TINA BROWN ON HARRY AND MEGHAN’S ‘SCORCHED EARTH’ EXIT
.
The author of “The Palace Papers” takes us inside the
power struggles and scandals of the British Royal Family.
April 25,
2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
Produced by
‘Sway’
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-tina-brown.html
Whether
it’s the Queen’s platinum jubilee, Meghan and Harry ditching their royal roles
or the sexual assault allegations against Prince Andrew, Buckingham Palace has
kept the media, and the public, hooked on the goings-on of a thousand-year-old
institution. Tina Brown has been covering the royal family since the days of
Diana, most recently in her forthcoming book, “The Palace Papers.”
In this
conversation, the former Vanity Fair editor talks to Kara Swisher about how
Elizabeth has sustained her relevance over her seven decades of rule and what
happens to the British monarchy when she dies. They also discuss what’s
happening in the nonroyal wing of British leadership — including Boris
Johnson’s “Partygate.”
The Palace Papers review – a rollicking ride through
recent royal family history
Tina Brown’s sparkling prose and eye for detail
enliven an entertaining exposé – with a little help from Prince Andrew and his
50-strong crew of teddy bears
Rachel
Cooke
Rachel
Cooke
@msrachelcooke
Sun 24 Apr
2022 07.00 BST
What ails
the royal family? By Tina Brown’s telling, the answer to this perennial and
highly thorny question is: just about everything. Yes, it’s partly a simple
matter of context; in the early 21st century, there no longer seems to be much
point to the hats and the parades and the tours (Kate and William in the
Caribbean? Cringe de la cringe! as Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriend Cressida Bonas
would say.) And yes, it’s a suffocating way to live: like being a “battery hen
in the Waldorf Astoria”, as Brown puts it, struggling somewhat for the right
image.
But the
former editor of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, having applied all of her
famous wit and intelligence to the problem, identifies many other maladies,
too. Sadism, parsimony, profligacy, infantilism, randiness, ruthlessness,
rudeness, coldness, extreme entitlement and, last, but not least, incredible
stupidity; alas, among the Windsors, all are present and correct. The family is
a walking, talking advert either for – take your pick – intensive group therapy
or religious seclusion (after all, wasn’t Prince Philip’s ma a nun or
something?). No wonder the Queen Mother’s steward, William Tallon, used to
herald dinner at her Scottish retreat, Birkhall, by swinging a censer, as if he
was a priest.
I must
admit that I did not have high hopes of The Palace Papers, whatever its author
has to say in her prologue about the zillions of insiders (OK, 120) she spent
two years stalking; the first person she quotes by name is – zzzzz! – Gyles
Brandreth, which didn’t seem to me to bode well in terms of hot new info (when
isn’t the former Tory MP up for talking about Prince Philip?). But having
ploughed through almost 600 pages of “truth and turmoil” – I do these things so
you don’t have to – all I can say is that if one must read royal gossip, let it
be written by Tina, a woman who, as a former editor of Tatler, not only knows
how to write an extended picture caption – “Harry’s hot and heavy glamping
retreat!” – but who also remains, in spite of the long years she has lived in
Manhattan, crazily attentive to the minute gradations of social class that make
this country such a basket case. Was the Queen Mother preposterously posh or seriously
suburban? For days now, I haven’t been able to stop thinking of the two
cherubim on her four-poster bed at Clarence House, whose little angel outfits –
I’m not kidding – were washed and starched by her servants every month.
‘Pretend
I’m a rocking horse,’ the young Camilla is said to have urged the sexually
‘diffident’ Charles
The book,
which is as fat as Paradise Lost and definitely won’t fit in your Launer
handbag, begins with a waspish account of the memorial in 2006 for the Queen’s
cousin, the photographer Lord Lichfield, an event at which Brown was happily in
attendance (she sat beside the aforementioned Tallon, in whose Kennington flat
she would later see “a draping of pearls he said belonged to the Queen Mother”
and many other “discarded bibelots… whether bestowed or pilfered was anybody’s
guess”). Brown carefully notes the appearance of the royal family on this
occasion: the Duchess of Cornwall’s hat made her look like an air steward; a
person could, she thought, have rooted “for truffles in the forests of bad
teeth”. But naturally she’s delighted by their shabbiness, just as she’s
thrilled to hear that, afterwards, Andrew Parker Bowles (“a walking pink gin”)
was seen strap-hanging in his morning suit on the tube. Her interest is in
dust, not diamonds. She has a taste, you soon gather, for minor characters. The
sad, Norma Desmond-ish spaces these types inhabit – Prince Andrew at home with
his 50 teddy bears, many of them dressed as sailors; Princess Margaret
complaining that she only wants to see pictures of her sister on postage
stamps, not “ghastly buildings and birds and things” – are so much fun to
describe, after all. Far better than the garden at Highgrove, at any rate.
Thanks to
all this, the bits about the Queen and Philip, and Kate and William, are a bit
boring. The pace picks up when she’s analysing the Duchess of Sussex, who
henceforth will always be known to me as Number Six on the Call Sheet (Brown’s
account of Meghan’s acting career – she has watched her Suits audition tapes –
is going to be a huge hit with Piers Morgan). As Brown sagely states, calling
your agent won’t help in the case of primogeniture. But I think she’s at her
absolute best when she’s dealing with the likes of Andrew and Fergie and with
Camilla in the days before she finally married Charles. In these chapters,
simply everything is either comical or ghastly, or both. In case you were
wondering, it’s Andy who’s the sadist. “What are you doing with this fat cow?”
he asked an American media executive who’d come to have lunch with his ex-wife
at their home, Royal Lodge, in 2015. The Queen’s second son is so stupid and so
pompous, he once seriously pitched to the then London mayor, Boris Johnson, the
idea of reducing the number of traffic lights in the capital. The deep thinking
behind this masterplan was that this would result in fewer red lights. He also
thought the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre should be bigger; God alone
knows why.
It’s
Camilla, though, who really fascinates Brown: her stoicism, her earthiness, the
fact that she once French-kissed Charles in front of her husband (this was in
1980, at a polo ball hosted by the heir to a meat fortune Lord Vestey and it
went on for hours, apparently). What drew her to Charles, a man whom Brown
depicts as a ruthless, spoilt baby – and who would, she can’t resist reminding
us, come to be known as Prince Tampacchino in the Italian press? (Work it out.)
What kept her at his side for so long? I’d have quit once I’d finished dying of
laughter at the revelation that the coronet he wore for his investiture as
Prince of Wales was topped with a gold-covered ping pong ball. I suppose it was
sex in the beginning – “Pretend I’m a rocking horse,” the young Camilla is said
to have urged the sexually “diffident” Charles – and then, later, it was
comfort. She subsumed the role played in his life by the Queen Mother, “the
buttery scone to his mother’s steamed broccoli”.
Anyway,
this bit of the book fairly rips along, the bastard child of Jilly Cooper and
Tom Wolfe. Like Queen Mary, who once said to a relative: “We [the royal family]
are never tired”, Brown is quite inexhaustible. But as for what all this hard
labour has been for, exactly, I don’t know. Hasn’t she anything better to do
with her time than to tell us about – no, this is not a euphemism – Andrew’s
6ft-long ironing board? About Charles’s preference for Kleenex Velvet loo roll?
Honestly. I’m embarrassed for her. Cringe de la cringe.
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