[0:00]This is Simon interview one, soft sticks. >> Okay. Simon Charles Hartley Wilson, ex-foreign office diplomat. I've met the
[0:10]former Prince Andrew on five occasions over my career. The first time I met him was in Lisbon at the embassy when I was running the small political section
[0:21]there. And he was there as a naval officer. I have to say I was a little bit surprised about how sort of cocky he was. There was a small group of us went out for dinner
[0:31]with him and he accused my wife, who was sitting opposite him, of touching him up under the table. It
[0:40]was all put down to schoolboy humor and my wife had a passing resemblance to Sarah Ferguson at the time. And I think he was going through a bad
[0:50]patch with with his marriage and it was a little embarrassing because other people were there and and it's the old story. If the main person is
[1:02]laughing at their own jokes, then you have to sort of go along with it. Obviously, there were indications that that he was behaving a little bit
[1:12]out of the ordinary, shall we say? But I hadn't had a vast experience of meeting the royals at that stage. So
[1:21]I was a little taken aback by his his behavior. >> Prince Andrew will now take up a position promoting British trade around the world. While his new job carries no
[1:31]salary, it's all expenses paid. >> It was nine years later in 2002. He'd been appointed the year before as
[1:41]the international envoy for trade for Britain. I was the deputy ambassador at the British embassy in Bahrain and was organizing his visits basically and
[1:52]accompanying him on most of the meetings he went to. And most of us in the Foreign Office at that stage when he was appointed
[2:02]uh we're really pleased that uh he was in this position because he would open doors uh particularly in our area in the Gulf where there's the royal
[2:13]families and uh and they love to interact with one another. And so we thought that Prince Andrew would uh would do a great job there.
[2:23]Um but things started to go wrong from the from the word go. We started to get reams of instructions about his likes and dislikes in terms of food that he
[2:35]didn't drink alcohol, tea, or coffee but would drink still water, room temperature, no ice. Uh one thing that was noticeable uh which I didn't
[2:47]encounter with any other visit of a royal family which they always went very smoothly anyway was that his staff seemed to be petrified of him.
[2:58]Now that was very unusual because if you've been a private secretary or working in the team with uh one of the senior royals
[3:08]they were very proud to be working for them. They were happy. They didn't you know they loved coming on these foreign uh trips. But you really got the
[3:18]impression with Prince Andrew's staff that the that they were really uncomfortable all the time, treading on eggshells, didn't want to put a foot
[3:28]wrong. And of course that transferred out in the wider picture to us the embassy who were organizing things. We were treading on eggshells. >> As a special trade representative,
[3:42]Prince Andrew has helped Britain win deals worth millions of pounds. But the money he spends on traveling gets more attention. >> I think the problem with his role as the
[3:52]UK trade envoy was that although technically he was taking on an unpaid role, the reality was he was traveling with a
[4:04]huge number of staff. They all had to be paid for. He would often refuse to travel on commercial planes, even first class. He
[4:15]would want to use a private plane of the Queen's flight. He would not stay with the ambassador at the residence, which of course is free. He wanted to stay in
[4:25]the best hotel on the island, the royal suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Bahrain. And there were various plus he was bringing a much larger entourage
[4:36]than we had anticipated. He was bringing not only a private secretary but an equerry. He was bringing two lady clerks whose sole responsibility was to write
[4:48]thank you letters. One of them was doing an on-the-job training. There were two police officers and there was this chap called the valet who was
[4:59]carrying a 6-ft ironing board which we were unaware of till it arrived and then the ironing board got stuck in the revolving door of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel
[5:10]in Bahrain. This five-star hotel and I'd said to the valet, "Why on earth are you bringing this ironing board? Is this normal?" He said, "Yes, I carry it
[5:21]everywhere cuz I'm the only person that knows how to how to iron his royal highness's trousers." I said, "This is absolutely insane. This is the best hotel in the one of the best hotels in
[5:32]the Gulf." And this was the start we had before we'd even started the visit and there was a lot of extra what we called downtime
[5:42]that didn't really ever happen when I was handling any other royal visits. obviously you had a bit of a break between important meetings, but often there
[5:52]would be half a day of of downtime and we didn't know what was going on and we were told that the embassy didn't need to be involved. He was very
[6:03]keen on the Formula 1. So when he came to Bahrain on a second visit, he he stayed on for the inaugural meeting of the Formula 1 which was a
[6:15]long weekend. I think his family came out separately to join him for that. It was It's this sort of thing. It's tagging stuff on to expenses paid
[6:25]visits. So the actual cost of his role did become quite excessive and we've never really seen a proper breakdown of
[6:37]what was involved. We were told that he was making so much money for HMG in his trade role, but we haven't ever seen a constant
[6:47]analysis of how this worked. His role was actually quite simple. It's shaking hands,
[6:59]banging the drum and smiling. And yet he seemed to do the opposite most of the time. Even at meetings, we had a meeting with the king
[7:10]where the main topic was the sale of British Hawk aircraft to the Bahrainis and he just went off piste and said, "Why are you wanting to buy these
[7:21]planes? You can just lease them." And cuz everyone was absolutely shocked. I mean, obviously the Bahrainis could lease them, but the point is you don't offer that
[7:32]and this was extraordinary that he would do this. He was supposed to address British Business Forum of all the senior British businessmen on the island and a
[7:42]few other Gulf Arabs as well. And he just refused to get up and speak. It was just unbelievable. He was in in a bad mood. We don't know. The ambassador
[7:53]said, "Please say a few words." And he said, "No, you're the man to to to to speak." And then reluctantly took a few questions. But the whole room was just
[8:03]silent. You could hear a pin drop. It was just unbelievable behavior. And the same thing happened to the garden party where again with his team we'd agreed a
[8:13]small receiving line of some of the senior people in Bahrain in the British community, the heads of various societies. He shook my hand and I was just about to introduce him to the other
[8:25]people that we'd agreed he would meet. He just charged straight off into the into the garden to start talking to some other people.
[8:34]I mean, I I I I I couldn't work out what was going on, but I assumed it was an aberration during this visit that he was either a bit out of control, he was
[8:45]upset. But later on that year I went to a meeting of all the deputy ambassadors in the Gulf region. And I discovered that the same sort of thing had happened on
[8:56]every single visit. Whether it was Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait. He wouldn't stick to the program. He
[9:06]wouldn't look at the brief. I don't know whether he'd even read the brief when he went into these meetings. So this sort of arrogance and and entitlement was just shocking. And
[9:17]that's why we uh a few of us coined this name, His Buffoon Highness, uh to describe his visits. People dreaded that Andrew would be coming out on
[9:28]another visit to your patch cuz there'd be so many issues involved. And finally in India, I was running our equivalent of the Consulate General in Calcutta,
[9:38]which covers Eastern India, he had the same [clears throat] attitude. The Indian speech, again, he did deliver the speech in India, in Bombay, at this huge awards with all the top businessman
[9:49]in India, but in a terribly leaden delivery. And then, with and it wasn't in the program, he skedaddled off
[9:59]from this speech to go and attend a party at the richest man in in India, [clears throat] Mr. Ambani, without anyone knowing what the heck was going on.
[10:10]People did know that he was out of control, but he wasn't reined in. This was the problem. No one reined him in. He didn't seem to be accountable to anyone. The
[10:20]difficulty for us in the Foreign Service to write back publicly in open communications with the Foreign Office that he'd behaved appallingly on such
[10:31]and such a visit, well, your career is going to be on the line. I think what was surprising was that he lasted so long in the job. I mean, 10 years or 9
[10:41]years is a hell of a long time uh when there'd been clearly a lot of things going wrong. The question is, why didn't the government step in
[10:53]at an earlier stage? People felt they couldn't upset the royal family too much. There is a lot of deference. Why
[11:01]wasn't something done to rein him in? And then there were other aspects of his visits which we weren't sure what was
[11:12]going on when he had these this private time where they, as it subsequently appears, he may have been doing private business arrangements. Obviously, we didn't know anything about that at the
[11:22]time. Although on one occasion, on one visit to Bahrain, he did have with him a a a female business advisor who came to
[11:32]all the meetings but never said a thing. Uh and we didn't know what her role was, what she was supposed to do, but she attended all the royal events. Uh
[11:42]maybe she was advising him on on business opportunities. I don't know. We we never found out. One of the surprising issues that came
[11:52]up in the reconnaissance visit before Prince Andrew's first visit to Bahrain when I was there in 2002,
[12:02]uh was when his private secretary said tipped me off and said that they may be raising the issue of the sale of Sunninghill
[12:13]Park, the sprawling mansion that the Queen had given him on his marriage to Sarah Ferguson, and had been up for sale for a while for
[12:23]10 or 12 million pounds and uh hadn't moved. And I said, "Well, this is a bit unorthodox if it's in during any of the main
[12:34]meetings when it's an official visit." And then, of course, as we now know, it was sold for 3 million above the asking price to some very dodgy uh characters
[12:46]from Central Asia and handled by one of the top law firms in London. Where was the due diligence? Where were the red flags?
[12:57]When you or I move house, we're asked to prove A, B, and C. The first thing anyone would do if you've got money coming in from Kazakhstan or wherever
[13:08]would be a load of red flags, but these would just seem to be nodded through. When I uh took early retirement from the
[13:18]Foreign Office in 2010, uh I was approached by a journalist who knew that I'd had dealings with Prince Andrew and asked if I would write
[13:28]something. And I did write quite a a detailed report. My main concern was I thought Prince Andrew was bringing the monarchy into disrepute.
[13:39]And he wasn't being reined in by any of the officials. And this needed to be addressed. And in the light of what's happened subsequently, I'm glad to have been
[13:49]vindicated. And I think I had a lot of backhanded compliments, but uh now people have coming out of the woodwork and everyone's saying, "Oh, we knew this
[13:59]all along." Blah, blah, but no one said anything at the time. >> Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor appears to have knowingly shared confidential [music] information with Jeffrey Epstein when,
[14:10]as Prince Andrew, he was a UK trade envoy. >> I was, like everybody, absolutely shocked to see in the Epstein files that Prince Andrew had been forwarding
[14:21]government documents to Epstein. Uh usually in incredibly short order, as soon as he'd received them. We didn't see any of that. Uh but subsequently,
[14:33]there's been suspicion that this is what was happening during a lot of the visits. And it's come out that it was happening. And and various uh visit reports have been leaked to
[14:44]Epstein and stuff subsequently, which is a a great shock to the system. Because those are private and should not be disclosed to a third party, let alone
[14:54]someone of Epstein's background. Documents that would have given perhaps Jeffrey Epstein financial advantage in some of his wheeler-dealer activities.
[15:05]We don't know what the implications were financially for uh Prince Andrew. But it's a very dubious and upsetting uh
[15:15]set of events. One can only feel that their friendship was so close. He loved the lifestyle that Epstein was able to private jets, private islands,
[15:27]unbelievable wealth. Who himself has a dodgy background about where he got that wealth. But this speaks to the judgment of
[15:37]Andrew. He should never have got involved with anybody like that. This was a a real bad call and a terrible misjudgment.
[15:48]But at the end of the day, I think it was all to do with financial arrangements and I think that's what needs to be investigated. >> Bombshell arrest [music] in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.
[15:58]>> Ex-Prince Andrew has been arrested. >> I found when he was arrested quite like everybody else a real shock that it had finally come to this.
[16:09]I felt that this could have been avoided if people had acted on what they knew about 10 years previously. And there's likely to be even more stuff coming out
[16:19]and now there is a police investigation. I'm not privy to all the bits and pieces that they're looking at. Um one can't help feeling sorry that
[16:29]someone has fallen so low. But it was completely self-inflicted. And people who eventually get found out
[16:39]have a very really long fall ahead of them and that's what's happened now. And again, it's a just a very sad story for
[16:49]the royal family. Each family often has a bad apple. This bad apple has been rotten for a long time.
[17:01]And it's surprising that it wasn't dealt with earlier. He's had it coming. They thought he could get away with it all his life. His behavior was completely
[17:12]out of control and let's hope that we you really get to the bottom of it and put closure on this dreadful episode.