Newsnight producer Sam McAlister and how her Scoop annoyed her colleagues

Sam McAlister and Billie Piper attend the World Premiere of "Scoop" at The Curzon Mayfair on March 27, 2024 in London, England. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION:

The Duke of York’s disastrous Newsnight interview is so well-known that his alibis, the Woking branch of Pizza Express and the fact he could not sweat after being shot at in the Falklands, have become well-worn jokes.

Much less familiar is the story behind how the BBC convinced Prince Andrew to put his foot in it so forcefully that he was, in effect, sacked as a working royal by his own mother. Enter Netflix.

The release of Scoop on the streaming service promises to give “an insider account of how the women of Newsnight secured Prince Andrew’s infamous interview”.

But the much-hyped film may also reopen old wounds between those who worked together and produced one of the most shocking pieces of broadcasting in modern times but have since gone their separate ways.

In Scoop’s telling of the story, the protagonists were Sam McAlister, the producer who first started talking to Team York and is played by Billie Piper, and Newsnight anchor Emily Maitlis, as portrayed by Gillian Anderson. Scoop is based on McAlister’s 2022 memoir about her decade working for the programme, and she serves as an executive producer on the film.

Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew and Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis in the Netflix series Scoop

Rumours have long swirled in media circles that a froideur has descended on the erstwhile friends and colleagues, with bitchy tabloid briefings bouncing around for years.

The disquiet seems to have begun when Maitlis and Esme Wren, then Newsnight’s editor, gave an interview to Radio Times in 2020 explaining how they landed the interview — without McAlister being mentioned once. “Sam tried to laugh at it,” a source has since told the Mail on Sunday. “It seemed deeply baffling that two women would not mention another, far more junior woman in an interview where they were talking about how the interview came about.”

Those close to McAlister also complained that she was paid just 10 per cent of Maitlis’s £325,000 ($682,851) salary and that, while the producer paid for her own buses to palace meetings, the star presenter put taxi journeys on expenses. McAlister quit the corporation in 2021.

“It’s a nice narrative: the plucky, poorly-paid woman. The truth is she worked part-time, while Emily was the lead anchor of Newsnight,” says a former colleague of the pair. “Producers at the BBC don’t earn a huge amount of money. It’s not like she was terribly terribly underpaid.

“Sam was angry that she didn’t get a pay rise, but the BBC doesn’t work like that. There’s a licence fee: you can’t just give pay rises to people because they do well,” the source adds. “She was never going to get a pay rise, because nobody got a pay rise. Nobody got a bonus. It’s the BBC. Everyone who was involved in that interview got a ‘Well done’ and moved onto the next thing.”

McAlister is an undeniably impressive figure. The first in her family to get a degree, she studied law at Edinburgh University and trained as a defence criminal barrister before making the switch to journalism at the BBC. A single mother who juggled raising her son with a broadcast career, she rose through the ranks and became a trusted producer on Newsnight.

Her first encounter with the Duke’s household came in 2018, when she was asked to consider interviewing him about his Pitch@Palace entrepreneurial venture. McAlister declined the proposal, as well as another in May 2019 when Andrew was willing to discuss anything except his friendship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, but kept open dialogue with the palace.

Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew Kelley Hawes as Amanda Thirsk and Charity Wakefield as Princess Beatrice in the Netflix series Scoop.

By that November, after Epstein’s suicide and the testimony from his victims being made public, a meeting was convened to discuss doing the interview. McAlister, Maitlis and then deputy editor Stewart Maclean — described by one former colleague as “the brains behind landing it” — were sat around a Buckingham Palace table with Andrew, his elder daughter, Princess Beatrice, and Amanda Thirsk, his most trusted aide who is played by Keeley Hawes in Scoop. After consulting the late Queen, Team York agreed to go ahead.

The fallout continues to affect Andrew, who has not returned to royal duties since the interview was broadcast, as well as those behind the scenes. Maitlis, 53, has always refused to comment on reports about her relationship with McAlister.

Friends of the broadcaster, who left the BBC to present The News Agents podcast with fellow corporation evacuee Jon Sopel in 2022, say that there is no tension between herself and McAlister and that she is “thrilled” that a dramatisation of the interview is “something people want to see”. The level of interest bodes well for her own Amazon series, A Very Royal Scandal, in which she will be played by Luther star Ruth Wilson; it is slated for release towards the end of the year.

There had been rumours that Maitlis would not cast a McAlister in her own series – where Michael Sheen does a turn as the Duke – but those close to her insist that “of course” there is a McAlister, as well as “as many of the team as they could dramatically write in”.

Sam McAllister & Emily Maitlis winners of The BBC News and Factual Award attend the 30th Women in Film & Television Awards on December 3, 2021 in London, England. Photo / Getty Images

For her part, McAlister has not, publicly, been fanning the flames. “I’m thrilled for Emily, genuinely,” she wrote in a piece for Tatler last month. “I can’t wait to find out who’s playing me and to see her played by Ruth Wilson. Emily is brilliant and I wish her nothing but happiness and success.”

If there is less bad blood between McAlister and Maitlis than has previously been stated, the former’s ex-colleagues appear to have taken exception to McAlister’s high-profile publicity campaign for the film. “We find it all rather distasteful,” says one. “It’s mega-cringe.”

A senior Newsnight executive says that the whole thing feels “slightly undignified” because the interview was about the alleged exploitation of women and had the real-world impact of destroying the careers of both Andrew and Thirsk.

Another says: “Sam is a very good self-publicist. A lot of people are baffled by the chutzpah of it all. That’s not to say Sam wasn’t a part of it – she obviously was. But it basically implies the interview – and for the interview, read Sam – saved Newsnight from a whole round of cuts, which wasn’t true. It is a case of someone heavily involved in something overclaiming and implying they did the whole thing by themselves.”

The film’s release has been more heavily trailed than the interview on which it is based. McAlister – plus Piper, Anderson, Rufus Sewell, who plays Andrew — have been ubiquitous on the covers of magazines and newspaper supplements, as well as touring chat show sofas and radio studios. Such is the level of international interest that McAlister spent this week in New York, with Piper, to do interviews on American TV promoting the launch.

It is perhaps telling, then, that one of the only places McAlister has not popped up to plug the film is Newsnight itself — despite being about the programme’s most recent high-water mark. “Everyone is too cross,” says an insider. The absence of Newsnight staff and alumni – including Maitlis – from McAlister’s book launch and the film premiere last week have also been noted in the newsroom. “Fundamentally it’s a team game,” says one who was snubbed. “In her telling of it, it’s a one-woman show.” McAlister says she has “invited many of my colleagues to participate in all elements of this process”.

(Some eyebrows were raised when Sarah Vine – the ex-wife of cabinet minister, and McAlister friend, Michael Gove – claimed in her newspaper column she was disinvited from the premiere at the last minute. Production sources insist that Vine was not originally invited and was declined when she asked to take the non-transferable ticket of a colleague).

Other former colleagues of McAlister give her her dues. “She got through the door and without that none of this could have happened,” they say. “She has also made it her own, and that is quite something.”

Billie Piper as Sam McAlister, the Newsnight producer whose memoir Scoop is based on. Photo / Netflix

Those close to the prince, meanwhile, question whether all of the journalists involved are overstating their roles. “I’m not sure how much it was the doggedness of Newsnight – it was vanity on Amanda’s part,” says a long-time member of Team York. “She told me about possibly doing a broadcast interview [in which Andrew could clear his name] a year before it happened. She wanted to do this.”

Since quitting the BBC two years after the triumph, McAlister has capitalised on the attention and has become a fixture wearing her trademark black leather, designer accessories and snakeskin boots – always teamed with a pair of oversized sunglasses. “She has managed to make her image and look part of the whole thing,” says an admiring former colleague. McAlister has also become a regular on the after-dinner speaking circuit, to talk about negotiations and leadership, and commands fees of between £2,500 and £5,000 per gig.

One Newsnight source says that the release of Scoop, and all the attendant publicity, is “mad” given it comes as BBC bosses are slashing the programme’s staff by 60 per cent and changing it from an investigative powerhouse to a half-hour discussion show.

“Although there is clearly some annoyance about Sam going full Hollywood starlet when she was just doing what we all do day in, day out,” they say. “It’s a timely reminder the programme can have some real-world impact.”