The free Sunday newsletter, reaching all subscribers (free and paid) in video format for the first time…do we love or do we hate?
The free Sunday newsletter, reaching all subscribers (free and paid) in video format for the first time…do we love or do we hate? And did it work (ie, if you are a free subscriber, can you watch this?)
FIRST, THE BIG NEWS: The Royalist’s first-ever members-only Ask Me Anything is this FRIDAY, live at 1pm New York time / 6pm London time, and it is open to all paid Substack subscribers (YouTube channel members are in too; nobody is being asked to subscribe twice).
Send me your questions in the comments below, or bring them along live on the day (there is a suspicion that live questions might work better on YouTube, but hopefully you will be able to join live chat on Substack too. We will have a lot to talk about, because by then Harry’s confirmed run of public engagements will be upon us.
See you Friday.
Now, I came to you this weekend with what I cheerfully confess as the least surprising scoop of the year, part two: Prince Harry, spotted by one of my impeccable Cotswold sources on Thursday at the Soho Farmhouse pool area, wandering around reception asking for a towel.
I don’t know if he went to the gym, if he went to the pool, if he went to the ice bath or where on earth he went. But that’s not really the point, is it? The point is that he was at Soho Farmhouse.
I put the story to the Sussexes’ office before publishing. They didn’t deny it, and they didn’t want to comment on the record, and the tone of the exchange was itself news: “It was notably less ‘we’re going to sue the pants off you if you write anything about their personal location.’ It was notably less ‘they’re just private individuals trying to live a private life, can’t you leave them alone, you’re a monster.’ It was: ‘We’re not going to comment.’ And I think that is a very, very interesting shift.”
Because let’s be clear about what Soho Farmhouse is. It is the most high-profile venue in the English countryside.
Hold that thought, and set it beside Alison Boshoff’s brilliant reporting in the Daily Mail this week, in which a source told her: “Look, they expect to be let back in. Harry expects they [the royal family] need him.”
They expect to be let back in. As I said on the show: “This is the institution which he compared unfavorably to a zoo, which he escaped from on a freedom flight, and we’re now told it needs him back and he’s graciously prepared to accede if he’s needed.”
And then there was the Sussex response to the Lord Chamberlain’s letter (the one confirming they are private citizens who don’t use their HRHs), briefing ITV News that they should have been consulted. “That did make me laugh,” I said. “’We should have been consulted by the royal family’? The royal family might say: yes, maybe we should have been consulted about one or two things you did.” Totally deluded, or as I believe my children would put it (and I’m told this is the technical term), delulu.
Put it all together and I think you can see what’s happening: a normalization campaign. “It’s like exposure therapy. Drip, drip, drip. Meghan getting a coffee, Harry at the pool. They’re around.”
So, why has the rehabilitation been such a failure so far? Two reasons, I’d argue: they haven’t apologized, and they haven’t explained in any understandable way what they are doing here. Marina Hyde suggested in the Guardian this week that the answer to that question increasingly appears to come down to one word: content.
I think it’s also about status (Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet mean very little in a republic; it’s a bit like having the King of Greece wandering around London saying “I’m the King of Greece.” No, you’re not). And Gavin Ashenden, in our interview earlier this week, supplied the darker logic: to stay on front pages, freelance royalty, “unmoored and unshackled from any kind of collective discipline,” needs to create conflict, and by coming back to Britain they can create conflict at every turn with the Palace. See, in a single insane week: the “we are public figures” pushback, and Uganda withdrawing from the Invictus Games “in order not to be construed as being opposed to His Majesty King Charles III of the United Kingdom, whom we deeply revere.”
Alison Boshoff joins me on the podcast on Tuesday to dig into all of it, and don’t forget: the first members-only AMA is Friday, 1pm NY / 6pm London, open to all paid subscribers. Send me your questions below.
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