Prince Andrew Has Near-Miss With Dog After ‘Scoop’ Reminds World of Disastrous Interview

The royal family narrowly dodged yet another set of troubling headlines Saturday, when Prince Andrew’s bodyguard reportedly sounded the alarm just moments before the royal would have driven into a small, off-leash dog.

According to The Sun, the blessedly averted collision went down on Saturday, as the younger brother of King Charles III drove a Range Rover SUV down the Long Walk, a 2.64-mile road that runs through the Windsor Great Park just outside Windsor Castle. The open, tree-dotted space is a favorite with area walkers, runners, and folks out with their dogs.

The prince had just left the crown estate when a small, dark-colored dog ran right in front of his car. The pup was so close, in fact, that Andrew couldn’t see it, the paper reports. 

His bodyguard, in the passenger seat, noticed that walkers and other parkgoers were frantically waving in a way other than the typical “look, there’s a royal!” manner, and spotted the dog’s guardian in a sprint toward the car. 

He alerted Andrew, who hit the brakes. The dog’s guardian was “mortified,” added the British tabloid, quoting a witness who said, “Everyone was laughing when they saw who was driving the Range Rover.”

The moment was a vague echo of a scene in the Netflix film, Scoop, which was released just the day before. In that movie, BBC Newsnight interviewer Emily Maitlis, as played by Gillian Anderson, is walking her dog in a public park, distracted and stressed over how to approach an upcoming interview with Andrew (Rufus Sewell). Her mind elsewhere, she realizes too late that her dog has darted off.

The dog, meant to represent Maitlis’s real-life whippet, Moody, fails to heed its guardian’s cries to return. Whippets can hit speeds of 35 miles per hour, so Maitlis never had a chance of catching him by foot, but eventually, to Maitlis’s relief, the dog returns. As she embraces it, a man seated on a bench nearby tells her, “You chase them, you’ll never catch them. And then when they’re ready to come, you won’t be there.” 

Anderson’s Maitlis looks up, realizing that that wisdom was the key to how to conduct her now-infamous 2019 interview with the Prince over his relationship with convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. 

“I knew that I had to do an interview that could hold up in a court of law. Once we knew we had the chance, there couldn’t be a misstep,” the real-life Maitlis said of the interview some years later. “I was terrified about everything. I was terrified I’d get the tone wrong and either be too ingratiating or too rude,” a fear every responsible dog guardian also expresses when it comes to training a pet. 

It’s unknown what tone the owner of Saturday’s errant dog took with his pup in the hours following the canine’s narrow escape. He’s surely relieved that his dog wasn’t harmed, but one has to wonder—if things had gone the other way, who would be worse off today, the dog or the disgrace-plagued royal?