Tina Brown’s royal gossip on ‘angry’ Prince Harry

What – another book purporting to tell the “inside story” of all that’s gone wrong lately in the House of Windsor?

Silly question. There seems to be endless appetite for tales about royals like those in “The Palace Papers” (Crown, 592 pp.), especially as Britain and royals fans around the world prepare to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee this summer, celebrating the 96-year-old monarch’s unprecedented 70 years on the throne.

Subtitled “Inside the House of Windsor – The Truth and the Turmoil,” this is not just any book about the queen, her sprawling, brawling family and their dramas over the past 25 years: It’s a Tina Brown book.

The buzz-queen of media-turned-royal biographer (“The Diana Chronicles”), Brown, 68, deploys her sterling contacts and deeply embedded sources, her familiarity with British royal history and her personal encounters with royals, palace courtiers, politicians and journalists to serve up a luscious feast of … well, yes, gossip.

But what elegant gossip, dressed up in Brown’s stylish sentences and erudite insights. Seeking a more conventional, footnoted and document-rich look at the queen’s life? Try royal biographer Robert Hardman’s “Queen of Our Times.” Not sure about the accuracy of pop-culture fare such as Netflix’s “The Crown” or the film “Spencer”? Turned off by daily tabloids attacking certain royals in spiteful and barely literate terms?

Brown is your gal.

It’s not that the book is full of “bombshell” revelations so beloved of headlines; anyone who has been paying half attention will be familiar with the scandals, histrionics, jealousy and cupidity on display since the throne-shaking death of the Princess of Wales in 1997. Never again, the queen vowed, could one supernova royal threaten the future of a 1,000-year-old monarchy.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way, so there is a larger purpose beyond tittle-tattle to Brown’s mission: These stories, she writes, are about the royals who have molded the modern monarchy – Charles, Diana, Camilla, William and Harry, Kate and Meghan, Andrew, Philip and Margaret – and about what she thinks their recent wobbles mean for the stability and survival of that monarchy.

“Above all, I hope we will get closer to understanding the woman who matters more than anyone else: the Queen,” Brown says in her prologue.

Some takeaways:

Prince Harry: A very angry man

Prince Harry was way more damaged by his mother’s death and his inability to process the tragedy than we knew, writes Brown. It turned Harry into a “very angry man,” especially after he left the discipline of the British Army. Like his mother, his emotions and explosive temper were always close to the surface. “He took up boxing because, as he later said, he was always ‘on the verge of punching somebody,’ ” Brown writes.

Brown discovered it was one of his girlfriends (prior to the former Meghan Markle), Cressida Bonas, who had serious worries about his mental health and persuaded him to get therapy. Among others, Harry, 37, turned to MI6, the British Secret Service, for help because they had teams of experienced therapists who could be discrete.

Why Prince Harry really loathes the tabloids

As Brown tells it, he has good reason to. “The Palace Papers” paints a blistering picture of the depredations of the “redtop” tabloids. Their outrages, as Harry sees them, predate his mother’s death while being chased by paparazzi, as well as the racist attacks on biracial Meghan that he first condemned in an extraordinary statement early in their relationship in 2016.

As far back as 2005, tabloid reporters, private investigators and other “creative researchers” in tabloid pay subjected Harry and William and his then-girlfriend Kate Middleton to illegal phone hacking and also to “blagging,” or obtaining confidential data by impersonation, aka lying. It happened to Diana, too, Brown found. To this day, Harry is one of multiple celebrity plaintiffs pursuing a lawsuit against several British redtops for long-ago phone hacking.

Another cause for resentment: Two of Harry’s girlfriends before Meghan, Bonas and Chelsy Davy, were endlessly harassed by paparazzi while dating the prince, in a repeat of what happened to Kate Middleton when she was dating Prince William, and to Lady Diana Spencer when she was dating Prince Charles.

Davy and Bonas concluded they didn’t want the life of a royal, although they remained friends with Harry and attended his wedding to Meghan. But he remained bitter about what he views as media intrusions targeting his friends and family, and unlike the usual royal protocol, he and Meghan have struck back with lawsuits.

“How, you might ask, did tabloid journalism – never exactly elevated – sink so very, very low?” Brown wonders.

Harry and Meghan’s wedding: Bitterness before the magic

Enough has been said and written about the chaos preceding the nuptials – like, who threw a tantrum about a tiara and who made whom cry – but Brown sheds more evenhanded light on the breakdown of relations between Meghan, 40, and her Markle family, especially father Thomas Markle.

“Scattered, discordant and mutually resentful, the Markles were never a ‘Leave It to Beaver’ American household,” Brown writes. “But in a contest of dysfunctional families, the Markles versus the Windsors is probably a toss-up.”

Thomas Markle, 77, is indeed a difficult man, Brown concedes. He sold fake pictures of himself supposedly prepping for the wedding and denied it, then dithered about whether he would walk his daughter down the aisle, exchanged tetchy texts with Harry and ended up in the hospital with a heart attack.

Brown suggests the Markles were trapped by paparazzi and tabloid reporters who hounded them into doing and saying nasty things about Meghan and Harry. “You want to hear evil stories about reporters? I can keep you here for a long time,” Markle tells Brown from his Baja California home.

It was too much for Harry. “Once again, the media had found a way to wreak incalculable damage on someone he loved, this time by ensnaring her father,” Brown writes.

Thomas Markle reserves much of his resentment for his son-in-law, “the snottiest man I’ve ever heard in my life,” who called him while he was still in hospital to, according to Markle, chastise him about his failure to listen to Harry’s orders on dealing with the media. “And I hung up on him,” Markle tells Brown. “I said, ‘That’s it, no more.’ ”

Harry and Meghan’s exit: ‘Mutual addiction to drama’

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s messy move to California in 2020 had “much in common with the American exit from Afghanistan: a necessary end executed with maximum chaos,” Brown writes. Megxit, she writes, is an inaccurate term: “The decision was Harry’s, with acceleration from Meghan.”

The British-born Brown’s long residence in the U.S. makes her somewhat more sympathetic to Meghan’s trials after marrying Harry. She blames much of Meghan’s distress on the American’s misunderstanding of what royal life actually entailed, especially the primacy of hierarchy and the sometimes deadening effect of crusty traditions.

As Brown describes her, Meghan was clueless about what she was joining and Harry failed to prepare her because he was fed up with it himself. She was now his “comrade in arms” fighting the royal rules he had wrestled for years. “An aide described their confrontational stance as ‘mutual addiction to drama,'” Brown writes, and Meghan was as combative as he was.

“I didn’t do any research,” Meghan told Oprah Winfrey in the 2021 interview with Harry heard ’round the world. For someone like Meghan, a smart woman who was laser-focused from an early age on achieving fame, it was odd that she claimed to never even Google her family-to-be.

So, Brown observes, no wonder she was mystified about why she and Harry would always rank behind Will and Kate, even though the Sussexes, in Meghan’s Hollywood view, were the true global superstars. Effusive Meghan made reserved palace pooh-bahs blanche when she vowed to “hit the ground running” in her new royal role.

Used to commanding entertainment publicists, she failed to grasp that palace press teams work for the institution on the premise the less said in public, the better. Meghan could not just order them knock down media coverage she didn’t like. And “she was hopelessly at sea” with English culture and Brits’ drier, more satirical sense of humor.

Once married, Harry and Meghan were “both drunk on the shared a fantasy of being the instruments of global transformation … who would operate in the celebrity stratosphere once inhabited by Princess Diana,” Brown writes. “Meghan couldn’t and wouldn’t bide her time to get there.”

Still, the two have achieved a major change that no one can take away, Brown writes: Meghan’s Black mother, Doria Ragland, and the queen are now “grandmothers in the same family, a twin victory over entrenched attitudes towards race and class,” Brown concludes.

Kate Middleton played the long game – and won

“In 2011, the question mark over Kate Middleton was whether a girl of such unexalted origins could successfully evolve into a future queen. Now the only question is whether the House of Windsor could survive without her,” Brown writes.

Kate, 40, was ambitious in deciding what she wanted – the heir to the throne – and going after it. And she had a supportive, strategic, circumspect mother, Carole Middleton, to help guide her. As Brown puts it, they were both good at playing “the long game.”

Brown suggests that after it was announced in 2000 that William was headed to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland for college, Kate “suddenly bailed out of the University of Edinburgh 50 miles away and reapplied at St. Andrews.” They ended up in the same dorm, later in the same off-campus digs, and eventually she wowed him at a charity fashion show where she wore little more than her underwear.

By 2007, after years together and after enduring media pressure without palace protection, Kate wanted a ring. William wanted to break up. She was devastated but threw herself into nights-on-the-town in London with sister Pippa. Within months, William realized his mistake and begged her to come back. They married in 2011, and now Kate is Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, the future Queen Catherine and mother of the future king.

“Love and Strategy would be a good name for a Kate Middleton perfume,” Brown writes.

Ten years on, Kate has become a “savvy dynastic strategist who buys wholeheartedly into both the monarchy’s mission of duty and its priority of survival,” Brown writes.

Charles and Camilla: Sex and sensibility

Another woman who understands how to play the long game: Camilla Shand Parker Bowles, 74, daughter of the English countryside aristocracy and great-granddaughter of a mistress of Prince Charles’ great-great grandfather Edward VII. Like her ancestor, Camilla never blabbed and stuck to her family motto of “Thou shalt not whine” in the face of public dislike fueled by media mischief, Brown shows.

One of the ironies of the past 25 years is that the Prince of Wales, 73, and Camilla, who was blamed by all, especially his sons, for the breakup of his marriage to Diana, emerged from catastrophic condemnation with a strong and happy marriage, popular respect and the approval of the queen, who granted her son’s dearest wish in declaring that his wife would be Queen Camilla when he becomes king.

This was after the queen had already showered Camilla with other prestigious honors for her dutiful loyalty and charity work. It’s a remarkable turnaround, Brown notes, given that the queen and her mother, the late Queen Mother, declined to be in the same room with Camilla for years until she and Charles wed in 2005, despite both queens being longtime friends of Camilla and her first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles.

Not all the family is thrilled about Queen Camilla. Harry “can’t stand” his father’s second wife, Brown writes; as a teen, he once freaked her out by silently glowering at her when first forced to be in the same room with her.

Nevertheless, Brown writes that Camilla is perfect for Charles, the “sexual and emotional comfort food” for the Prince of Wales, the “horse whisperer of his emotional needs” since they met in the early 1970s.

Brown quotes the queen’s former press secretary Michael Shea saying that Charles’ three siblings in the mid-1980s thought of writing to Charles to protest his relationship with Camilla. Brown is not sure it happened but if it did, it had no effect: “Charles was hypnotized by Camilla sexually,” Shea told her.

Prince Andrew: The Duke of Hazzard

The yearslong scandal involving the Duke of York and the late American sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein was only the latest, most shocking, most expensive and widely covered chapter in the buffoonish life of the queen’s second son, described by Brown as a dim bully with an exaggerated sense of his own intelligence and a habit of doing dodgy financial deals with dictators.

“The Duke of York was a coroneted sleaze machine,” Brown pronounces. Prince Andrew, 62, even horrified Prime Minister Boris Johnson, himself no slouch in the prat department. After Andrew left a business lunch with Johnson when he was mayor of London, Johnson turned to a companion, London Assembly chair Darren Johnson, and said, “I’m the last person to be a republican but … if I ever have to spend another lunch like that, I soon will be.”

The most surprising anecdote Brown shares involves Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, 62, known as Fergie. They’ve been divorced for decades but they are still close, still live together (in different wings) in the same mansion (Royal Lodge, in Windsor) and still back each other up when under fire, which is often.

Brown describes how an unnamed American media executive was having lunch with Fergie at Royal Lodge one day when Andrew came in, sat down and said, referring to Fergie, “What are you doing with this fat cow?” The executive was stunned at the “level of sadism.”

“Whatever the undertow of their curious arrangement, the deal seems to be that he bails (Fergie) out when she’s in trouble, and she backs him up when he’s assailed by scandal. It is the symbiosis of sheer survival,” Brown writes.