The Palace Papers by Tina Brown review – the good, the
bad and the indefensible
It’s hard to look away as Tina Brown delves into
decades’ worth of royal scandals
Hadley
Freeman
@HadleyFreeman
Sat 23 Apr
2022 07.00 BST
‘The
fascination of monarchy is that its themes repeat themselves because its
protagonists are earthly,” is Tina Brown’s conclusion to The Palace Papers, her
latest book about the British royal family. This is a very Tina Brown way of
saying – after more than 500 exhaustive pages of Windsor arcana – “Oh well,
we’re all human.” In fact, I think the fascination of the monarchy is that no
matter how many books are written about them, and no matter how hagiographic
they intend to be, there’s always some new information within that proves
they’re even more repulsive than you originally thought.
This is
genuinely impressive – superhuman, even – given that the Windsor’s shenanigans
are about as unexamined as the assassination of JFK. I’m no royalist – after
all, I do work for the Guardian, which Brown describes as “mercurial” and
“sour” due to its rude republicanism – but hey, I watched The Crown. I’ve even
read Brown’s previous royal book about that similarly untapped subject, The
Diana Chronicles. I’m up on the royals, OK? Or so I thought until I read in The
Palace Papers about Charles’s other mistress in the 1970s and possibly 80s,
Dale Harper, who was dropped by Charles for being too keen on him. Later she
fell out of a window and was paralysed below the waist. When she “frantically
pursued Charles in her wheelchair” at a polo match in 1997, he issued “a chilly
statement saying they were no longer the friends they once were”. Or how about
this one, which was told to Brown by “an American media executive” about the
time he had lunch with Sarah Ferguson in 2015: “Andrew came in and sat down and
said to me, ‘What are you doing with this fat cow?’ I was so stunned by his
level of sadism. She has to sing for her supper.” In other words, Brown
concludes: “He bails her out when she’s in trouble, and she backs him up when
he’s assailed by scandal.”
Brown gets
in an even more satisfying dig at Andrew by making good use of the unpublished
memoir of Virginia Giuffre, who claims she was forced by Jeffrey Epstein and
Ghislaine Maxwell to have sex with Andrew three times. The first of these
encounters, Giuffre writes in her memoir, was “the longest ten minutes of my
life”. (Andrew, famously, denies he ever met Giuffre.) Even the revered Queen
is diminished by some of the claims. Most people know she went away for weeks
at a time when she was a young mother. But I did not know that, after a
six-week trip to Malta when he was 12 months old, “instead of rushing straight
back to see Charles at Sandringham as one might expect, she lingered in London
for a few days, catching up on admin and attending an engagement at Hurst Park
Races where she had a horse riding,” Brown writes. She missed both Charles’s
second and third Christmases and his third birthday. Really puts that modern
parental guilt about going out two evenings in one week into perspective,
doesn’t it?
Yet Brown
doesn’t want her readers to hate the royals, which is always the problem with
books about them. The royals, like celebrities, only matter as much as people
believe they matter, and a book just about Andrew’s awfulness and Charles’s
pettiness would be true, but would also make the reader question just why they
are reading about this absurd, irrelevant family. Current events, however, are
in Brown’s favour as they have enabled her to play a double game. So in The Palace
Papers there are the Good Royals – the Queen, Prince Philip and the Cambridges
– who are written about in prose worthy of Mills & Boon (“There’s a Mona
Lisa quality to Kate,” Brown writes, presumably without throwing up on her own
keyboard). Then there are the Bad Royals – Prince Andrew, Sarah Ferguson, the
Sussexes – who get a thorough kicking. Prince Charles is neutral, the others
non-existent. In other words, she’s pretty much sticking to the script of the
palace’s current PR strategy, which has cut the deadwood adrift and focused the
spotlight entirely on the Queen and the Cambridges.
In regard
to the Sussexes, Brown is assisted in her endeavours by Meghan Markle’s father,
Thomas, who adds Brown to the long list of journalists to whom he has trashed his
daughter. Brown duly rewards him by defending his indefensible behaviour,
insisting that Prince Harry made Thomas feel “disempowered, perhaps even
emasculated” when he asked his father-in-law to please stop talking to the
press. And that’s another interesting thing about the royals: as bad as they
all are, the bottom-feeders around them are even worse.
For those
who haven’t encountered Brown’s writing before, The Palace Papers provides all
the greatest hits. There’s her fondness for introducing people with often
baffling descriptions: “the galloping Major Shand”; “a blonde dazzler with
amazing legs”; and – my personal favourite – “With her tumbling mane of red
curly hair and vulpine networking skills, Rebekah Brooks was lethally
successful at penetrating the political and media corridors of power.” There’s
also her usual balancing act of being both an insider (one person is introduced
to the reader as “my pew mate at Lord Lichfield’s memorial”), but also enough
of an outsider to describe Prince and Princess Michael as “low-boil,
money-grubbing embarrassment[s]”. It’s a pose she perfected as editor of
Tatler, that monthly annual of poshos that alternates obsequiousness with
objectivity, and as with Tatler, it’s not hard to detect where Brown’s
sympathies ultimately lie: the sad state of the British upper classes in the
early 2000s is exemplified, Brown suggests, by the sight of “Brigadier Parker
Bowles on the London tube, strap-hanging in his morning suit”.
You can’t
write as much about the royals as Brown has without taking them seriously, and
she absolutely does. Her writing becomes positively orgasmic when describing
Kate’s alleged triumph in bagging William: “Kate did not wait eight years for
any rich, connected man. She waited for the man – the future King William V, by
the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
and of Her Other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth,
Defender of the Faith – Your Majesty to the rest of us.” She gives poor Prince
Philip a death scene that would have made even Charles Dickens say: “Tina,
mate, come on. Dial it down a bit.”
But Brown
is also an absolutely dogged researcher. A significant part of The Palace
Papers seems to be gleaned from earlier, very well known books (Diana by Andrew
Morton, The Insider by Piers Morgan, Diary of an MP’s Wife by Sasha Swire).
Even so, she dredges up enough colour to enliven the outlines of this all-too
familiar story. And by God, it’s familiar. Are there really any readers out
there with the stomach to wade through details of Megxit again? More people
still agog for the alleged fairytale of Prince William and commoner Kate?
Anyone on the planet desperate for another rehash of Charles’s cruelty to
Diana? The answer, of course, is yes. And that, really, is the most fascinating
thing of all about the royal family.
The Palace Papers is published by Cornerstone
(£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer order a copy at
guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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