Mike Tindall is one part of a very popular rugby podcast called The Good, the Bad & the Rugby. Tindall does the pod with James Haskell and Alex Payne. Rugby is much more popular in the UK, and they truly have millions of listeners. The pod is such a success that the men have written a book about what has happened to them behind the scenes as they’ve recorded their successful pod. To promote the book, the three men were interviewed by the Telegraph, and of course they had a lot of sh-tty, toxic sh-t to say. Did I mention that they’re all royalists? Mike Tindall is “allowed” to profit from his royal connections because he and pod bros play the game and stick to royalist talking points.
Haskell on traditional masculinity: ‘Society needs people like us. Being strong, masculine, protective, loud, dominant: men like us play a role, you can’t deny it. I’m unapologetic about it now. I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.’
Tindall on marrying into the royal family: ‘Believe it or not, marrying into the Royal family was pretty easy for me. They were always nice to me, and I was always nice to them. Simple really.’
Haskell on the reality of life in a royal castle. ‘I expected big trays loaded with scones and exotic fruit tarts. Instead, I got a couple of broken rich teas and what appeared to be a half-eaten malted milk – a leftover from a box of Family Circle biscuits… Luckily, I’d brought along an M&S sandwich, but when I started eating it, someone appeared and shooed me into a corridor. They’d been on red alert since our MD spilt coffee on what was probably a priceless Chippendale cabinet.’
Tindall’s bond with Prince George is particularly close: ‘George loves his football. I’ve played numerous times in the garden with him. He’s passionate about Aston Villa, too. Wherever he is, he’ll sit down and watch that game. They’re just a family who love sport. Catherine loves her running.’
They don’t like Omid Scobie: Haskell takes a pointed swipe in the book at Omid Scobie, obsequious chronicler of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, calling him a ‘very odd bloke’. ‘Royal fans can be mental,’ Haskell adds. ‘We all know that American royal fans are f—king nuts, especially Scobieites.’ Scobie fuelled a pile-on against Tindall when, in 2022, he criticised the former England centre for ‘cashing in’ on his royal connections by appearing on I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!. ‘I don’t even have access to my Twitter,’ says Tindall today. ‘I just [get] tagged in by anyone who’s talking about anything. It’s so random, what I have to sift through. If there’s any story about me or my kids, it will get entangled into a web of something else, and I’m tagged into reading all this crap. That’s the world we live in. Some have got nothing better to do than bag people.’
“We all know that American royal fans are f—king nuts, especially Scobieites.” Hm. Sounds like they’re mad that Americans defended Meghan and Harry. Sounds like they’re mad that Americans don’t “understand” why Mike Tindall is allowed to be tacky and crass and use his royal connections for profit with no official criticism. “Marrying into the Royal family was pretty easy for me. They were always nice to me, and I was always nice to them. Simple really.” It helps that he was a white British man marrying an untitled cousin, as opposed to a Black American woman marrying the most popular prince in the realm. Ya think they got treated differently? Ya think they were held to different standards within the family and outside of the family?
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.