Emily Maitlis says Prince Andrew ‘lost respect’ after interview

Emily Maitlis says the Duke of York “lost the respect of the nation” after her infamous Newsnight interview with him, but warned that Jeffrey Epstein’s victims didn’t get closure.

“I think there is unfinished business,” the journalist told BBC News. “It isn’t some nice, neat ending.”

The 2019 interview, widely viewed as a “car-crash”, saw Prince Andrew talk candidly to Maitlis about his friendship with convicted sex offender Epstein.

It is now the subject of a new three-part drama, A Very Royal Scandal, starring Ruth Wilson as Maitlis and Michael Sheen as Andrew.

The BBC interview did huge damage to Andrew’s reputation and is seen by many as greatly contributing to his downfall.

Days after it, the duke announced he was stepping back from royal duties, saying the Epstein scandal had become a “major disruption” to the Royal Family.

Maitlis was speaking to me alongside Wilson in the Ham Yard Hotel in central London, not far from where Newsnight is made in the corporation’s Broadcasting House.

Her interview, which made headlines around the world, aired on a special Saturday evening edition of the programme in 2019.

It saw Prince Andrew discuss his links to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the socialite now serving time in prison for helping Epstein abuse girls.

Andrew used the interview to emphatically deny having sex with then 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre, saying he was in Pizza Express in Woking on the day the encounter was meant to have taken place.

The duke has subsequently paid a financial settlement to Ms Giuffre, formally ending a civil case brought against him in the US.

The out-of-court settlement accepted no liability and Prince Andrew has always strongly rejected claims of wrongdoing.

On Monday, it was reported that the duke will have to pay his own costs if he wants to stay in the Royal Lodge mansion in Windsor.

When reflecting on the impact of the interview, Maitlis said that in some ways, “everything changed”.

“Prince Andrew, he lost his royal duties, he lost the ability to wear uniform, he lost the respect of the nation, and it became, I think, much more difficult for him in his place in the Royal Family,” she said.

“And on the other side, we don’t know if Epstein’s victims gained anything from that. We don’t know if their lives materially changed,” she added.

“There’s been no trial. There’s been a settlement… but we haven’t had that sense of closure there,” she said.

She said that she sometimes wondered whether it was “anything more than a moment”.

“Can you ever do anything more as a journalist than just ask the questions, and then see what changes as a result?,” she asked.

She said that’s why the third episode of the new series – which focuses on consequences – is so important.

“It is about reckoning. It is about fallout. But it isn’t some nice, neat ending with a comedy villain or a sort of swashbuckling hero. It doesn’t end neatly.”

Maitlis also revealed that a month after her interview in November 2019, she was “pulled aside” by someone close to King Charles, who was at the time the Prince of Wales.

She said the person simply said: “HRH was not unhappy with the interview.”

BBC News has been unable to verify these comments. But Maitlis says she spent years “trying to puzzle out” what the words meant.

She speculated it could have meant that Charles didn’t “blame” her for the interview. “You’re not going off to the Tower,” she said.

“Or it might have meant that in some way, that it was not unhelpful for a reset between the Royal Family and the British public.”

Maitlis said that when you look at the shape of the monarchy since then, it is “more slimmed down”.

“I remember the Queen’s speech that Christmas – on the piano, there were only a few photographs, and the sense was that there had been a shift,” she said.

“And so I kind of think back to those words that I heard in, you know, December 2019, and think I wonder if that was the beginning of the reset.”

In the series, Wilson wore a wig and brown contact lenses in order to look like Maitlis.

The actress said it was “absolutely wonderful” playing Maitlis, adding: “I got to be blonde, and blondes do have more fun. I loved it.”

She recruited a voice coach, and also a movement coach, and studied Maitlis “intensely” – including in the workplace – to try and get into character.

“I loved getting involved and seeing behind the scenes of how that world works. That’s what drew me to the project in the first place,” she said.

Maitlis, meanwhile, said Wilson had managed to capture her “impatience”, including the way she eats sandwiches in a hurry.

“And she put a sort of comedy into the movement which I had,” she said.

“I wouldn’t recognise it myself, but I suddenly saw it through Ruth and thought it’s true. I’m always spilling things. I’m always dropping things. I’ve always overstuffed a handbag.

“There is sort of a certain amount of chaos, I think, to my off-screen life that Ruth had just watched and seamlessly injected without ever having to say it. And so, it was remarkable, actually.”

The Amazon Prime series comes just months after a rival dramatisation of the 2019 Newsnight interview, Scoop, was released on Netflix.

That version starred Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew, Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis and Billie Piper as producer Sam McAlister.

But whereas Scoop focused on the part played by McAlister in securing the interview, A Very Royal Scandal is centred on Maitlis’s own role in the process.

Maitlis, who is executive producer for the new series, is diplomatic when asked about McAlister’s version, insisting “they’re very different beasts”.

But she said there were elements in Scoop that she didn’t recognise, including scenes which showed her and her grey whippet Moody in the office.

“I’m really sorry to disappoint,” she said. “In my perfect world, obviously, dogs would be everywhere, but Moody has never been in the Newsnight studio.”

But even Maitlis’s version took creative liberties.

She pointed out one scene in which her on-screen husband is heard snoring while she types furiously on her phone next to him.

“There was no snoring, I have to say, in my marriage or, you know, in the bedroom,” she notes.

The entire Newsnight interview can still be easily watched online.

Which begs the question: Do we need a dramatisation, or indeed two, if you can just watch the real thing?

“The interview was one hour, in one moment, in one day, in one year,” Maitlis said.

“And [the drama] is actually an accumulation of consequences and results and fallout that we’re only just managing to understand.

“Now, I still think that the story itself isn’t actually finished, but this is the nearest you’ll get to kind of understanding, I guess, the beginning of it, and just what it did to all of us.”

A Very Royal Scandal is out on Prime Video on 19 September.