s great. It’s a brilliant idea!’. And the Queen says, ‘Marvellous, darling,’ and then she turns to Beatrice, the sensible one, and she asks, ‘What do you think?’ I knew they were very close.”
McAlister has no idea if that meeting occurred, but 24 hours later she was told that Prince Andrew wanted to go ahead with the interview. “They never suggested any conditions or content. Of course, we would have said no anyway, but I was impressed with the classiness in terms of the way they dealt with us,” notes McAlister, who despite the outcome clearly feels Thirsk’s role in the whole debacle was professional and benign. (Thirsk was sacked shortly after the interview aired.)
McAlister feels that the reason Andrew was so keen to do the interview “wasn’t just to vindicate himself but to return to public life, to walk his daughter down the aisle, to have a 60th birthday party, to live the extraordinary, privileged, amazing life that no doubt he had prior to all of this coming to the forefront.”
The fateful interview
Two days later McAlister was back in Buckingham Palace recording the interview. Again, the royal machine was absent. McAlister says she has no idea if future kings Prince Charles and Prince William knew of what was going on, but they were never mentioned, and their advisors were never involved.
Prince Andrew arrived early and full of beans and the only members of the royal household there were Thirsk, an equerry and a couple of junior staff.
Finally, a man McAlister later discovered was the Queen’s Communications Secretary Donal McCabe, came in. “His moment in the room is fleeting but, retrospectively, significant,” notes McAlister. “It means the Queen likely knew about the interview (there has been a lot of speculation on that point).”
But McCabe didn’t ask any questions and more importantly left before the recording started. “I was waiting for the entourage and when he arrived I thought, oh here’s the entourage. I thought maybe he was the head of litigation. Maybe he was the person who was going to put me in the Tower of London. It felt like, ‘ah, here’s an authority figure’. But then he leaves,” which she says looking back “was clearly an unfortunate decision for the Palace”.
And so, in the room that afterwards was to be used for the royal household’s cinema night film show, the stage was set and the cameras started to roll.
McAlister feels certain that Prince Andrew must have been prepped for the interview, but on the night perhaps things turned out differently.
“When I was a criminal defence barrister, I saw this all the time. You’d have a conversation with your client and they’d say, I’m going to say x, and then the second you put them in, people get verbal diarrhoea. They’re untrammelled, and their fate becomes their own end with every single answer,” she says.
“With Prince Andrew everything that could be done badly he keeps doing and it just gets worse as he goes along. Whatever they did in terms of rehearsal, that was all out of the window the second he started speaking.
“It was an embarrassment of horror for Prince Andrew but for me, sitting there as the person who had negotiated that, who’d brought that to the table, you can only imagine what it was like to hear answer after answer that I knew would be the front page of every paper in the country, if not the world. It really did feel that significant. I knew what we had, and I knew how profoundly difficult and awful his answers were.”
As the interview drew to a close, with Andrew’s credibility in tatters, McAlister was eager to rush the tape back to the BBC. Incredibly the mood from Prince Andrew was upbeat and he proceeded to give Maitlis a tour of the Palace, an offer McAlister declined.
“I’d expected Amanda to be distraught, the Prince to look shaken or concerned, but he seemed ebullient. And then it hit me: he actually thought it had gone well. In fact he was in fine spirits!”
The fallout
The rest, of course, is history. The interview aired two days later and on November 20, 2019 Prince Andrew put out a statement stepping back from royal duties “for the foreseeable future” and finally offered sympathy for Epstein’s victims.
On January 13 this year, facing US civil action over sexual assault allegations – claims he has consistently denied – Andrew’s military titles and royal patronages were returned to The Queen with the statement from Buckingham Palace announcing: “The Duke of York will continue not to undertake any public duties and is defending this case as a private citizen.”
On February 15, he reached a settlement out of court and is unlikely to be a working royal again.
© 2020 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.
ABC Content Disclaimer
