The fishmarket skills that helped Newsnight net Andrew scoop ...

MORE bad news for Prince Andrew. If the loss of his titles and patronages ahead of a civil case in the US wasn’t bad enough, the woman behind the interview which set the ball rolling on his current woes is writing a book.

Producer Sam McAlister, right, tells us that ever since the prince’s Newsnight appearance, she has been asked: “How on earth did you convince him to do it?” McAlister helped secure the infamous interview in which Andrew claimed to Emily Maitlis that he was in a Pizza Express in Woking on the night Virginia Giuffre alleges he slept with her.

Later this year McAlister’s Scoops — about her work as a producer

— will detail how the interview came about. “I wanted to write it to tell the story of my part in it,” she says.

“I ended up being the person trying to negotiate those scoops,” she tells The Londoner. “I was a barrister and I loved negotiation. I finished pretty close to the top of that class,” she explains, adding that some of her skills may be inherited. “Trying to convince people to do something ... takes all of those kinds of skills that my granddad had in the fishmarket which I’ve carried on in a slightly different way.” And don’t the royals know it.