Earlier today, I covered the quotes from Tina Brown’s interview on The Ankler podcast. Brown has written many books and articles about the Windsors and she’s considered some kind of expert. I’ll admit that I found some of her interviews and articles interesting, but her years-long denigration of the Duchess of Sussex is where Brown has really jumped the shark. Obviously, every outlet is running Tina’s quotes about how Meghan “is flawless about getting it all wrong,” and how Prince Harry is “in thrall” with his terrible wife. But Tina also threw in some slams of Prince William. Obviously, those quotes are not getting the same kind of attention:
On the Sussexes’ foreign tours, Tina Brown said, “When he goes on these much mocked foreign trips, he’s just really good at it. He’s charming, he’s funny, he’s sweet, he’s authentic again. He has a real sense of being true and real, and he’s flawless at it. So it’s actually very sad that he can’t go back to England and play that role, which is desperately needed, because now the monarchy is a skeleton of itself. It’s so ironic that Prince Charles, for all those years, talked about the slimmed down monarchy. It’s been so slimmed down now that it’s anorexic.”
“You’ve basically got Charles, who’s got cancer. You’ve got Kate, who’s been through this terrible cancer bout herself and had to leave the stage for nearly a year, and William, who’s so curtailed by all the anxiety on his shoulders—his wife and his father and the whole thing—that they could use, an upbeat, joyful ambassador to the world who would be Harry.
“The problem is very much the same problem that I talked about with Princess Diana and Charles, which was known as the ‘upstage problem.’ I mean, he does upstage William. There’s no doubt about it.”
Asked if Harry would “remain in the U.S., and be married to Meghan in ten years time,” Brown said: “I think he’s pretty much in the thrall of Meghan… He’s the lamb to the slaughter in this situation. I mean, he was terribly impressed by Meghan. He thought that she knew it all. She persuaded him that she was the savvy Hollywood wheeler dealer, who would come in and make them stars and all the rest of it. And he just sort of blindly followed her like a child, really. And unfortunately, she made every mistake in the book, and she’s kind of run out of road, actually. I mean, I don’t know where Meghan goes.”
“I think that Harry could still, as I say, make a comeback. He’ll always be Prince Harry. He’ll always be the grandson of the Queen and the son of Diana. You can’t take that from him, whatever happens.”
Asked if the British people would welcome Harry, she said, “I think if he came back alone, they would… unfortunately, I think that the hostility between Harry and William is such that I don’t think that William will ever want Harry back.”
It amuses me that all of these years later, these dumb people still think of it in such simplistic terms: “we need Harry to go back to the UK so we’re going to smear his wife and that will hopefully encourage Harry to divorce Meghan and go crawling back to his abusive family.” That’s the big plan and they haven’t deviated from it for six-plus years. As for Tina’s admission that William is anxious and dull and terrified that Harry will upstage him… that’s all true. But it’s even worse than that. It’s worse than Tina Brown or any royalist will admit: William and the rest of the left-behind clan are so obsessed with the Sussexes that they trying to copy everything Harry and Meghan do, while also screaming about everything Harry and Meghan do. It’s unsustainable.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red and Cover Images.