Show caption Emily Maitlis with Prince Andrew in Buckingham Palace ahead of the Newsnight interview. Photograph: Mark Harrison/Mark Harrison/BBC 2019 TV: what happened next? 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 GMT Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter

Share via Email

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.

Prince Andrew denies having sex with teenager, saying he took daughter for pizza in Woking – video

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.

This is a man – a prince – who did not come to repent.

Photograph: Mark Harrison/BBC/PA

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.