Why didn’t the BBC ask Prince William about Andrew?

0:28When people turn to telehealth or weight loss, they're looking for real support.

0:33This is a Global Player original podcast. Part of feeling comfortable talking about mental health is understanding it. And if you've got guys who have really gone about trying to really learn about what feelings are, why we feel like we do, what can we do about it, that's part of the conversation too. We need more male role models out there kind of talking about it and normalising it so that it becomes something that is second nature to all of us. That is Prince William on Radio 1 today, talking about the hugely important subject of mental health. But another vitally important subject is Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and the Epstein files.

1:14On that, he said nothing and equally was asked nothing. The royal family find themselves right in the middle of this national conversation about Jeffrey Epstein. yet there's literal radio silence from them on air. So do we need to redefine the rules of how we talk to the royals or not? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:41The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. And as we come on air at 20 past one, we're reading breaking news that Bedfordshire police are reviewing Epstein files in relation to private flights in and out of Luton Airport. This follows news of an investigation into private flights going in and out of Stansted Airport. The investigation centering around whether trafficked girls on Epstein's planes, on Epstein's flights, were coming in and out of the UK. So I think that gives you a sense, as we record, of how central much of this conversation is to the news that we are reporting every single day about Epstein, about the files, about the wrongdoing, about the paedophilia, and of course, about the connection to the very centre of the royal family, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who we should say denies all criminal wrongdoing.

2:39Look, we spoke yesterday on the podcast, a different story, but sort of the same story about whether Metropolitan Police, Royal Protection Officers, had got too close to their principles too close to the people they were looking after and therefore turned a blind eye to things that were happening and shouldn't have been happening and today it's the broadcasters where you wrestle with how close a relationship can you have with buckingham palace or clarence house or whichever palace it happens to be kensington palace that you had prince william appearing on a very important podcast today on Radio 1 talking about mental health.

3:19It was a panel discussion. But at no time do you address that question. And you think there's no way that a serving politician would be allowed to go on the radio and not answer a question about the central issue of the day. I know you've come to talk about the economy. But first of all, we need to ask you, Minister, about X or Y or Z. and you hear it every single day. And yet there was Prince William, not often in a radio studio, not being asked that. And I just think we kind of had a discussion in the office about why is that? Let us peel back the curtain a little bit to some of the things that we still don't know and some of the things that we do know, i.e.

4:03how a broadcast interview is set up and how it works and what happened in this particular case. And we should say we've got calls into Radio 1. And what we don't know at this point is whether they asked to address the question of Prince Andrew, ex-Prince Andrew, or whether it was never on the table at all. Now, what I would say is in all our doings, if you are about to speak to somebody who is pretty influential, pretty powerful, a member of the royal family, it is not unusual to do a kind of pre-interview. You send through areas of interest, not your questions, but you say, we'd like to talk about this, this and this.

4:38And you will get a response saying, that's all fine. When we first tried to speak to Prince Andrew, months before Epstein was rearrested, months before he died, we sent through a list of areas of interest. And I remember very clearly the palace circling around the word Epstein and saying he won't talk about this. As a result of that, we dropped the interview completely. We just didn't do it. And I think it went somewhere else because we decided that that red line was not a good way of starting. That was months before the actual. It was months before. It was in 2019, but it was around sort of January, February of that year, long before Epstein was in prison, long before he died.

5:15But the point is that we asked the question. They said no. And as a result, we said, I don't think we want that interview. Now, I guess in this situation, if Prince William is offered up, it's pretty hard to turn him down. He's the future monarch and he's talking about, as you said, really important issues. We are so conscious of the number of people that are struggling with their mental health in this country right now. It is totally understandable that he wants, as somebody who's always espoused mental health charities and the importance of therapy and talking, it's utterly understandable that he wants to talk about that and prioritise that.

5:55But it is really hard to calculate what happened in that conversation where a producer said, well, surely you've got Prince Andrew's nephew sitting here. You've got the future monarch sitting here. You've got the king's son sitting here. And what, we're not going to ask about Epstein? We're not going to mention that? We're not going to talk about mental health in relation to the victims? They've already expressed in a statement their thoughts, their condolences for the victim. So if they're doing that in a statement, as they did before Prince William went to Saudi Arabia last week, why wouldn't they want to say that out loud?

6:37Why wouldn't they want to engage in that conversation on air for people to hear that they care and they think about this? because the corollary is that if you read the newspaper cuttings right now, there is no shortage of off-the-record briefings, sources close to, saying the Prince of Wales argued for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to be banished from royal life seven years ago, before the rots further set in, according to a new biography. Well, presumably a source. Hello magazine, two days ago. Sources have gone further, with one friend telling hello. Everyone knows William's feelings about his uncle.

7:13He's never had a close relationship with him. So this stuff is being dripped out, presumably, I don't know, by a palace press officer or friends of the prince or maybe even the prince himself. You don't know when you read stuff like that. But it seems that the royal family are happy to let know their feelings about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. but God forbid they should ever say it out loud. And I just think we would not accept that from a politician. We would just say, I'm sorry, you're not coming in the studio unless you say, agree that you're going to take questions on this. And I, you know, it is a generally interesting question of whether the deference that we show the royal family is just anachronistic now.

7:57I think it's such a good question. And I think the response to your question about politicians is this, that you are not Chancellor for life. You are not Housing Secretary for life. You are Housing Secretary, etc., because you have been voted in by democratic means to serve a job in a role for four or five years, whatever your length of parliament is. With the royals, we have already made a calculation that they are above the democratic process, that they are not part of the democratic process. They don't even get a vote, right? And they don't get elected. And they don't get elected. And so I suppose this is where it gets really confusing that we have already tried to redefine them as totally other.

8:43They're not people that come in every day to the radio studio. I mean, that's why you want to hear from them, because there is a scarcity value. Right. We don't actually sit them down. We don't ever ask them what they feel. So the fact that, you know, off the back of Prince William talking, I would say, in a pretty generic way about mental health, everyone's saying, isn't it wonderful to have a prince who opens up about his feelings? He didn't open up about his feelings. He said it's really important to talk about mental health. Yeah, you know, nobody's going to disagree with that. We love the fact that he's able to say that, but it doesn't take us anywhere intimate or anywhere that is sort of in any way revelatory.

9:20And maybe that's the point that the royals figure that once you open the door, one crack, that's it. It has changed forever. The genie is out. You can't then say to the next interview, oh, I've talked about Andrew. I don't want to talk about him again. Or I've talked about my relationship with Harry. I don't want to talk about it again. the point is that we have got to a place where we are demanding more of the royals now because something has changed something has changed and i think the question of how they're going to respond to that is absolutely critical now look the 19th century idea was that sort of monarchy was magical you know i think badger talked about that and you know the magic within the sprinkling of magic over the royal family and that you've got to believe in the magic otherwise the royal family itself looks meaningless.

10:11Look, we've got a situation now where Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is facing the most serious allegations and you say he's denied the wrongdoing, but we also know that he was untruthful in his interview to you about having broken off all contact with Jeffrey Epstein. We've seen many more allegations. We've seen pretty kind of compromising photographs that have appeared from the Epstein files. We have also learned about him briefing, sending kind of notes about some of the envoy work he was doing on behalf of the trade ministry in this country and telling other people what was going on. So there are some pretty serious questions.

10:48And then you are left with two words, accountability and transparency, neither of which we have ever had from the royal family because we haven't sought that degree of accountability and transparency. But I think people have now reached a point where they say enough you know Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has some pretty serious questions to answer to the British authorities to the various police forces investigating flights that have been coming in to the UK to what he has said also to the Congressional Oversight Committee in the United States which is trying to get to the bottom of what happened and the idea that the old shroud of secrecy that used to envelop the royal family is still working in 2026, I don't think it washes.

11:33Yeah. And I think it's important to say that it's probably us that have changed, not them. I mean, no one can look back over the history of the monarchy and say, Andrew's the first wrong one, right? I mean, you know, Richard III, kind of memorably not such a great guy with his own nephews. You know, we have had in that line of succession, probably, allegedly, murderers. I mean, misogynists, rapists, God knows whatever else, you know, within the royal family. So it's not as if it's not as if we've. But Richard III didn't have social media to contend with. He didn't. And he didn't have a hungry population who was starting perhaps to question the very legitimacy of this God ordained family.

12:22Exactly. And if you look at the history of the monarchy... I'm sure we'll get corrected, and I'm sure there was somebody at the time who was questioning the God-ordained family, of which Richard III was a succession. Yeah. But if you look at the history of the royal family in the 20th century, which was an enormous change from the deference of the Victorian era and empire and all the rest of it through to kind of the end of the 20th century, post the death of Diana and all the rest of it, the royal family has had to change. You know, it's not like it hasn't changed at all. It's had to change because of the abdication crisis.

12:57Public opinion wouldn't accept it that a divorcee could marry the heir to the throne and to become the king. And, you know, so there was an abdication. You look at what's happened again and again over various bits of the royal family where they have kind of thought, OK, you know, were we out of touch when Diana died? Should we have been more responsive to public opinion? Did we need to come back and show that we were concerned when, you know, the rest of Britain was mourning and losing its head? And why wasn't the Queen outside Buckingham Palace speaking to people? I think that those things are where the royal family has had to change.

13:31OK, but just stop there because I'm really interested in this. Is it that it hit something that was fashionable at the time, that Tony Blair tapped into this kind of need for people to therapise and weep and hear about Diana? And if you look back on it now, do you say, actually, the Queen was probably doing the most decent thing of all, which was protecting the boys, protecting little kids who just lost their mum, you know. And in 2026, I could also see the argument that you sort of hold fast and you go, sorry, that comes next. Public sort of performance comes second to our role as the family first.

14:07So going back to an important analogy you made a moment ago about, you know, they don't face election and they're not, you know, a chancellor is here today, gone tomorrow. And then another chancellor of the exchequer replaces them. That what they are dependent on is the general consent and support of the public, that there has to be a tacit contract between us, the public, ordinary citizens and them, the royal family. and if that phrase and if that breaks then the monarchy ceases to exist because people will say no yeah and i think that this is such a moment now with andrew mountbatten windsor where i'm not sure it washes or is good enough for just off the record briefings saying oh i'm very concerned about him i've never been close to him but not addressing it in public okay so if i was the king now, if I was King Charles, I think I would be trying to weigh up whether the acts that I took last October, which were ahead of the game, actually, in terms of the Epstein files, removing the title, kicking him out of Royal Lodge, basically making it known that he was no longer part of the royal family as such.

15:21Does King Charles think, thank God I got ahead of things and did what I did then because that showed willing, you know, the first head of state actually to act upon stuff that would later be uncovered in the Epstein files. Or is he now thinking, by doing that, I open the door and actually the public appetite now is ravenous and it wasn't enough to remove a title because as soon as you remove a title, you have to remove his place in the succession. As soon as you remove Royal Lodge, you should remove Sandringham as well. As soon as you say he's got questions to answer, you're essentially saying I've got questions to answer too.

16:01And I think that is at the nub of this, whether you think by sort of showing, showing your working, showing a start to how much you do care about this story, you are making things better for yourself or worse. And at this point, the king clearly felt that in October he was separating Andrew from the rest of the royal family. what we're saying now is he hasn't that the royal family itself is being dragged into this and if we hear from the king if we hear from william if we hear from others does that stop then does it go away do we say oh thanks very much that's that's cleared that up i don't think we do well the interesting thing is that you know we talk about the fact that prince william hasn't said anything on the record about this in terms of his lips moving and hearing him talk about it But he did an interview with the actor Eugene Levy, you know, from Schitt's Creek, about how he saw his future role as monarch.

16:56In that, he says, believe me, the monarchy has to change. It sounds like the monarchy will be shifting in a slightly different direction. I think it's safe to say that change is on my agenda. Change for good. And I embrace that and I enjoy that change. I don't fear it. That's the bit that excites me, is the idea of being able to bring some change. Not overly radical change, but changes that I think need to happen. I think he is absolutely signed up for some of this stuff. So I wonder whether he wants to talk, but others around him don't want him to. Or the broadcasters, maybe the BBC was, you know, the Royal Unit said, we've got this, we can't possibly go there.

17:37I don't know. I'll tell you what's really interesting, actually. You were away last week, but you will have followed the Saudi trip that William did. and there is a point where he's doing the royal walkabout and we should sort of explain a little bit of the architecture, which is, I mean, I've never been a royal correspondent. No, no, no. But essentially there is what's called an invisible deal whereby you sort of follow them around and you take pictures of the elephants or you take pictures of the football match or whatever and you might get a couple of words at the end of the line but you don't really get much of an interview.

18:07You don't really get intimate access to any of the people. You hope they'll come back on the plane. When you're travelling around with them, You hope that they will come back and say, how's the trip going? And are you doing, you know, you hope for that because that's vital. Yeah. But that is, you don't really talk to your subjects, I suppose, is the truth. I mean, you are the subjects, but you don't talk to the subject of your report. And yet, as William was doing this walk about, Prince William was doing this walk about, somebody shouted a question of like, are you going to talk about your dodgy uncle or something like that?

18:36Now, when I first saw that being reported on Sky News, it described it as a heckle. but actually it wasn't a heckle it was a journalist asking the question and i do think that puts us in a different mindset which is you know when tony blair was in tokyo in the aftermath of the iraq war in 2003 after the death of david kelly the suicide of david kelly somebody yelled out a journalist yelled out have you got blood on your hands prime minister and apparently for blair this was quite a chilling sort of shocking moment. But it was considered totally legitimate that you were asking your head of government in the wake of a terrible national disgrace what had actually gone on.

19:19And yet when William was asked that by a journalist, it was considered a sort of aberration. Bad form. Bad form, sweep that on the carpet. Oh, sorry about that, sir. And I just wonder, you know, I wonder whether that will change now, whether if you are one of those reporters, if you are on the spot, if you are following the royals around, will you ask those questions or does your flight back on the plane depend upon you not doing that? Look, I don't think we'll get to a phase. Rightly so. If we're going to continue with a royal family, we can't treat them like politicians, everyday politicians where you're just shouting and doorstepping them and with the latest question on this, that or the other.

19:58Because actually, then what's the point of having a royal family that is above politics? They'll be part of the daily commentary. But I do think that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and the seriousness of the allegations that seem to get worse. I think that they can't just do this and say, no, no, that's not the way we do things. I think there are certain questions that have to be addressed if the royal family is to move on. And just to do stuff which ignore the elephant in the room, I just don't think is good enough. But sometimes it's us that ignore the elephant in the room. And I think, you know, to be honest, we should talk about what it's like as a broadcaster to sort of feel the pressure on your back of asking a question that you know is going to make you really unpopular and how difficult that is sometimes.

20:42Because to give you an example, in 2014, I was invited to India to interview Bill Clinton. And Bill Clinton was talking about women's rights and he was talking about women's freedoms. And it was in the middle of a goat farm in Lucknow, which we had only been able to get to in part of their convoy. And I was having this conversation with my producer at the time. if we're talking about women's rights with Bill Clinton, we have to talk about Monica Lewinsky, right? She'd just written this piece for Vanity Fair, talked about a humiliation derby as a young woman of what she was put through. And we had this really robust sort of row, debate, conversation about whether I could ask Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky.

21:29And what you have to understand is that in that setting, everything was against us. There was sort of, it wasn't like an office. It wasn't like we were sitting amongst sort of goat poo and marijuana plants and women in saris and sort of buckets of water. And somehow I was sort of made to feel like it would have been totally like off colour, totally off topic. You know, how can you do that? How can you bring your own sort of Western idiosyncrasies to the middle of India where we're actually talking about, you know, water purification for an entire population? And so sometimes these things are set up in a way that makes it almost impossible for the journalist to go to the place that they want to go to, even though their head is thinking this will look ridiculous if I don't.

22:18I think that's such a vivid example of the pressures that you face. But if we only ever ask the questions that the palace or the Clintons or whoever want us to ask, and it's a sort of choreographed thing whereby it's all kind of broadly speaking. Anything you'd like to say to the nation. Then we're just a branch of advertising on behalf of those people. And that is not our job. Our job is to kind of, you know, at times. Discomfort. Yeah, to ask uncomfortable questions. And because otherwise people think there is a conspiracy between the broadcasters, between the police and the principals, between everybody, that there is an elite.

22:58And there is so much toxicity at the moment and so much mistrust that us not asking those questions contributes towards that. OK, so let's just be sort of cheeky for a moment and imagine the interview, the panel. I mean, again, it was a panel with William, with Prince William. And obviously the topic is mental health. Now, if you as the interviewer had said, oh, fuck it, I'm just going to do it. Right. They're in the middle of this panel. What happens if you go, look, we've talked a lot about mental health. You know, we've talked about your own struggles. Let's talk about something that is right in the middle of the national conversation now.

23:36The victims of Jeffrey Epstein and your uncle's potential contribution to that. What is the worst that would have happened? there would have been an almighty row between the bbc and the palace particularly if the bbc hadn't got permission to do that and remember when the bbc or itv have pissed off the palace you know suddenly the queen's speech as was back in the day would no longer be on the bbc it would be done by itv can you really do you think that would happen this time i don't know but but they were in a different world now aren't we we're we are in a different world but you know they've got lollipops to give out they've got lollipops right prince william would like to do something on such and such but do you want the lollipop if well that's the wrong lollipop well that's what i think that's got to change yeah i think that it's say it requires the broadcasters now to say look we have to ask this question yeah things have moved on and it actually it's better for you guys to do this and sorry i know this isn't the way you would like it orchestrated or managed or choreographed But we are going to do it differently because we have to.

24:43And I don't think that the national broadcast, the BBC has got to that stage yet. And I suspect others wouldn't either. And so that is the problem you have, that the change needs to happen. But who's going to be the first one and say, we've got to be brave here. And we're either going to do this thing on mental health and ask a question, which you could do very elegantly. And it could be one question and move on. And it gives Prince William the chance to say something on the record that is being set off the record. It might have been a blessed relief for him. Yeah, exactly. But it takes a bit of bravery and no one quite has got to that position yet where they're going to jump.

25:18It's like all those wildebeest waiting to cross the Mara River for the migration and they're all sort of sitting there at the edge. I love a wildebeest. So do I. We'll be back in just a moment with the cancel culture of Donald Trump and why he's trying to shut down a Texas state politician.

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26:44The News Agents. You know who is not one of my guests tonight? That's Texas State Representative James Tallarico. He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network's lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast. Then, then I was told in some uncertain terms that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on. And because my network clearly doesn't want us to talk about this, let's talk about this. You've probably heard. That is Stephen Colbert from The Late Show doing what he was told not to do. And what had happened was that the chief executive of the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, had got on to the owners of CBS, Paramount, and said, no, no, you can't have Tararico on unless you're going to have all the other candidates who are going for the primary race for the Senate seat in Texas.