Welcome to the latest edition of Breaker. We are Lachlan Cartwright and Ravi Somaiya. If this email has been forwarded to you can subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.

In this edition, we dive into a weird stealth fight between Netflix and Amazon over perhaps the most sensational car-crash story of our era: BBC Newsnight's interview with Prince Andrew. The streamers have differing accounts of it. And there’s a whole world of intrigue behind why.

Our podcast covers corporate evil, bureaucracy, comebacks, criminal justice, Mark Halperin, Carlos Watson, Donald Trump, Emma Tucker, and (briefly) Napoleon.

And we have a strange tale of Steven Seagal, that links all the way back to Buckingham Palace.

This week we come to you from Bar Mercer, in Soho, to talk about Performance Improvement Plans, culture clash at the Wall Street Journal, how Me Too men are coming back, the scandal PR machine's latest target, the philosophy of the Sun's Page 3 girls, the complexities of outdoor dining and why New York is like Moscow. We also land on an eternal truth: the ultimate power lies in being able to choose the music. And in honor of that, we sing YMCA. (You can also listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and a bunch of others And if you have a bar, cafe or restaurant you’d like featured in the Breaker pod get in touch.)

(Exclusive.) Netflix and Amazon are in a quiet fight over Prince Andrew. Specifically, both have a purportedly true behind the scenes account of BBC Newsnight's seismic interview with him in 2019. And those accounts differ greatly.

In Scoop, on Netflix, a Newsnight staffer, Sam McAlister is cast as a plucky and determined outcast, fighting the snobbery of the BBC, and prejudices against her as a single mother, to land an interview that is as high-profile and high-stakes as David Frost and Richard Nixon or Martin Bashir and Princess Diana.

In A Very Royal Scandal on Amazon, McAlister has maybe four lines across three hours. 

Of course, drama is not journalism, and basically the more compelling something is, the less true it is. But we have learned Netflix breathed a sigh of relief when Scoop passed into the public eye without a backlash. And since the two series came out last year we and our friends at Popbitch, with whom this story was put together, have heard...