Over the weekend, I did a little mini-review of Scoop, the Netflix movie about what happened behind-the-scenes of Prince Andrew’s disastrous BBC interview in 2019. The movie was enjoyable and well-acted and the source material (Sam McAlister’s book of the same name) badly wanted to make Sam McAlister and the BBC the “heroes.” But what the movie actually shows is that Prince Andrew is a buffoon, a liar and a human trafficker who was too stupid to get through a softball interview without incriminating himself repeatedly and lying blatantly. It also showed that the BBC had little appetite to actually cover the nitty-gritty of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew’s crimes. Instead of understanding that they could hold power to account and play hardball, the BBC continued to bow and scrape. Speaking of, apparently Prince Andrew (the real one) is quite pleased with how Scoop portrays everything that went down.
A friend of Prince Andrew’s who has spoken to the prince since the one-off film was released told The Daily Beast: “Obviously Andrew regrets doing the interview, and if he had his time again he wouldn’t do it. That said, he feels Scoop is much more even-handed than he expected. It’s fair to say he was delighted by Rufus Sewell’s portrayal of him.”
Another friend of the duke’s told The Daily Beast: “I think the show, to the satisfaction of everyone who actually knows the guy, made clear that Andrew was an extremely good convener of people. He did actually play a valuable role for the royals with Pitch@Palace and his other business-focused advocacy work. When he was at a business meet and greet in a conference room in Hong Kong, there was real energy when he entered the room. Those things are otherwise as dull as ditch water. He flew the flag for British business. He knows he screwed up monumentally over Epstein—but nobody is now doing what he did then. He still has a lot to offer.”
The friend added: “The irony of course is that Newsnight got gutted anyway [the nightly show was cut to 30 minutes, and more than half of its 60 staff were fired], and Andrew is very much back in the fold.”
A friend of the king and queen said that Charles, who is battling cancer, was “vanishingly unlikely” to have watched the show and that he regarded the “Andrew question” as “settled,” and that there was no way back to an official, public role for Andrew but that he would continue to be welcomed at non-state, family occasions. Buckingham Palace did not respond to a request for comment on the drama, including whether the king had watched it.
While there was expectation that Scoop would reignite criticism of Andrew, Andrew’s friends are not the only ones to feel he has come out of it rather better than might have been expected. The Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones, for example, wrote that the show, “had a surprising effect on me… I started to feel sorry for Prince Andrew, something I never thought would happen.” Jones argued that Scoop shows the Newsnight’s team courting of Andrew was duplicitous, and that their promises of an “opportunity to set the record straight” were “self-serving” and concluded, “Watching it, you’d have to conclude the prince was ‘played.’”
However, the historian Andrew Lownie told The Daily Beast that Andrew was deluded if he thought Scoop had done him any favors. He said the show had only created renewed interest in Andrew’s misdeeds, pointing, for an example, to an article in the Daily Mail about the obstacles Lownie has faced while trying to access official records of Andrew’s days as a trade ambassador for a biography he is working on.
Even with the prosthetics, you could still tell it was Rufus Sewell, and yes, Sewell is way too handsome and charismatic to play Prince Andrew. That is genuinely the biggest flaw, even if Sewell did a good job of showing Andrew’s clownishness. What I’m saying is that of course Andrew is happy about being played by Rufus Sewell, that casting was much better than Andrew deserved. As for the whole “Andrew could still be working for the family” stuff… if it was up the Windsors, they would totally let him be a working royal again and formal royal screwup. Hell, that’s pretty much the case now, except Andrew doesn’t have any patronages anymore.
Also: in a few months, we’ll get A Very Royal Scandal, which will stream on Prime. That version of the “Andrew interview” has been executive-produced by Emily Maitlis and Michael Sheen plays Andrew. I can’t wait to see how Sheen portrays Andrew, honestly.
Screencaps courtesy of the BBC, photos courtesy of Netflix and WENN.