Ralph Lauren dress, worn with satin shoes, £610, Andrea Wazen; recycled silver cuff, £235, Anuka; sterling silver ring, £289, Tom Wood
Scott never did become Diana’s official mentor. “We had lunch a few times. I invited her to the ITN studios. I thought if she and the reporters could meet each other they might have more understanding of how the other worked. We were in the lift to the newsfloor and she asked me who I was going out with, which I thought was funny.” Maybe the Princess would have made a feisty journalist. “Then she started to tell me something scandalous Anwar Sadat of Egypt had said to her when the lift doors opened and she had to stop.” Those two could have been a good TV show.
Ultimately Scott felt she couldn’t teach the Princess anything. “There was no answer for the situation she – and to an extent I – found ourselves in,” she says, her soft Scarborough lilt masking, for a few moments, the bleakness of that conclusion. The BBC offered her no protection, she says, and she doesn’t believe that much has changed, even now,” which is remarkable given what happened to Jill Dando [another Diana lookalike BBC reporter who was murdered in 1999). “There were very few women working in TV at that time – zero sense of sisterhood.”
She found the supposedly macho environment of ITN’s News at Ten far more nurturing than the fluffy world of breakfast. Alastair Burnet took her under his wing. When she went to the US, the empresses of American broadcasting – Diane Sawyer, Jane Paulin, Barbara Walters, Connie Chung – “were all so supportive. After I interviewed Prince Charles, Diane Sawyer no less, congratulated me. But I suppose there were more of them and they were well established.”
At the BBC, by contrast, “there was one very senior male presenter. Everyone called him, Look Out Golden Balls. It was just accepted as part of the culture”. Even her co-founder at Breakfast, the avuncular Frank Bough, 20 years her senior (of course he was) who later had his own drug scandals to contend with, turned out to be less avuncular when he wasn’t absolutely in control and the centre of attention. “He needed to know that the young women around him weren’t going to confront him.”
Her looks made her a target for men in her orbit, but she didn’t seem to have a problem swerving the casting couch. Speaking of which, “that red leatherette sofa they had on BBC Breakfast – urgh,” she chuckles. The cosy-bloke woolly jumpers that male presenters on the sofa were expected to wear at the time, she jokes, were also visually alarming.
Scott is an enigmatic mix of earnest sincerity and gossipy charm (a bit like Diana?) and while her relegation from TV could play as a victim story, she doesn’t view it like that. “I don’t miss it at all. I did it for 25 years. It was relentless. I wanted to step back and enjoy life.”
At least the early days in the snake pit gave her the confidence to deal with the egos she went on to interview when she covered for Wogan, or later when she was at CBS in New York: everyone from Prince Andrew (he walked on the set with a bit of fuselage from an aircraft called the Brazen Hussy, which he asked her to sign) and George Harrison to the late Duke of Edinburgh, King Constantine of Greece, King Juan Carlos of Spain. Her views are bracingly unfiltered. Enoch Powell, she recalls,”was charming”.
There’s always one though, and in Scott’s instance, it was Donald Trump. They knew of each other by reputation (of course he would have been aware of the classy, Diana-adjacent blonde British journalist). “I quite liked him, to be honest. I thought he was funny, and it was obvious what he was about”. He was fighting for his reputation and agreed to be interviewed by the English Rose. They filmed in his office in New York, at the top of the Empire State Building, which he claimed to own and culminated with a sit down at his home in Mar-a-Lago. “He swaggers in. I was in my Catherine Walker suit with the shoulder pads. I thought at least I’ve got this, sartorially.”