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Prince Harry still ‘can’t stand’ Camilla
Prince Harry does not want Camilla Parker Bowles to be queen, royal author Tina Brown says. In an interview to publicize her new book, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor—The Truth and the Turmoil, Brown told the Telegraph: “William has accepted Camilla in terms of what she means to his father. He’s been grown-up about it. ‘My father loves this woman, I can’t fight it, so I won’t.’ Harry, on the other hand, can’t stand Camilla, he doesn’t want Camilla to be queen, he’s very angry that it’s happening. He has not made his peace with it and he probably never will.”
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Brown, the founding editor in chief of The Daily Beast, says Harry’s memoir has the potential to turn the Platinum Jubilee into another annus horribilis.
“William was disgusted about Meghan’s attack on Kate (over the wedding dress/who made who cry saga) because she can’t answer back. But that’s nothing compared to how furious he’s going to be when this book comes out. Because Harry’s not going to go after the Queen, she’s sacrosanct. And he probably won’t go after Kate, whom he’s very fond of. But he will go after Charles and Camilla and maybe William. And that’s so unhelpful to them all at this particular moment; for William that’s the big cloud in their relationship right now.”
The truth about Harry, Brown says, “is he’s so emotionally needy that he’s been completely and utterly taken over by Meghan and his whole personality has changed. It’s a really sad thing to a great many people. Meghan seems to answer some huge need in Harry and it seems like they are in a powerful co-dependency. And I do question how it will end.”
Perhaps, she muses, “he’ll wake up and realize he’s living in Goop [Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website] and he has to get the hell out, go down the pub and see his friends.”
How Charles and Camilla tied the knot
The U.K. Telegraph ran the first big excerpt from Brown’s book Sunday—a forensic exploration of the year leading up to Charles and Camilla’s wedding in 2005.
Brown says that in 2004, “the ambivalence of her position was becoming untenable,” as Camilla was being expected to perform a quasi-royal calendar of duties accompanying Charles on his tours, and was also expected to be “the horse whisperer of [Charles’] emotional needs” but had no official role.
Intriguingly, Brown says that it was one of the most senior “men in grey,” Sir Michael Peat, who, having been sent to Charles by the queen with the goal of “pushing back on Camilla’s ascendance,” changed his mind and “began to advocate the reverse to the palace and his boss: Charles should marry her and be done with it.”
The final straw for the couple apparently came at a van Cutsem family wedding when Camilla was told she would be seated by the matriarch Emilie van Cutsem with the bride’s friends near the back, rather than with Charles. (The van Cutsems are among the oldest of the royals’ family friends.)
Prince Charles found an excuse not to attend the ceremony in protest at the humiliation of Camilla and subsequently proposed to Camilla on the 31st of December 2004, with the queen symbolically signing off the arrangement by allowing Charles to give Camilla an engagement ring from the Queen Mother’s collection.
Brown has a good story about the royal wedding ring. These are traditionally made from gold sourced from a special Welsh mine, and when Charles requested a nugget H.M. is said to have replied archly, “There is very little left—there won’t be enough for third wedding.”
The wedding took place on April 8, 2005, a civil ceremony in a registry office which the queen did not attend, although she did confer her blessing on the couple by making a speech at the post-wedding reception.
Brown paints an amusing picture of the party, saying that Camilla’s ex-husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, “seemed mysteriously gratified” by events and was “behaving like the mother of the bride.”
Emilie van Cutsem was not present.
The Telegraph promised that on Monday they will be leading with another extract entitled, “Jeffrey Epstein told people that Prince Andrew was an idiot—but a useful one.”
Andrew really does relish a comeback
Prince Andrew is still focused on a full public comeback. The U.K. Times reports that the prince thinks he has a lot to contribute. No matter the settling for millions of pounds with Virginia Roberts Giuffre to terminate a case in which she had accused him of raping her three times when she was 17 and being sexually trafficked by Andrew’s good buddy Jeffrey Epstein.
Andrew denies her claims, but his excommunication from royal life—despite being stripped of nearly all his titles and responsibilities—was complicated when the queen chose him as her escort to Prince Philip’s memorial service. Andrew placed himself front and center at the event much to the reported “dismay” of other royal family members.
Clearly the spotlight has fed his own thoughts that he still has a royal role to play, even after his mother has died.
“If he is rehabilitated then I think he can do a lot of good,” one source told the Times.
In what looks like a co-ordinated PR salvo, sources and friends lined up to tell the paper how badly Andrew has been treated, they feel.
“In the past, he has done a lot of good things for charities, also in his capacity as UK trade ambassador,” one “insider” said to the Times. “If he is rehabilitated, then I think he can do a lot of good. The settlement had no admission of guilt.”
“He’s clearly in an awful place,” another associate of Andrew’s said, praising a recent Instagram post of him describing his experiences serving in the Falklands War as “incredibly personal, and incredibly thoughtful. Even the reaction to that . . . here he was as a veteran sharing something deeply personal on this important anniversary—it was surprising that it couldn’t be read as what it was. There are rightfully some questions of him but there is rarely a balanced judgment of him in the media. He has a lot to give to people who will let him give.”
But given, as The Daily Beast has reported, that Andrew is embroiled in a fresh financial scandal, royal sources are throwing cold water liberally on any suggestions of an Andrew return. “His ambition to return to public life and his belief that he can be of service remains undimmed,” one royal source told the Times. “But he is the only one who sees it that way.”
Brother, and future king, Charles “has a very clear delineation in his mind,” the source told the Times. “On the one hand, the Duke of York is his brother whom he loves, who he will support as any sibling would through difficult times, just as support has been offered by the Princess Royal and the Earl of Wessex. What they [the siblings] are very good at is understanding the difference between the family dynamic and the institutional need.” In Charles’ mind, there is “no way back” for Andrew, the paper reports.
However, the public may see him at events, where there are other non-working royals, like his daughters. “He is the queen’s son, so there has to be an acceptance that he can be at a family event,” a source said.
Meghan and Harry head overseas for Invictus documentary
The optics don’t feel great. Meghan and Harry, who, Harry says, are unable to visit the U.K. because they are not adequately protected, are going to the Netherlands next week where they will they be filming a Netflix documentary about the Invictus Games, the Paralympic style event for wounded servicemen that Harry helped found.
Less than two weeks ago, Harry failed to attend a memorial for his grandfather without explanation and has yet to introduce his daughter Lilibet to the queen.
However the Mirror now says they will be at the Hague for several days, from Friday, with a Netflix documentary crew in tow.
Harry and Meghan weren’t invited to Beckham wedding
The British newspapers have been quietly obsessing all week about the wedding of Brooklyn Beckham (son of David and Victoria) and Nicola Peltz which took place yesterday. The Mirror says Meghan and Harry weren’t invited but Kate and William were.
A source told the paper: “David and Victoria wrote to William and Kate inviting them and the family to their son’s wedding, and William replied wishing them a great deal of joy but they are unable to attend.”
The source added: “David’s attachment and history go back with William and Kate and they have a very strong relationship and they were their choice of wedding guests. It was always about them, it was never about Meghan and Harry. They are the people David and Victoria are attached to and it’s always been about them because they’ve had a long history together.”
It raises a very interesting point—those who wish to maintain connections to the future king and queen of England might think twice about extending the hand of friendship to the court in exile in California.
Harry and Meghan NY-bound?
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle may be making Manhattan their second home. The Daily Mail reports tongues are wagging that the couple are apartment-hunting near the United Nations.
The couple, presently based at their sprawling Montecito, California, home, visited the UN on a whistle-stop trip to the city last September, meeting with Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed and Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the United Nations.
This week in royal history
There was once another Princess Beatrice. The daughter of Queen Victoria was born on April 14, 1857 at Buckingham Palace. She lived until she was 87, dying in 1944.
Unanswered questions
Can Prince Charles kick Prince Andrew’s rehabilitation campaign into the long grass? And how really can he stop Andrew acting independently and grabbing the limelight if he chooses to?
