How a Reuters Photographer Captured Former Prince Andrew’s Dramatic Arrest
A Reuters photographer captured an astonishing photograph of the former Prince Andrew exiting a police station yesterday after he had been arrested for misconduct in public office.
Phil Noble is one of the senior Reuters photographers in the U.K. and after Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested yesterday, he made the six-hour drive from his base in Northwest England to the Southeast, where the Royal has been detained.
The photo Noble captured is a classic through-the-window-of-a-car shot that is incredibly hard to pull off. Not only did he manage it, but he also caught the ex-prince looking shellshocked and disheveled. The picture has been published all over the world and is on the front page of a great many newspapers this morning.
Noble characterized it as a “proper old school news day”, which involved a lot of waiting around in the cold and anxiety over whether he was even in the right location.
Reuters explains that while the news agency knew where Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested, there could have been over 20 stations that he had been brought to.
A tip led them to the historic market town of Aylsham where Noble met up with a Reuters video journalist, Marissa Davison.
After hours of nothing, Noble was packing up and heading to his hotel when Mountbatten-Windsor’s cars arrived. He raced back and saw two vehicles leaving at speed.
In the first car sat two officers so Noble focused on the car behind. He took six frames: two of police, two were blank, one was out of focus, but one hit the jackpot.
“You can plan and use your experience and know roughly what you need to do, but still everything needs to align. When you’re doing car shots it’s more luck than judgment,” Noble humbly says. “It was a proper old school news day, a guy being arrested, who can we call, tracking him down.”
It capped a remarkable day in which a prominent member of the Royal Family was being treated like a common criminal. While the arrest for misconduct in public office relates to Jeffrey Epstein, Mountbatten-Windsor hasn’t been arrested for sexual crimes.
Reuters adds that the arrest means police have reasonable suspicion a crime has been committed and that Mountbatten-Windsor is suspected to be involved. It doesn’t imply guilt.
