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Friends of Prince William and King Charles have predicted the royals will “keep calm and carry on” in the face of what is likely to be a highly critical new book about the royals, entitled Endgame, by Omid Scobie, the journalist whose sympathetic biography of the Sussexes, Finding Freedom, rocked the royal establishment.
Scobie said this week that the new book, to be published in November, will examine both the successes of the royal family and the things they “should be ashamed of,” in a bellicose newspaper article setting out his stall.
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There will be little expectation in royal circles that Scobie will devote many pages to heaping praise on the Windsors.
While Finding Freedom was told almost entirely from the Sussexes’ point of view, The Daily Beast understands that the new book will not be framed by their perspective. It is also likely that the Sussexes, smarting from a dip in popularity some ascribe to their non-stop bitching about the royals, would not welcome another volume portraying them as still looking back in anger. Scobie described it in his article as “an unfiltered investigation into the current state of the Royal Family.”
One might imagine being the focus of Scobie’s new book would make the royals nervous, but a friend of Prince William told The Daily Beast that the prince had made a point of not reading the first book by Scobie and would not read the second. They added that he had not watched the Netflix series the couple made nor had he read Harry’s book Spare. “The idea that William is going to be distracted from his work by even thinking about Omid Scobie’s new book is fanciful,” the friend said.
William’s office declined to comment.
A friend of the king’s took a similar line, saying the king had “seen it all before” in terms of negative books about him being published and added, “He will keep calm and carry on.” The king’s office also did not comment in response to questions from The Daily Beast about Scobie’s new book.
Keeping calm and carrying on has, of course, been the guiding principle of the monarchy when faced with negative commentary over the past several decades, and one that has arguably served them particularly well in recent years.
They did not make any statement reacting to Harry’s memoir; indeed the only on-the-record responses to any of Harry and Meghan’s claims came after the Oprah Winfrey interview. These were the terse riposte of the late Queen Elizabeth that will go down in history as a classic of understated regal froideur—“some recollections may vary”—and a response by William to a shouted question from a reporter, when William said, “We are very much not a racist family.”
While the royals believe that not responding to criticism is the quickest way to get it to evaporate into the ether, Scobie is a different class of threat to anonymous tittle-tattle in the newspapers, precisely because of his close relationship with Team Sussex.
The palace is unlikely, privately, to be particularly happy that he has a fresh book coming out given that Scobie and his publishers clearly expect it to make another season of headlines.
Scobie himself is a divisive figure. There are non-stop attempts to impugn his credibility; he was most recently accused of partiality when he acted as a witness in Harry’s recently concluded action against Mirror Group Newspapers.
He said in court, and under oath, when asked about his relationship with Harry: “I don’t have his phone number, I have never socialized with him. I’m literally a member of the press who has tried to do my job for years.”
Scobie said that by giving evidence on Harry’s behalf (he said he had seen Mirror editor Piers Morgan be told that a story came from a hacked phone) he was making his own life “more difficult” because he was “giving ammunition” to those who called him the “couple’s friend, mouthpiece, and cheerleader.”
Scobie, who declined to comment when contacted by The Daily Beast, insists that his intel comes not as a result of being a yes-man for the Sussexes, but from good old fashioned journalism and the careful cultivation of critical sources.
Readers of his first book (which he co-authored with Carolyn Durand) have been left in little doubt that Scobie seems to have a very good idea of exactly what Harry and Meghan are thinking and feeling, even extending to Scobie appearing to know what yoga position (“a perfect Warrior pose”) Meghan “stretched her body into” on a trip to Botswana with Harry.
Readers appear untroubled by the aspersions regularly cast on him by the British media, such as a hit piece in the London Times recently which sought to cast him as a hypocrite because he once worked at a celebrity tabloid. The book-buying public have voted with their pockets, anyway; Finding Freedom is one of the top ten bestselling royal books of all time, and that is undoubtedly due to the trust the Sussexes’ circle have placed in him and the access he has got as a result.
His relations with the Windsors are, understandably, more fraught. In the piece published this week to promote the forthcoming book, Scobie said that after the release of Finding Freedom, “Prince William was so incensed” by some of his revelations that “he wanted me barred from his engagements.” A spokesperson for Prince William declined to comment on this claim when contacted by The Daily Beast.
Partly given their disdain for him, it will be particularly intriguing when the book comes out to try and figure out the extent to which Scobie has managed to get the Windsor camp to speak to him.
As every journalist knows, if you have a good source in one camp, and Scobie certainly has that, the other side is, ultimately, probably going to have to deal with you, no matter how much of a thorn in their side you may be.
It all makes the prospect of another book from Scobie, which seems likely to be explicitly focused on the antics of the royals behind the scenes in recent years, more than just another story for the royals to brush aside—no matter how much they would very understandably like to.
