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  • 18 hours ago
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00:00When I started this book, I had a suspicion that perhaps Prince Andrew particularly wasn't the most honest of the royal members of the royal family, but I didn't realise the level of basically cover-up that had gone on to protect him.
00:17I think I was vilified when the book came out for reporting that he had actually been protected and actually enabled in his work, particularly as a trade envoy between 2001 and 2011, but I think it's now becoming very clear that this is actually part of a much bigger problem than just Sarah Ferguson and Andrew.
00:39Now, when I started this book, I actually got in touch with Sarah Ferguson, whose mother had been at school with my mother-in-law, she was also at school with Diana's mother, and I think about three of Philip's mistresses, and I say it was quite a small school.
00:53And she came and we had a meeting, or on the actual day, that Andrew settled with Virginia Giffey. She disappeared down to our bathroom. She appeared with one of her products that I think was ostensibly for your face, but we found it much more effective on recalcitrant pans.
01:11She came in and presented me with one of her Milton Boone's books. I gave her Traitor King, so she knew exactly where I might be coming from, and she decided not to cooperate. In fact, she told all her friends not to talk to me.
01:27I had moments where I would go into interviews with people and actually find that they would tell me to leave. I had a lot of opposition doing this book. The Foreign Office told ambassadors not to talk to me, which only encouraged a number of them.
01:41And we had legal letters, even before the book came out, from Sarah Ferguson, and they said they were monitoring my social media and stuff.
01:52So, I mean, they were clearly not very keen on this book coming out, and I think I'm very grateful to the people who did speak to me.
01:58Of the 3,000 people that I approached, and I used all sorts of odd things, electoral rolls, LinkedIn, Facebook pages to find people, old school lists, 300 spoke to me, a lot of them on the record, about half of them on the record.
02:15And this is unusual for a royal book, where it's very rare for people to come forward.
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