Tina Brown recently trashed the Duchess of Sussex in a podcast interview. I sort of forgot that the whole reason why Tina deigned to appear on a podcast is because she was promoting her new (gulp) Substack called Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell. How the mighty have fallen, eh? Well, in her latest piece, Brown actually spilled some interesting tea. She ripped into Prince William for his obliviously arrogant interviews in South Africa, and said that her sources are suggesting that King Charles’s loyal private secretary Clive Alderton could be stepping down soon. Both of those things somehow, improbably, mean that Prince Harry should be “coming back” any day now. Some highlights:
A Prince Harry-shaped hole: Despite the passing of years, there is still a gaping Harry-shaped hole in the depleted royal line-up. As a veteran of two military tours in Afghanistan and founder of Invictus, the substantive charity that brings hope through competitive sports events for injured vets, the Duke of Sussex, now stripped of his military honors, surely deserved a place on the [Remembrance] balcony. The British nation needs his human touch and so does his ailing father. Prince William just acknowledged that this past year’s scourge of family illness, when his father and wife fell mortally ill at the same time, has been “brutal.” But the other prince who could plausibly lighten the load is still benched in Montecito.
King Charles is old & bleak: At the Cenotaph, the king looked old and bleak without the usual supportive presence of Camilla who now, alarmingly, is herself unwell with a chest infection. Charles has just lost the siege to eject his disgraced brother Andrew from the money-pit mansion Royal Lodge on the grounds of Windsor where he remains shacked up with his horse and his ex-wife. The house was bequeathed to Andrew on a 75-year lease by his grandmother and there was never a legal leg to stand on to get him out. For Charles, it was an unwinnable fiasco.
William’s dumb interviews: William did not help the mood by giving a swaggery interview at the end of his South Africa trip for the Earthshot Prize. He told reporters about his plans to “do things differently” and then listed “impact philanthropy, collaboration, convening, and helping people”—in short, everything his father has been doing for the past 50 years. “I’m doing it with maybe a smaller ‘r’ in the royal,” he added, an unfortunate choice of words after the Sunday Times revealed days before that William’s and Charles’ ancient Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster are worth an eye-watering £1.8 billion and hold 5,000 properties on 180,000 acres (seized in the centuries after the effing Norman Conquest).
William needs Harry: In light of all this, William’s comment that his plans for a caring, sharing monarchy also include “throw(ing) some empathy in there” made him sound like a performative pinhead. In happier years, it was the irreverent Harry (or Harold as William lugubriously used to call him) who could tease the Prince of Wales and take him down a peg. There are too many people around William now who, in Kara Swisher’s inimitable phrase about those who live in a gilded bubble, “lick him up and down all day.”
Clive Alderton is on the way out? But are things about to change? I am told by an intimate royal source that Sir Clive Alderton, the king’s all-powerful private secretary and gatekeeper, and an avowed Harry enemy, – caricatured by him as The Wasp in the explosive pages of his memoir Spare – is considering retirement. The royals are run, to a degree the public doesn’t often realize, by their private secretaries, able to block and tackle the access of people on their personal sh-t lists. Harry characterized this tribe as “insects who buzz around the Palace” and “have a sting in their tail.” If Alderton goes, it could create a new, friendlier path for negotiations with Harry to be given the security protection he seeks and to resume some curtailed version of his royal duties. It could also represent a great face-saver for Meghan who must realize by now that the dull demands of second-division royalty are less onerous than grinding out serial rebranding flops.
William should suck it up: William, whatever his abiding resentments toward Harry for his intemperate broadsides in Spare, should now suck it up and let his father give Harry something to do. In an isolationist Trump world, the UK needs to draw closer to Europe and romance its relations with the Commonwealth. William and Kate dread foreign tours that take the princess away from the children and cut into what William (to his advisers’ irritation) calls his “me time.” So, unload the lesser but important red-carpet junkets onto the Sussexes who, chastened by five years in the wilderness, would export some modern royal flair, especially to ex-colonial trouble spots. Uh, wasn’t that the original plan?… What was always paramount for [QEII] was the health of the crown. And right now, the crown needs Harry.
[From Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell]
This is idiotic: “It could also represent a great face-saver for Meghan who must realize by now that the dull demands of second-division royalty are less onerous than grinding out serial rebranding flops.” Meghan was close to being driven to suicide when she lived in the UK. Now she has her own beautiful mansion, she raises her two children in peace, and she’s a successful businesswoman, producer and investor. Tina Brown can’t help but assume the exact same posture as everyone else in the rota lunatic asylum, that obviously (!!) Harry and Meghan would jump at the chance to live in some dilapidated shack and do all of William’s work. Now, that being said, Tina’s comments about William are hilarious. “Cut into what William (to his advisers’ irritation) calls his ‘me time.’” “Who could tease the Prince of Wales and take him down a PEG.” Ah, I’m always here for a peg reference.
As for the Clive Alderton tea… Tina makes it sound like Alderton’s resignation would actually be a big shock for Charles. There’s been so much turnover in the two big royal households lately, especially Kensington Palace. I wonder if Charles’s people are just as irritated as William’s people.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.