Soon after Kensington Palace’s Mother’s Day frankenphoto fiasco, CBS brought Tina Brown in to offer her royal-expertise on the situation. Brown was pretty harsh, saying that the “wheels had come off” Kensington Palace and that the whole “missing princess” thing was massively mismanaged. A few days after Brown appeared on CBS, she ended up flying to London. It felt like she was actually doing some leg work to figure out what the hell was going on. She talked to her sources in the palaces and royalist media and she was seemingly still on the trail when Kensington Palace published the Princess of Wales’s big cancer-announcement video (on March 22).
Days after the video was published, March 25, the New York Times published a guest op-ed written by Brown. I covered it here – Brown said that the royal courts are constantly lying and have done for decades. Her sources told her that “the turmoil behind the scenes has been intense, resulting in what has felt like a series of baffling press screw-ups” at Kensington Palace. Then she wrote about what’s really been going on, which is that William and Kate have been frozen with anxiety because of their proximity to the throne and that “Catherine is battling more — much more — than cancer. A tidal wave of premature responsibility is crashing in her and William’s direction.” What was interesting about Brown’s NYT column was that it felt mostly accurate and it sounded like this was the general assessment from real royal sources too, that William and Kate were being crushed by their own sense of inadequacy. What was also interesting is that very few outlets covered Brown’s NYT column two weeks ago, but suddenly, in the past two days, American and British outlets are running quotes from it.
Prince William is reportedly in “frightening proximity” to ascending the British throne amid His father King Charles III’s ongoing battle with cancer.
“The almost simultaneous news of Charles’s cancer has put William and Catherine in frightening proximity to ascending the throne just when they had hoped for a span of years to parent their children out of the public eye,” journalist Tina Brown claimed in a New York Times essay published on March 25. William and his wife, Kate Middleton — who is also battling cancer — share three kids: Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, 8, and Prince Louis, 5.
The former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief asserted that the idea of William becoming the reigning sovereign has spurred much stress for the couple.
“The prospect of it, I am told, is causing them intense anxiety,” she wrote. Brown also claimed that several scandals surrounding the royal family — including Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s estrangement from the royal family as well as Prince Andrew’s ties to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — have put William and Middleton “under unmanageable pressure.”
“Catherine is the most popular member of the royal family after William,” she wrote, adding, “The future of the monarchy hangs by a thread, and that thread is her.”
Brown furthered that William, 41, and Middleton, 42, are burdened with more responsibilities than just her health condition.
“A tidal wave of premature responsibility is crashing in her and William’s direction,” she said. “Frozen, unready and with Catherine now seriously unwell, the Prince and Princess of Wales await the awesome burden of the crown.”
Similar coverage has appeared in The Independent, Us Weekly, InStyle and on and on. Why the two-week delay? Why are Brown’s comments suddenly making all kinds of headlines? Part of it is that Buckingham Palace has seemingly ordered radio silence across the board for the past week or so, and people are going back to some weeks-old gossip. But I also think that there’s a reason why Brown’s column is getting more traction right at this moment. It will be very interesting to come back to Brown’s piece six months from now to see if she was right on the money.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.