Prince Andrew arrest liveblog on BBC News website
Freelance photographer Terry Harris was on the scene when six unmarked Thames Valley Police cars arrived at Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s home on the Sandringham estate on Thursday morning.
He had been at the Norfolk royal residence for 16 days covering the unfolding Andrew story and sent out the pictures via agency Bav Media to the world’s media.
The Daily Mail had a story about apparent police activity at Sandringham at 9.26am and The Sun reported in a story timestamped 9.36am that police cars had been spotted arriving at the royal residence.
The BBC says it was first to reveal the news that Andrew had been arrested at 9.54am via a report from special correspondent Lucy Manning.
Thames Valley Police then issued a statement at 10.03am stating that it had opened an investigation into the offence of misconduct in public office into an unnamed man.
It said: “As part of the investigation, we have today (19/2), at approximately 8am, arrested a man in his sixties from Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office and are carrying out searches at addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk.
“The man remains in police custody at this time.
“We will not be naming the arrested man, as per national guidance. Please also remember that this case is now active so care should be taken with any publication to avoid being in contempt of court.”
Why publishers gambled that public interest outweighs Andrew’s right to privacy
Since 2013 the UK College of Policing has said forces should not name arrested people until they are charged unless there are exceptional circumstances.
Two cases have since further led media organisations to be wary of naming arrested people: in 2021 Mail Online publisher Associated Newspapers was ordered to pay £83,000 in damages after naming Alaedeen Sicri as a man arrested on suspicion of involvement in the 2017 Manchester Arena terror attack but never charged.
Then in 2022 the UK Supreme Court ruled in a case against Bloomberg that a person under criminal investigation should not be named by the media before being charged.
Naming Andrew as someone who has been arrested therefore raises the prospect of a possible legal action for breach of privacy.
But legal experts who spoke to Press Gazette said publishers can still gamble, as they have done in this case, that the public interest in disclosure outweighs a person’s right to privacy.
Media law expert David Banks said: “Yes, the Sir Cliff case being under police investigation was a private matter, then Al Sicri v Mail Online pushed that further to arrests being private, and then Bloomberg extended it to investigation by a watchdog. So, in theory, Andrew ought to be cloaked by privacy.
“However, I think there’s a strong public interest argument to be made in publication.”
Media lawyer Alex Wilson, a partner at Reynolds Porter Chamberlain, told Press Gazette: “The police, as a matter of custom, don’t reveal the name themselves (if they did then it might be much easier for the media to argue that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, and the fact that the police don’t name suspects is relied on as supporting the reasonable expectation of privacy) and they instead refer e.g. ‘to a man in his 60s arrested in Norfolk’, and let the media decide whether to go further.
“Not only can that reasonable expectation of privacy be displaced in the circumstances of any particular case (where one must look at things like the attributes of the individual in question), but in any event there is always the possibility of showing that the public interest outweighs any privacy rights and that freedom of expression and the public’s right to know should prevail.
“This situation is extraordinary and quite literally unprecedented in the modern era – a member of the Royal Family who had official duties at the relevant time, and the brother of the King has been taken into custody under suspicion of misconduct in public office, which has been preceded by weeks of extensive media coverage and scrutiny, including ongoing commentary from senior public officials including the prime minister, over his relationship with Epstein, arising in particular over the recent public release of documents in the so-called ‘Epstein files’.
“If ever there were a case to argue that the starting point of privacy should be displaced and be outweighed by the public interest, I’d have thought it would be one like this.”
At around midday on Thursday King Charles issued a statement referring explicitly to Prince Andrew’s arrest and so putting the matter firmly in the public domain and removing any privacy risk around reporting.
Other recent high-profile exceptions of being named upon arrest included the case of comedian Russell Brand , who was arrested in 2023 on suspicion of sexual assaults (and has since been charged with offences including rape and sexual assault and has pleaded not guilty). The Met Police put out a statement that did not name Brand but was positioned in direct response to an investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches and The Sunday Times. The allegations and police complaint were already public knowledge, meaning there was a low privacy risk.
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