Prince Andrew asked before his car-crash interview if he should mention he can't sweat

Prince Andrew brutally embarrassed himself and his family with his catastrophic interview in 2019, and the conversation he had with his interviewer prior to the chat could also be seen as a hint of the embarrassment that was coming his way.

The Duke of York had appeared in an interview with Newsnight in 2019 to provide clarification on the reports of his friendship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The interview was dubbed a "car crash" and later cost him his role as a senior member of the British royal family.

Journalist Emily Maitlis has now revealed in an article for BBC that Prince Andrew had asked her in a meeting ahead of the controversial interview if he should mention that he can't sweat. The Duke felt his inability to sweat would be an important piece of information as Epstein's accuser Virginia Giuffre, who has now filed a sex abuse lawsuit against the royal as well, had claimed that Andrew had sweated profusely when she had danced with him in 2001 at the London nightclub, Tramp.

Maitlis recalled that the Duke wanted to "set his own record straight" with the interview by offering "minutiae and anecdote, detail and description," and thus "volunteered the information" that he could not sweat. She said, "His Falkland Islands wartime experiences, he claimed, had produced a glut of adrenaline that meant he hadn't been able to sweat properly since being shot at. I remember him asking me very directly if we thought that would be interesting to hear."

"And I said yes, I was fascinated by adrenaline, and that we wanted to hear as much detail of his account as we could," Maitlis added.

After Andrew's claims of not being able to sweat, Giuffre's lawyers asked for documentary evidence to prove the same. Andrew's legal team admitted in a court filing in December last year that no such documents exist.

Andrew had made several other claims in the interview, including that he was at Pizza Express in Woking on a day that Giuffre alleges he assaulted her. He also said that he has no recollection of meeting her, even though there is a picture of them together.

Maitlis said about the interview, "The answers he gave me on camera may have seemed astonishing, jaw-­dropping, even, in places. But bizarrely, I had been expecting them. Part of my job that day was just to let him speak."