Buckingham Palace tried to prevent an official photographer taking a photograph of Prince Andrew escorting Queen Elizabeth into Prince Philip’s memorial service last week.
The decision by the queen to ask Andrew to accompany her into the service was hugely controversial as Andrew has recently settled a court case with a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her. Although Andrew did not admit guilt, he paid Virginia Giuffre a sum of money reportedly in excess of $15 million. The queen is said to have underwritten part of the settlement from her personal fortune.
Although it had been widely assumed that Andrew would attend the memorial to his father, he was expected to enter Westminster Abbey with his children and sit with them.
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In the event, he walked the queen by the arm to her seat before taking a front row seat next to Prince Edward.
Now, the official “rota” photographer tasked with catching the event on behalf of all U.K. print media has written a first person piece in The Times of London in which he describes how palace officials initially sought to prevent him taking a picture of the queen until she was seated. This would have meant there would have been no still photographs of the queen and Andrew as she walked to her seat, despite the entire service being screened live on TV.
Photographer Richard Pohle wrote that he entered a state of “high panic” upon being “told by a Buckingham Palace press officer that I could not photograph the arrival of the queen into Westminster Abbey. Only once she was seated, they said.”
Pohle said he tried to diplomatically argue that as there had been significant interest in how the queen would arrive, on her own two feet or in a wheelchair or buggy for example, he should be allowed to take pictures of her arrival.
His arguments fell on deaf ears.
However, when news filtered through ten minutes before the start of the service that Andrew was going to be leading her in, he writes, “everything” changed and he demanded to be allowed to photograph what “was now the major news event,” and bolstered his case with the argument that “the BBC was carrying the whole event live.”
The palace relented—but then to his horror Pohle realised, when the congregation stood up for the queen’s entrance, that he couldn’t see the queen and Andrew from his official position.
He writes: “Desperation dictated I do something quickly. As the choir started up I jumped off my footstool and moved quickly to the aisle between the rows of seats opposite where the queen would walk.
“Suddenly moving from an official position while on a royal rota is the most cardinal of sins. I brushed past the press officer and could feel a hand reach out to try and stop me but I rushed past and crouched in the center of the aisle… I got the picture.”
