Royal Blush

At the height of Operation Yewtree – back when you could barely go a day without some new celebrity sex offender getting themselves splashed across the front pages – we were handed a very interesting document. A copy of the performance notes written up on Sir Cliff Richard’s closed-door interview prep.

A few months prior, South Yorkshire’s nonce squad had broken into Sir Cliff’s mansion and live-streamed their raid on the BBC. Cliff – who was exonerated of all charges – was understandably eager to go on TV and clear his name, but his team knew that his first public response would be critical and felt that it was worth taking the time to do things properly.

So as part of his media training they set up a fake TV studio, loaded a blank tape into a camera, hired an actor play the part of a newscaster and then had a crack team of PR handlers, media analysts and legal advisors pore over the tape to make notes on how well Cliff responded under full test conditions.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Cliff’s first attempt was more than a little rough. Guided by anger, and letting personal embarrassment cloud his judgment, Cliff fired off some very unpolished, emotional answers; answers that almost certainly would have caused him even larger headaches had they been broadcast on national television. But, with some hard graft and a little fine tuning, Cliff eventually managed to clear his name, rehabilitate his reputation and get back to work without any lingering suspicion.

That document is now more than five years old, but it’s been back in our mind this week after seeing Prince Andrew’s hour-long squirm on the BBC: a masterclass in just how bad things can get when you don’t heed good advice.

Presumably, his objective in sitting down with Emily Maitlis was to put an end to the constant speculation about his relationship with the dead paedophile and suspected international child-trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, so that he could draw a line under it all and move on.

Instead, he ended up broadening the scope of people’s interest in the story. First by talking about attending a birthday party at Pizza Express in Woking. Then by discussing the 30+ year dry patch of his life in which he claims he was physically unable to sweat. Then by trying to reinforce a weird theory that the photo of him with his arm around his accuser was doctored (pivoting from the previous defence of “his fingers are actual chubbier than the photo suggests” to the new line “I never went upstairs in that house”).

As an exercise in damage control, it could hardly have been worse. It has since been described as a “car-crash” and “reputational suicide”, all of which makes his reported thoughts of taking a second run at it all the more baffling.

Still, it took Cliff Richard more than one go to get things right (even though his first attempts were smartly kept under lock and key). So to make sure Prince Party Hands stands at least a fighting chance of getting through his second round, we thought we’d do him a favour and pass across some of the expert media advice that was given to Cliff when he stood accused of similar crimes.

(We’ll accept both New Years or Birthday Honours as payment for this, Andy. Thanks in advance.)

Mind Your Language

Creating an effective soundbite is a tricky balancing act. Obviously a good one shouldn’t sound overly rehearsed, but it definitely shouldn’t be left to chance either. Freestyling under the pressure of these types of accusation can often cause serious problems.

For example, when Cliff Richard sat down for his mock interview, he emphatically declared “There is no child porn in my life!” – a soundbite so perfectly packaged for a front page, Cliff could probably pick up a few shifts on a subs desk. It’s understandable why he thought it might have been a sensible thing to say in the moment, but his advisors were quick to point out the potential pitfalls of having the words “child porn” plastered next to your face on the front of the nation’s papers. As such, he tended to temper his phrasing moving forward.

To Prince Andrew’s credit, his style was so freewheeling that he managed – for the most part – to avoid handing the papers any usable quotes on a platter. Instead, he painted more impressionist pictures with his words. Viewers were treated to the bizarre mental image of him bumbling around a birthday party in the Woking branch of Pizza Express (while keeping a very keen eye on the date and time) but he articulated it all in such a weird way that there was no snappy quote for the papers to pounce on.

It’s a very unorthodox technique, but it almost worked.

All except for the section where he was describing his erections as “positive actions” and implying that every erection he’s had has been so memorable that there is no way one of them could have slipped his mind.

Or the bit where he described Epstein’s conduct (which, to remind you, includes a conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution, multiple federal charges of sex trafficking children, and all sorts of civil cases brought by women accusing him of assault, unwanted sexual advances and rape) as “unbecoming”.

Or the bit when he said that his biggest problem was that he was probably “too honourable”.

But other than that… good job?

Body Talk

For some reason, whenever a well-known personality is facing down these charges on camera, they always seem to end up talking about some peculiar quirk of their intimate bodily function.

When Cliff Richard was rehearsing for his big interview, one of his genuine lines of defence was that he had excellent bladder control and because he was able to hold in his piss for hours on end he couldn’t possibly have assaulted someone in a stadium toilet. His bladder was so strong that it was just medically impossible.

The advisors reviewing the rushes of this taped interview gently recommend that Cliff not bring up his “bladder, or any other inherently private issue” in an interview, as doing so would make discussions of his bodily function fair game as talking points.

They were pretty much on the money with that assessment too because when Prince Andrew thought it would be a swell idea to explain at length how getting shot at in the Falklands left him physically unable to sweat, that’s exactly what happened.

Clearly, Andrew thought this was an iron-clad way of contradicting an accusers’ account of how they met. A perfect, Johnny Cochran-esque “If the pits are dry, it must be a lie” reasoning. Open-and-shut.

Have the media reacted the way he’d hoped? No. Of course not. Instead, all the morning shows and news sites are roping in their resident medical experts to discuss the finer points of anhidrosis, the function of sweat glands and whether or not an overdose of adrenaline in the 80s is an effective alibi against accusations of sexual misconduct in 2001.

Plus it leads to headlines like this.

Internet Rumours

Another thing that Cliff’s handlers were keen to steer him away from was waffling on about rumours he’d read about himself on the internet – and with good reason. There are all sorts of mad, unverified claims on the internet; and a lot of them are about Cliff Richard.

In his earliest attempts at being interviewed, Cliff couldn’t keep from going off-message, constantly turning the conversation around to the strangers on the internet who were saying that he had ordered the hit on Jill Dando, or that he had children buried in his vineyard, or that he knew the whereabouts of Madeline McCann.

It’s not hard to see why accusations like those would weigh heavy on a sensitive soul like Cliff, but – as his advisors rightly pointed out – his primary goal in the interview was to quash any remaining concerns about his investigation. Not to spark any new ones about whether or not he should be questioned about his involvement in the unsolved Dando murder.

Prince Andrew almost made it through his hour without directing viewers’ attention to the internet, but he stumbled at the last hurdle. When Maitlis asked him, as a wrap-up question, if this interview signalled a sea change in the way that Royals would now respond to scandals, Andrew clearly had some thoughts to get off his chest about social media and the sorts of things that get published there.

You may already have an inkling as to why it’s a bad idea for Prince Andrew to encourage anyone to run a search for him on the internet. In case you don’t, here is a non-exhaustive list of scandalous stories – some real; some imagined – that you can find about Prince Andrew if you ever log on to the internet:

– Prince Andrew once took a flight aboard Epstein’s Lolita Express plane with Naomi Campbell
– Prince Andrew had his mother, the Queen of England, arrange for Jeffrey Epstein to be murdered in his Manhattan prison cell
– Prince Andrew is a member of the Illuminati and was sworn in by a soul-scraping ceremony that left him with a black eye
– Prince Andrew is a shape-shifting lizard-like reptilian alien, masquerading as a human to help him secure world domination
– Prince Andrew was photographed wrapping his arm around a 17 year old’s waist in Ghislaine Maxwell’s Belgravia home, shortly before the 17 year old says he had sex with her

Quite why he thought it might be a good idea to alert viewers to these reports and rumours is something only he can know. Maybe he was hoping they’d all just stumble across the stories that he’d been secretly dating Kylie Minogue?

With Friends Like These…

In times of great stress, it’s common for people to turn to their friends for support. When Cliff Richard was first questioned under the glare of the fake studio lights, he seemed to take great solace in talking to the interviewer about his good friend Gloria Hunniford.

So much so, that his handlers had to tell him to knock it off.

If PR experts warned Cliff away from talking too much about a sweet, beloved TV personality like Gloria Hunniford, then you can imagine how horrified they’d have been to watch Prince Andrew repeatedly lean on his friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell as some sort of defence: a woman who has been repeatedly described as Epstein’s “chief procurer”.

Maxwell, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, became the number one person of interest after Epstein snuffed it. Not least because the same accusers who have given detailed depositions of Prince Andrew’s conduct at Epstein’s parties, have also accused Ghislaine of being the one who approached young girls on Epstein’s behalf and even went so far as to give them pointers on their oral sex techniques.

As far as character witnesses go, it’s probably not one that a professional communications expert would recommend you lead with.

(NB: It’s probably important that we say Maxwell has repeatedly rejected these allegations and denies ever having facilitated any sexual liaison on behalf of Prince Andrew. But it’s probably equally important to point out that the accusations keep on piling up – and one of the main accusers, Virginia Guiffre, sued Maxwell for defamation and the case was settled in Guiffre’s favour, costing Maxwell millions.)

Big Up Yourself

Subjecting yourself to a nationally broadcast television interview in which you are called upon to defend yourself from accusations of heinous sexual crimes would be, we imagine, quite a humbling experience.

Or it should be, at least. But there’s something about famous people that they just can’t avoid but use it as an opportunity to peacock.

Cliff Richard’s advisors stamped straight down on any attempt he made to declare himself “one of the biggest names in Britain” or “probably the most recognisable person in Britain”. True though that may be, his team reasoned that it probably wasn’t the time to be trumpeting your brand recognition.

Similarly, when he slipped in phrases such as “people like me” and “you don’t know what it’s like to be people like me”, they thought it risked him coming off as being “superior”.

Prince Andrew was unable to help himself either. There were a few occasions where the Duke chose to draw rank, reminding Maitlis that “as a member of the Royal Family” he rarely posed for pictures, or engaged in PDAs. He suggested that Jeffrey Epstein – an extraordinarily well-connected billionaire in his own right – would subtly alter his behaviour around “people like me”. He said that, without wishing to “appear grand”, he was used to having hundreds of people scuttling about his home (“Buckingham Palace”) so didn’t find it out of the ordinary that Epstein had lots of people coming in and out of his apartments.

This might seem like a fairly trivial PR problem – especially when compared side-by-side with coining a new euphemism for an erection, or implicating yet another pizza restaurant in an increasingly well-known conspiracy theory about the global elite running a international child sex ring – but this is the one that can really put people off you.

There are all sorts of sins the public can forgive. Some of the people that we as a species have lionised over the years have done some truly despicable stuff and gone on to maintain a good reputation and illustrious career in the public eye.

Sometimes we care, sometimes we don’t. As a mob, we can be extremely capricious, but we aren’t so devoid of sympathy that we’d let a botched phrase or an unwise admission pass if we felt there was a sincere attempt to apologise behind it.

The document concludes by saying “Sticking to these key messages and toning down some parts of his language will ensure [Sir Cliff] not only successfully communicates his points, but also wins huge support from the nation…”

If we could just add two key words to that – there’s something we feel that would really help the Duke demonstrate solemnity and gravity. Something that also got rave reviews five years ago in an interview with Emily Maitlis.

If His Royal Highness could just be persuaded to wear a black turtleneck, he might find a lot of his problems would disappear.