Emily Maitlis: ‘If You Don’t Jump Ship At 50, When Will You Dare?’

Her infamous royal scoop banished Prince Andrew from public life. She discusses what it's like to become the story – and her midlife epiphany.

Emily Maitlis

by Zing Tsjeng |
Updated on

Emily Maitlis's early days in the media did not go well. ‘I was a terrible journalist. I didn’t understand how stories worked. Something would always go wrong,’ she tells me of her first job as a reporter for a local radio station in Hong Kong. She’d interview then governor Chris Patten and her tape recorder would break, for instance. She’d leave a key passage out from a speech.

Thankfully for us – not so much for the political bigwigs she’s skewered over the years – Emily Maitlis persisted. The formidable broadcaster and former Newsnight anchor, once dubbed ‘the BBC’s secret weapon’, is now one of the most respected journalists of her generation. ‘I’m really pleased I stuck at it,’ she says understatedly over Zoom from her chic greige living room in London.

The Ontario-born, Sheffield-raised journalist has been on our TVs and in our ears for decades now, with lesser mortals – politicians of all stripes included – withering and losing their cool in the face of her prosecutorial questions.

In person, Maitlis is warm, engaging and self-deprecating, her chandelier earrings swaying vigorously as she recounts the many ways in which her News Agents podcast co-hosts take the piss out of each other – which for Maitlis includes ‘for being told to you-know-what by various politicians’.

In the dark days of Brexit, the nation let out a cheer at her exasperated side-eye while interviewing a flustered Barry Gardiner MP – a rare instance of an on-screen everywoman expressing how fed up we all were with prevaricating politicians. When Dominic Cummings broke lockdown rules, Maitlis’s opening monologue on Newsnight captured the prevailing mood of public anger.

Then, of course, there was her infamous Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew, which was appointment viewing: an hourlong, sit-down meeting with just abou enough air-time for the now disgraced prince to dig his own grave and slide into it feet-first. Who can forget his bizarre alibi for the night Epstein trafficking victim Virginia Giuffre claims to have met him – that he was at a Pizza Express in Woking? Or that it was impossible for her to have danced with the sweaty prince in Tramp nightclub – because he couldn’t sweat?

That explosive interview is now the subject of A Very Royal Scandal, a three-part Prime Video series starring Ruth Wilson as Maitlis and Michael Sheen as the prince. With The Last King Of Scotland screenwriter Jeremy Brock on writing duties, the series sits alongside newsroom dramas like the Harvey Weinstein exposé She Said: fast-paced, propulsive explorations of power, the men who wield it and those who might take them down.

It follows hot on the heels of the Netflix film Scoop, based on a memoir by former Newsnight producer Sam McAlister and starring Gillian Anderson as Maitlis. Unlike Anderson, however, Wilson got to spend quality time with Maitlis as the latter signed up to A Very Royal Scandal as executive producer. Ever the diplomat, Maitlis won’t be drawn into comparing the two portrayals, but Wilson’s feels much more, well, real.

While Anderson plays her as a stately Paxman figure, A Very Royal Scandal captures all the fidgety idiosyncrasies of this otherwise steely broadcaster – the sense of internal chaos whirling below the surface. ‘She plays me like I’m an elastic band – it’s a sort of restless energy,’ Maitlis explains. ‘She found that inner character of me that I couldn’t have described to you until I saw it in her.’

How does she feel about becoming the story, which journalists are routinely warned against? ‘I think of the story as being more the world of journalism and the world of royalty. We’re trying to tell what happens when those two worlds kind of come up against each other.’

Amazingly, she says, Prince Andrew and his staff were ‘pretty happy’ with the interview after they wrapped on set. In fact, it was his private secretary, Amanda Thirsk, who asked them to include his ‘no sweat’ excuse. ‘It was extraordinary for us, because we’d finished the interview. I said at the end, [because] I wanted to be really fair, “Is there anything that you feel you didn’t get the chance to say?” It was Thirsk who then came forward and said, “You didn’t give him the chance to explain his alibi.”’

Did she think Prince Andrew had picked Newsnight for the interview because she was a woman? ‘I think it would have been an odd look to choose another man to do an interview like that. I don’t think it was about him underestimating me. He just thought he had all the answers – even when we finished the interview. It’s a hard thing to explain, but he didn’t feel at any point that it went particularly badly.’

Almost two million tuned in for the interview, with clips broadcast around the world to stunned and outraged audiences. Then, not long after writing her self-deprecatingly titled memoir Airhead, Maitlis stepped away from the BBC – an institution she had called home for two decades – to set up her daily show The News Agents at Global, a commercial radio company.

Was there anything the BBC could have done to make her stay? ‘I wasn’t thinking like that, actually,’ she ponders. She’d just hit 50 and, in her words, ‘Fifty is a weird milestone. If you’re not going to do it then, you think, when am I ever going to dare jump ship?’

Four years in, the show has hit 100 million downloads and Maitlis is a free agent. There has been her triumphant return to telly with Channel 4’s general election coverage and The News Agents USA, a spin-off following the American elections, which Maitlis knows better than to predict. ‘If the Democrats are honest with themselves, they can’t imagine going back to a BK – before Kamala – time, because they’ve seen what she has done in terms of closing the enthusiasm gap,’ she says.

‘Does that mean she’s gonna win hands down? No, I don’t think it does.’ Prince Andrew, however, has been in deep freeze ever since her interview with him aired. He’s been stripped of peerages and military titles and was even sidelined at the Queen’s funeral. Even now, however, Maitlis goes back and forth as to what that earthshattering interview accomplished.

‘I’ve tried to be really honest with myself. I’ve said, “Well, what did it actually change?”’ she says. ‘If I were one of those [Epstein] victims, would I think that there was closure? I guess I wouldn’t.’ As she points out, ‘They’ll never get answers from Epstein because he’s dead. They won’t get their day in court with Prince Andrew because he’s made a settlement, and in the United States that doesn’t mean a recognition of guilt.’

Still, she thinks of the interview as illustrative of the power of journalism: ‘We were the ones that had the chance to ask the questions on behalf of so many others who wanted to hear those answers. I hope we did them justice.’

Those weighty concerns are also testament to the journey that Maitlis herself has travelled – you’d think, at least, that rookie journalist back in Hong Kong would be impressed.

‘A Very Royal Scandal’ is available to stream on Prime Video from 19 September

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