Tina Brown was on CBS Mornings on Tuesday as one of their on-call “royal experts.” CBS, like other networks and American media outlets, has been covering all of the Princess of Wales drama for weeks now. The fact that King Charles and Kate fell ill at the same time in January was obviously a big story, but everything ticked up several notches when Prince William skipped his godfather’s memorial service while Kate had been MIA for over two months. That was really the start of this current catastrophe. In any case, Tina Brown is, in my opinion, a compromised “royal expert.” Her last book, The Palace Papers, was very heavy on a Middleton-centric narrative, and Brown has repeatedly said that the monarchy depends on William and Kate’s marriage, and if the marriage implodes, so too will the monarchy. Well, Brown was in rare form on CBS – she actually called out the incompetence of Kensington Palace and said outright that the wheels have come off. LOL.
Brown on Kensington Palace: “The palace did always say, ‘We’re not going to give you any health updates on [Kate’s] condition. She’s going to have this operation, and she’ll be back.’ She is indeed [entitled to privacy] and should have it. The problem is that when you release the picture, it is a health update. The picture is a health update saying, ‘Look at me, look at us, I’m perfectly fine.’ So, of course the world descends on that picture to dissect it. So I think that was the great mistake they made.”
She doesn’t think there was one original photo: “I’m deeply skeptical that there was an ‘original’. I think it’s a jigsaw of different pictures.” KP just keeps “digging themselves deeper into this mess, frankly, that they’ve created for themselves.”
Kate needs to wave from a car: “At the end of her life, Queen Elizabeth II, she had bone cancer. And in the last eight months of her life, she was on Zoom. She managed to come out onto that balcony and hold onto that stick. People didn’t realize that she was actually wheelchair bound in the last six months of her life. The public never saw that, but that was what it was. So why they can’t simply have Kate on a sort of, 50-second Zoom, saying, ‘I’m here, I’m fine.’ Bam. That’s the end of it. The kind of hiding that they’re doing, it seems excessive to me. I think all she needs to do is wave from a car window. That’s really all she needs to do. And smile. And it’s puzzling that that doesn’t happen.”
Why is everything so chaotic? “It’s possible that this was a transitional bad staffing situation, where no one is really properly paying attention, but clearly the public is going to look at a hand with no wedding ring and say, ‘Where is it?’ I think that the wheels are coming off in terms of the sort of press situation there at the palace.”
Whether Brown believes that Kate was the one who edited the photo: “I don’t [buy that]. Actually, I think there is no PR strategy. I think that they’re flailing and we need to have a new PR person come into the palace and start having a strategy about these issues.”
You can’t completely disappear in the year of our lord Beyonce 2024: “This old idea, really, that you can completely disappear, it just doesn’t work. It didn’t work in [Princess] Diana’s day. I do think [Kate] clearly feels ill and depleted, and she wants this time. But I also think, you know, there’s been so much strain and stress on her. She’s been trying to say, ‘Can I just recover quietly and in peace?’ just like Diana tried. And they won’t let you do it.”
FLAILING! There is no PR strategy! Ill and depleted! Now, I have no idea if Brown has exclusive tea or if she (like so many royal commentators) tailored her message for skeptical Americans, but it does feel like the floodgates have opened and people like Brown and various Mail columnists feel perfectly comfortable saying that Kensington Palace is completely inept and that something is dreadfully wrong here.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Kensington Palace.