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No royal reunion this Christmas
The seemingly never-ending beef between Prince Harry and Prince William is reportedly playing a key part in Harry and Meghan’s decision not to return to Britain to celebrate Christmas with the royal family.
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A “well-place source” told Vanity Fair, “At this stage they are really enjoying their new life in California and their new home. There are currently no plans for them to return to the U.K. for Christmas. Let’s just say that while things are better between Harry and his brother, it’s not what it was, and I don’t think anyone is ready for a cozy family Christmas right now.”
The couple also chose not to attend last year’s festive royal celebrations.
As it is, the Daily Mail reported that the queen had faced a “staff revolt” at her traditional Christmas base, Sandringham, after workers there refused to remain in a monthlong Covid-related “bubble” to safely tend to her. Now the queen may be forced to spend Christmas at Windsor Castle for the first time in 33 years. (Buckingham Palace also announced this week that there would be no large-scale events at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle—most notably, investitures—for the rest of the year.)
Vanity Fair said the brothers remain “largely distant,” even if they have touched base to mark family birthdays, and making contact when dad Prince Charles became ill with the coronavirus.
Royal biographer Robert Lacey, whose book Battle Of Brothers: William and Harry—The Friendship and Feuds is soon to be published, told the Daily Mail that before he started researching his book he thought reports of William and Harry at war were “newspapers stirring up something that wasn’t there. I didn’t want to believe it, in truth. None of us does. Yet it most definitely exists. Actually, it’s worse than anyone thinks.
“Some say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. It will blow over.’ But that’s not what historians will be saying in 10 years’ time. If this breach between the brothers is not healed in some way it will come to stand with the Abdication crisis and the death of Diana as one of the traumas that changed the monarchy. There is time to change things in a positive direction, but at the moment the palace is not working in that direction.”
Although the bad feeling in recent years has centered around William’s allegedly disapproving response to Harry and Meghan getting together, the rivalry between the brothers, Lacey said, is rooted in their childhood.
If you’ve seen The Crown, think back to the series tracing how differently Princess Margaret was treated to her sister, the queen—shut out of rooms from an early age, and treated as “the spare.”
Lacey said: “The palace got this very wrong, as it always does with the second-born. They always treat the second-born badly, not to say cruelly. It happened with Princess Margaret. It happened with Prince Andrew. It’s the classic ‘heir and the spare’ thing. They just don’t know what to do with the spare. And they certainly didn’t know what to do with the spare’s wife.”
Who’s been telling tales?
Her lawyers may have sought to distance Meghan from the Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand pro-Harry and Meghan tome Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family—describing the stories in Finding Freedom as “extremely anodyne, the product of creative license and/or inaccurate”—but the Mail on Sunday has listed 49 pieces of personal information which, they argue, “could only have come from her.”
In a court submission, they say that Meghan used her friends as “de facto media relations agents” and argue she does not have “any reasonable expectation of privacy” because she secretly shared intimate secrets with Scobie and Durand as part of “a media strategy to improve or enhance her image.”
Meghan is suing Associated Newspapers, the publishers of the Mail on Sunday for printing extracts from a letter she sent her dad Thomas, saying it breached her privacy. Meghan this week failed in an effort to stop Associated using the book in court to bolster their case. The media group claimed that Meghan and Harry “cooperated with the authors to put out their version of the events by means of the book.”
Harry and Meghan have denied cooperating with the authors, but Associated says much of the information in the bestselling book “could have originated only from Meghan and/or her husband.” It goes on to list the details in the book which it says must have come directly from Meghan herself, including her feelings towards Kate Middleton, her birth plan for Archie, her views on filming sex scenes, and detailed accounts of holidays that she took with Prince Harry.
Queen’s private secretary: Meghan “miserably self-indulgent”
William was so pissed off with Harry that he refused to have lunch with him before the infamous “Sandringham Summit,” held by the queen to decide Harry and Meghan’s post royal future, according to Robert Lacey’s book, now being serialized in the Daily Mail. Instead, Harry chowed down with the queen alone. William also thought dimly of Harry and Meghan’s “prima donna” maneuvers to conceal the birth of Archie.
The book, which is being seen as a critical rejoinder to Finding Freedom, also reveals that the queen thought that Harry and Meghan were “erratic and impulsive” in their behavior, “leading her to strip them of their Sussex Royal moniker,” the paper reported. The royal family itself was “hopping mad” over Harry and Meghan’s trademarking of Sussex Royal products and services, which the Firm saw as the “commercializing of the crown.”
Lacey also says that Harry and Meghan didn’t talk to the the queen, Prince Charles and Prince William about their many media-related legal actions—which the senior royals think has negatively impacted what public opinion of the monarchy.
Meghan’s interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby, in which she thanked him for asking how she was doing “because not many people have asked if I’m OK,” was deemed “miserably self-indulgent” and exhibiting “a bizarre tone-deafness” by the queen’s private secretary Sir Edward Young.
One “senior palace source” told Lacey that negotiating with the Sussexes over their “Megxit” terms was akin to facing “a hard-nosed Hollywood lawyer... The Sussexes wanted guarantees on every single point as if it were a contractual negotiation.”
Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis speak!
OK, not everything is terrible in the world. You ready to smile?
Prince William and Kate Middleton’s kids asked famed naturalist Sir David Attenborough a question each, in a cute video just released by Kensington Palace. It was the first time the children have actually spoken in public. They appeared in age order, and it’s pretty darn adorable—and Sir David shows why he is such a renowned and trusted communicator on all matters in the natural world.
Prince George asked what animal will become extinct next. Sir David said he hoped “there won’t be any,” recalling that when he showed a rare mountain gorilla on one of his TV shows years ago, it led to people donating money to help save then. Now their population had grown, he said.
Princess Charlotte confirmed our hopes of blooming mischief by saying she liked spiders, and asked if Sir David did too? Yes, he said, and wondered why people were so frightened of them. He mulled it might be because they had so many hairy legs that could transport them quickly in any direction.
Prince Louis then asked what animal Sir David liked. “I think I like monkeys best,” Sir David said. For a domestic pet, he said, he would choose a puppy over a kitten.
In other, not-terrible news, Prince Harry, patron of the London Marathon Charitable Trust, sent a video message to competitors running in the event today. Elite athletes ran through the streets of London as usual, while 45,000 people from 109 countries are running their own 26.2-mile route.
“While we won’t be together in person, we are together in spirit,” Harry said. “And the amazing tenacity of runners from around the world is a reminder of our strength and sense of community during these difficult times.”
Kate has embarrassing relatives too!
Just when William and Kate were doing a good job of looking absolutely perfect; along comes a reminder of their own awkward extended family.
Kate Middleton’s uncle, Gary Goldsmith—he was filmed cutting up lines of cocaine at his villa, La Maison de Bang Bang, on the party island of Ibiza prior to Kate and William’s wedding—launched a broadside at Harry and Meghan this week.
In a now-deleted LinkedIn post, the brother of Carole Middleton, apparently unimpressed by the couple’s public interventions this week, blasted: “With so much stuff going on in the world, still these two muppets are craving attention. Please shut the F up and bring up their child and stop talking, let alone demanding. Harry you have lost our love and respect. Meghan you are a wrong’n. Now hush please we are kinda busy saving lives and an economy.”
History lesson
Dare we say it, but The Crown fashion designer Amy Roberts’ replica design of Princess Diana’s wedding dress is way better than the Emanuel-designed original.
The dress, as worn by Emma Corrin who is playing Diana in the forthcoming fourth season of the show, was revealed on The Crown’s Twitter account Saturday. That famed, 1981 billowing Emanuel meringue, which threatened to eat everything in its path including its wearer, is still unapologetically big in Roberts’ interpretation, but somehow less apocalyptic. Or certainly photographs as such.
The fourth series of The Crown will be streamed on Netflix on November 15, and focuses on the 1980’s—basically, the scandal-rich Charles and Diana years. Start stockpiling the popcorn.
Was Diana tricked by Martin Bashir?
In other Diana news: long-standing allegations that the BBC’s Martin Bashir obtained his blockbuster interview with the Princess in 1995 by using fake bank statements are back in the news today.
The Sunday Times claims that Bashir did use “mocked-up” bank statements, the existence of which the BBC has long conceded, in order to persuade Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, to arrange a meeting with Diana. The Sunday Times says this “seems to contradict an internal BBC investigation into Bashir’s behavior in 1996, which concluded that the false documents did not help to clinch the interview.”
Bashir is said to have used the fake bank statements to convince the family that one of Spencer’s former employees was selling information about the family. Copies of the falsified statements were published by the Mail on Sunday in 1996. The BBC claimed at the time they were produced for a separate, discontinued investigation.
The broadcaster issued a new statement to The Sunday Times saying they already accepted “the documents had been shown to Earl Spencer,” but that “they were not shown to the Princess of Wales.”
This week in royal history
October 8, 1993, saw a day of happiness for Princess Margaret, as she watched her son Viscount Linley (better known as David Linley, fancy furniture maker) marry his wife Serena.
The couple, who have two children together, announced their divorce earlier this year. “The Earl and Countess of Snowdon have amicably agreed that their marriage has come to an end and that they shall be divorced,” a spokesperson said. “They ask that the press respect their privacy and that of their family.” Margaret died in 2002, aged 71.
Unanswered questions
What is Meghan’s plan now that the mysteriously intimately-sourced Finding Freedom has been deemed admissible as evidence in her invasion of privacy case against Associated Newspapers?
