Inside the house of Monarchy

Tina Brown, a former Editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, and author of the bestselling “ The Diana Chronicles (2007)”. The Palace Papers, take the readers on a tour that shows the Queens’s stoic resolve as she copes with the passing of Princess Margaret, the Queen Mother, and her partner for seven decades, Prince Philip, and triumphed in her Jubilee years even as the family dramas raged around her. She also explores Prince Charles’s determination to make Camilla his queen, the tension between Prince William and Harry who are on “different paths”, the ascendance of Kate Middleton, the disturbing allegations surrounding Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein and Harry and Meghan’s stunning decision to “step back” as senior royals.

Brown ignores what apparently the Queen often said after the death of the Princes of Wales in 1997, “We don’t want another Diana”, never again the monarchy be overshadowed by a single figure.

In the British monarchy, history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme, the institution is unbalanced by family members who won’t play the game: Once the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson, then Diana, now Harry and Meghan.

Brown concentrates on the courtships of Camila and Charles, and Kate and Williams, She tells how the 2012 London Olympic ceremony helped to make the Queen cool, and how canny PR advisers made Charles popular. And she tells why Meghan’s entrance into royal life went so wrong, so quickly. The blame goes to Harry for not accepting the realities of royal life, and to Meghan herself. A palace source has admitted to Brown that in dealing with negative press coverage of Meghan, “ We did not take the race seriously enough”.

“Most of royal life is crushingly dull. It’s like being a battery hen in the Waldorf Astoria” says Brown. Minor royals like Sarah Ferguson are “like creatures in Middle Eastern harem, captives of luxury everyone resents”. Royals can’t get proper jobs, they can’t serve in the military as they’d like. In 2008, Harry completed a 10-week tour in Afghanistan before an Australian news website exposed him, forcing him to be withdrawn. Harry has an “earnest desire to do good”, Thomas Markle, Meghan’s father, maybe shown in newspapers as a money-grabbing egotist, but he was a relatively successful lighting director in Hollywood before being left alone to fend off World’s press. Andrew on a trip to California appalled his hosts by spending two days watching porn and the book argues that Jeffrey Epstein “exploited Andrew’s sense of grievance about being relegated increasingly to the royal margins”.

Brown presents readers with a better understanding of the monarch, and we learn that she is often a remote figure, using her workload to avoid tricky family dynamics, a tactic known as “ostrich mode”.

The Queen sees Charles as too emotional and too materialistic, or that Ghislaine Maxwell once showed a friend implements with which her father beat her, are drawn from previous books.

Brown is critical of British tabloids that hound all those in the royal limelight. Despite the fragile monarchy’s best efforts, ‘never again’ seems fast approaching.

The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor – the Truth and the Turmoil by Tina Brown, Century £20, Crown $35, 592 pages.