The photographer who captured the most historic moment ever for the British royals – the arrest photo of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – has revealed what he did to get the snap.
In a video shared to Reuters‘ official Instagram account on Friday, February 20, Phil Noble, a senior photographer for the news agency, explained how the photo came to be.
Noble said that he’d traveled to “four or five” different police stations on Thursday, February 19, after learning of Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest that morning – knowing he’d probably leave custody at some stage.
“When I arrived, it didn’t look anything out of the ordinary. There was no cars, there was no increased activity,” Noble said.
“And to be honest, just before he arrived, I’d left to go back to the hotel.”
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When he returned to his nearby accomodation, Noble said he received a message from a colleague telling him that two cars had just arrived at the police station, and that he needed to return.
“Within one minute of arriving back, the shutters on the garage at the police station came up, and two cars left. One of them, he was in,” Noble said.
As he waited, he took practice shots of other police vehicles at the station to adjust his flash and other settings.
“There’s so many moving parts, you don’t know where the car is going to come from, where he’s going to be sitting in the car,” Noble said.
“The photo gods were on my side.”
He took six frames in all – two showed police, two were blank, one was out of focus. But one captured the unprecedented nature of the moment: for the first time in modern history, a senior royal was being treated as a common criminal.
The resulting image, in which Mountbatten-Windsor, 66, is sitting in the back of a police vehicle, went viral, racking up millions of views on platforms like X and Instagram. The image has been used extensively by media worldwide.
“You can plan and use your experience and know roughly what you need to do, but still everything needs to align,” Noble said.
The arrest of Mountbatten-Windsor, on suspicion of misconduct in public office, relates to his time as the UK’s trade representative between 2001 and 2011. It follows a series of allegations, prompted by the release of the Epstein files, that the former-prince shared official documents.
That included sharing reports from trade visits and a confidential briefing on investment in Afghanistan with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and passing a Treasury briefing to a personal business contact.
Top image: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. REUTERS/Phil Noble/Instagram