As others have noted Scoop, the Netflix film about the Newsnight interview with the Duke of York that ended his career as a working royal in 2019, wasn’t a scoop. It exposed no new information. The story that the duke stayed in touch with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein after he was convicted of sex offences belonged to the photo-journalist Jae Donnelly, who appears briefly in Scoop, taking the famous photograph of Epstein and Prince Andrew in Central Park.
Emily Maitlis, who conducted the interview, elicited no meaningful apology to Virginia Giuffre, the woman who claimed she was trafficked to Andrew by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and with whom he settled out of court for £12 million — the late Queen is thought to have contributed — without admitting wrongdoing.
So, it wasn’t a scoop though this oddly self-congratulatory film — journalists do their job, and adequately, not brilliantly — thinks it is.
What is it then? A late episode of The Crown, I fear: a work of dramatic tragedy. Scoop is not about the duke’s actions — we don’t know what his actions were, and the film takes us no further, it remains Andrew said, Virginia said. It is about his character: specifically the inability of a man raised in a doll’s house to inhabit a real world, and how easy it is to mock such a person even if you have colluded in his fantasy life.
The real Andrew interview, which I turned back to, was agony to watch: a fairytale creature smashing into glass
It showed how deference will ruin you if you are a weak character, and the self-deception of princes and paupers. The on-screen victim is not Giuffre, who doesn’t appear, or Sam McAlister (played by Billie Piper), the Newsnight producer labouring under office suspicion because she is not a bourgeois. It is the duke’s adviser Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes) who believes in his innocence, emitting a gentle credulousness that ruins her. It should have been a film about her: another woman who touched the royal family, and whose innocence was lost. I turned from Scoop, which I found dull — I know that journalists make telephone calls, and that we don’t react when an interviewee reveals more of themselves than they mean to, and Maitlis doesn’t — to the real interview. It is still agony to watch due to Andrew’s blazing lack of self-awareness.
In the absence of an outcome, that is what we are left with. It is obvious that Andrew considers himself a superior being (he has been taught that, I think) and he tried hard, even piteously, to conceal it, probably because his advisers told him so. “I’m an engaging person,” he said, on why he wanted to socialise with Epstein the ghoul: his parties in New York were cosmopolitan. Then there was royal life, and its odd customs, which the duke understands, but thinks we don’t.
You held a birthday party for Maxwell at Sandringham, Maitlis told him. No, he replied, very seriously, as if this was an essential point. It was a shooting party. Epstein visited royal palaces as more of a plus one than a friend. Andrew understood the trafficking of women, he told Maitlis: he was patron of the NSPCC’s Full Stop campaign. He visited Epstein in New York because it was “chicken” not to end a friendship in person, and he stayed on for four days because it was “convenient”. Surely, he of all people, could afford a hotel?
Then it collapsed into farce. He hasn’t been able to sweat since the Falklands War (he couldn’t have sweated, as Giuffre claimed) and he found Pizza Express in Woking memorable, and that is an alibi in his mind. He doesn’t know where the bar is in Tramp, so he can’t have bought Giuffre a drink there. It was, as I said, agony: a fairytale creature smashing into glass.
I wondered if he is stupid, and if he hid in this stupidity, or if it was a combination of both, or none. We can’t know. In the end Scoop offers no small factual insights, but it does offer one great existential one: the slow and certain end of British deference to authority. That is the story, and I suspect it will have greater consequences on our politics that we know.
