Tina Brown’s Very Entertaining ‘The Palace Papers’

Two days before Prince William married Kate Middleton on April 29, 2011, John Berlau published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal hailing Middleton as “The Entrepreneur’s Princess.” In Berlau’s words at the time, “This week’s wedding can be seen as the culmination of a long process of elevating the social status of entrepreneurship itself.”

As was well-known at the time, Middleton was a “commoner,” which meant her wedding to Prince William was something of a story beyond the world’s theoretically most eligible bachelor getting married. Middleton’s bloodline wasn’t of the Windsor/Mountbatten kind, but thanks to her parents’ impressive entrepreneurial achievements, Middleton grew up very well-to-do, only to become part of Prince William’s crowd at the University of St. Andrews. Berlau was celebrating the very American ascendance of Middleton. In the U.S., it’s thankfully very much the norm for people to rise from relatively humble origins, while England is quite a bit more class conscious.

My thinking at the time was that while the sentiment of Berlau’s (whom I consider a friend) op-ed was very uplifting, what made the marriage appealing to Americans is what rendered it the wrong match. For a royal. I say this as someone who thinks the inherited status of royalty as kind of ridiculous. Still, if there’s going to be royalty, it should remain just that in order to continue to be royal.

My take is that Walter Bagehot got it right with his perhaps apocryphal line about the British royal family that “Its mystery is its life, we must not let in daylight upon magic.” While Bagehot was talking about the royals not wading into politics, the view here is that his quip became even more reasonable when applied to marriage. Which is what we Americans perhaps don’t get. We don’t have royalty for a reason. We’re a nation founded on merit, on all men equal before the law. England increasingly is merit focused, but for some of its anachronistic institutions rooted in inherited merit. Love them or hate them, they exist. And if an institution is going to be royal, it should once again be just that.

In which case Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton was puzzling. It in no way denigrates Middleton to observe that if anyone can be royal, or marry into it, it’s no longer royal. The titled should marry within their titled class not because the whole notion of royalty isn’t ridiculous, but precisely because it is. Once marriage to a prince becomes aspirational as opposed to an impossible barrier to breach due to a lack of a bloodline, what’s royal no longer is?

Berlau’s opinion piece came to mind while reading the very excellent Tina Brown’s just-released and very entertaining modern history of the British royal family, The Palace Papers – Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil. In this blast of a book’s prologue, Brown noted about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s revolting “tell-all” with Oprah Winfrey that “Americans who have never forgiven the Windsors for their rejection of Diana mostly cheered the Sussexes [Harry and Meghan] for blowing the whistle on the monarchy’s whole crumbling theme-park enterprise.” Okay, but there lies the problem.

Again, Americans are arguably the wrong audience to please if you’re a royal. Americans are properly optimistic, they’re entrepreneurial, they’re aspirational, and they rightly believe anything’s possible. Amen to this truth about Americans. But royals must be mysterious, the barriers to entry somewhat sealed, the secrets kept. Diana, though of impeccable bloodline if you’re willing to take such things seriously, went public with the dirt. She was “the People’s Princess,” which explains well what Brown reports about what Queen Elizabeth meant when she decreed behind closed doors that there must never be someone like her again. In the words of Brown about the Queen’s younger sister Princess Margaret, “the peril of celebrity is that it curdles.”

Princess Diana was a celebrity. Some will say the latter is a statement of the obvious considering her beauty and charm, but didn’t she know that royals are supposed to be less than exposed; that “the People’s Princess” is a dangerous sign of an overexposed, “curdled,” and surely less mysterious royal family that draws its life from the opposite? Worse, how could Princess Diana have been so naïve as to believe Prince Charles had married her for love? About the previous question, it will be stressed again that your reviewer, or analyzer, or reader isn’t a royalist, an expert on the royals, or even a fan, but at the same time I’ve got what is presumably a reasonable understanding of marriage in the titled world: mistresses are somewhat the rule in it precisely because love and emotion generally don’t inform the marriages. Love it or hate it, that’s the way it is. Prince Charles asked Diana to marry him not because he was passionately in love with her, but because she checked the boxes. She was very pretty, she had the bloodline, and considering the time in question, she brought virginity to the wedding day. Brown unearths a quote from Princess Diana as saying that she knew she had to keep herself “tidy” if she expected to marry someone like Prince Charles. It makes sense, but how then did she not know that her husband, seemingly like most royal personages, was not going to have a mistress?

None of this is to defend Prince Charles. He doesn’t always come off well in The Palace Papers. But Prince Charles was just playing his role in “the Firm.” What could Princess Diana have been thinking in expecting fidelity, and can we really blame the royals “for their rejection” of her based on her actions in response to Prince Charles getting back to romance after “the breeding” was done? Readers can decide.

Regarding the lengthy clearing of the throat that precedes the analysis of Brown’s book, please understand why. It seems in analyzing people and a lifestyle that’s so alien to 99.9999% of us (including your reviewer), it’s useful to define one’s terms ahead of time. While infidelity is not cheered in the real world, while it’s not cheered by your reviewer, it’s the accepted norm among royals. So is quietude. As Brown notes early on, “In the seventy years of her reign,” Queen Elizabeth II “has never given an interview, which has only enhanced her mystery. (emphasis mine)” Lastly, I don’t claim much knowledge at all of the royals other than a strong belief that a lack of mystery will be their undoing. This is mentioned simply because what may be news to me, or interesting to me, may not be news to some readers. A non-expert will be analyzing Brown’s book. Why did someone who usually writes on economics read and review it? The answer is that I’m aware enough of the royals to be interested, Brown is always interesting, plus there’s nothing wrong with being conversational. The royals are much spoken of, so it makes sense to know something. Brown delivers.

Beyond the Prologue, Brown’s book begins with the never again “post-Diana world,” which means it in a very figurative and literal sense begins with Camilla Parker Bowles, born Camilla Rosemary Shand. She was the third of “three of us” in Princess Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles. The chapters are eye-opening, and in a lot of ways. For one, Brown is quick to dismiss as “apocrypha” the much-passed-around line from a 24-year old Camilla to a 22-year old Charles that “My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather – so how about it?”

Realistically, Camilla didn’t need to be so forward, as Brown indicates that Charles was very taken right away. Better yet, and as Brown makes plain, “Camilla had no need to tout her own antecedents. The Shands were a charismatic family whose deep roots in aristocratic life were amplified by their considerable personal charm.” In other words, when Camilla looked at Charles she was not looking up. They were part of the same set. When Camilla married Andrew Parker Bowles, Brown reports that the Queen Mother and Princess Anne attended.

All of this rates mention given what your reviewer had long assumed; that Charles loved Camilla, but that she loved him and wanted to marry him even more. Brown writes that even if the non-virgin in Camilla had been acceptable despite her kind of wild past, it’s “doubtful that Camilla would have accepted a marriage proposal from Charles anyway.” Brown’s explanation is that for seven years she’d been in “headlong pursuit of the sexier, more dangerous Parker Bowles.” News to me. All these years I’d assumed Parker Bowles was the weak-kneed cuckold, when in truth he “would be as unfaithful during his nearly twenty-two-year marriage to Camilla as he was for the seven years that preceded it.”

Brown indicates that if anything, Camilla kept Charles in the 1970s picture as a way of pushing Andrew across the finish line. And once she and Andrew were married, Charles remained in the picture precisely because Andrew was so often out of it. Worse, as opposed to playing the part of put upon cuckold, Andrew once observed with seeming glee as Camilla made out with Charles very much in view of their crowd that “HRH is very fond of my wife. And she appears very fond of him.” In their world, association with the future King was obviously an elevation of sorts, and presumably for Andrew, the path to knowing even more women not named Camilla.

As opposed to disdaining Diana as a barrier to Charles, Brown reports that “Camilla vetted the blushing Lady Diana Spencer” as suitable. Again, she was in love with Andrew it seems, but hoped (presumably revealing a bit of her own naivete) keeping Charles in the picture would keep him relatively well behaved. And precisely because Diana didn’t hunt, this would leave “plenty of opportunity for her and Charles to meet” with Diana far away.

Which brings up one anecdote that read as a false note? About it, it’s useful to precede what allegedly caused Andrew to file for divorce with another mention of his apparently joyful comment about HRH being fond of his wife. Andrew plainly knew. But when the infamous phone call between Charles and Camilla was made public (if you don’t know it, look it up…..), Brown describes the latter in concert with Charles’s admission on television of “infidelity” as “the last straw” on the way to real divorce. This read as false simply because Andrew was not only relentlessly unfaithful, but he also knew about Camilla and Charles. Better yet, he seemed to revel in it. Since the world of Andrew, Camilla and Charles is more about mergers of blood than marriage for love, it wasn’t understandable why an admission of what was already well known was what caused Andrew to officially sever ties.

Where it all becomes sad is that in Brown’s accounting, Camilla and Andrew’s kids (Tom and Laura) were apparently blindsided. They’d apparently thought their parents very happy, and like anyone, had similarly enjoyed their parents’ close association with the future King. Yet even this read and reads as a little bit odd? Never an expert on this, memory says that People Magazine and other royals-obsessed publications in the U.S. had almost from day one been reporting on troubles in the “fairy tale” marriage between Charles and Diana, and it seems by extension that Camilla was a known quantity well before the tapes. How did the kids not know? In asking the question it’s not a critique. From the perspective of an American, it all sounds so awful.

The main thing is that subsequent to the revelations, Laura Parker Bowles would yell at Charles through the phone to leave their family alone. And while William was cordial to Camilla, she notes that Harry long “unnerved” her with “long silences and smoldering, resentful stares.”

Despite all this, Camilla ultimately comes off well. She reads as charming. She smokes, she’s sophisticated, and “she makes you feel like the most important person in the room.” Brown writes of her “lack of formal education,” but that just speaks to how overrated education is in the first place. You can’t teach sophistication, or charm, or ease around others. Camilla was born, not created. And she overcame enormous hatred born of the public’s love of Diana. Seen as the interloper who wrecked what was wrongly perceived as golden, she took a lot of bullets.

Another eye opener was Brown’s assertion about how “it’s hard to overstate what a glamorous figure the Prince of Wales cut” in the 1970s. Maybe it’s an American thing, but he came off as kind of bland and dopey? Furthermore, if he had been this glamorous it seems as though Andrew wouldn’t have been even more glamorous. Just a thought.

Brown is clear that Charles’s relations with his parents were strained. Prince Philip observed about him long ago that he’s “’not king material,’” and then Brown quotes an unnamed source as saying that Charles is “the wrong person” for Queen Elizabeth. He’s “too needy, too vulnerable, too emotional, too complicated, too self-centered, the sort of person she can’t bear.” Parenting was surely different then. Certainly in this crowd. In his biography of Winston Churchill, William Manchester referenced letters from a very young Churchill essentially begging his distant parents to visit him at school. In Charles’s case, Brown writes that the Queen “missed his second and third Christmases and his third birthday.” Paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald, the royals are different from you and me.

About Charles the public person, Brown paints him as a series of contrasts. While he was “early” to the theory that is global warming, the theory that plastic threatens the planet, and that enhanced techniques for creating food in abundance (GMOs and all that) are anti-health, Brown reports of his “cranky dislike of anything that smacked of lefty cultural dogma,” that he feared the “degree to which our lives are becoming ruled by a truly absurd degree of politically correct interference,” plus when Tony Blair pandered to the hard left with his fox hunting ban, Charles was squarely on the other side. Brown reports that Blair later admitted in his memoirs that Charles was correct.

All that, plus Charles ultimately did the right thing by Camilla. About her, it’s interesting to learn of how very much she was treated shabbily in a very real sense before her marriage to Charles. A specific reference from Brown concerns Hugh and Emilie van Cutsem, and the marriage of their son Edward. These were people very close to Charles, only for Emilie to seat Camilla well away from Charles in the pre-wedding chart. Oh well, Charles and Camilla didn’t attend, which was quite the purposeful statement; one that surely devastated the ambitious van Cutsems. There was also growing pressure from Camilla’s family, as there should have been. Her war-hero father let Charles know that “I want to meet my maker knowing my daughter’s all right.” It’s apparent she is. One senses she’d be the most interesting royal to know of them all.

Regarding Prince Andrew, Brown quotes Jeffrey Epstein referring to him as an “idiot.” Though the two were friends, it’s apparent that Epstein viewed the always hungry for money Andrew as a useful idiot when it came to opening doors. It seems they needed each other, but Epstein wasn’t impressed. Brown is not impressed with Andrew.

Diana arguably comes off the worst in the book, followed by Megan Markle. About Diana, Brown writes that “her boundaries” relative to her sons “were dissolving and, with them, her judgment.” Brown was alluding to among other things Diana making William privy to her various affairs, which likely means she made him privy to Charles’s dalliances too. The view here is that doing so wasn’t fair. It would have been hard enough for the kids to witness the constant warring between parents, only to be made aware of a parent’s couplings?

Though it’s well known how the press harassed Diana unmercifully, Brown is pretty clear that celebrities can avoid media glare more than they let on. Diana apparently cultivated media attention more than is assumed, to play the media, to taunt media members, and in addressing past media taunts, Brown suggests the possibility that the latter played a role in her fatal accident.

If there’s a defense of Diana, it has to do with her age. It’s surprising in retrospect, but she was 36 when she tragically died. Think about that. Diana is being judged (including by me) based on decisions largely made in her twenties. The bet here is that most of us wouldn’t come off very well if judged based on decisions made before 40.

As for Harry, while the Oprah interview he conducted with Meghan was yet again revolting, while his expressed policy views are similarly gag inducing (Brown references an exchange with Jane Goodall in which Harry confirmed that he and Meghan would only have two children in order to save the planet…), it’s hard not to feel sympathy for him. And not just because of his parents’ divorce, or the relentless reporting on his parents before and after the divorce. Consider the rumors about him, and given his hair color, that perhaps he was the illegitimate son of Maj. James Hewitt. Brown dismisses the whispering based on the dates of Diana’s affair with Hewitt. Still, true or false is almost not the point. Harry to suffer taunts about the rumor, including “following your father into the army.” Imagine that.

Regarding Kate Middleton, it will be stressed yet again that as an American, it’s hard not to cheer her story and that of her parents. To think her marriage to William was the wrong one is not a critique of her as much as it’s an acknowledgement or presumption of what royalty is. Once it’s accessible for reasons other than royalty, it seems it’s not. What applies to Middleton applies to Markle in the eyes of your reviewer.

Back to Middleton, Brown indicates that there’s a savvy to her that’s perhaps not immediately apparent? Which is logical. A future King is logically going to have endless choices, yet Middleton won as it were. Brown indicates that Middleton was set to attend Edinburgh in Scotland, but switched to St. Andrews once William did. And once the two were an item and anytime “their romance hit a speed bump, she would retreat to Bucklebury for strategy sessions” with her mother Carole. That’s a brief way of saying what royal watchers probably already know, or presumed: Middleton’s coupling with William wasn’t an accident. She had a plan. And that’s not a critique. It’s an expression of admiration. Game playing among the sexes is as old as humanity is.

As for Meghan Markle, the bet here is that it doesn’t last. It seems William analyzed it best. Meghan and Harry’s third “date” took place in Botswana. Harry fell hard. William said “You do realize this is the fourth girl you’ve taken to Botswana.” Meghan comes off as pushy, highly demanding of a royal staff that wasn’t nearly as impressed by her as Harry was, plus it’s apparent she hated the job of Duchess. Worse, she was delusional while in it. If Brown’s reporting is correct, Meghan concluded after a successful tour of Australia with Harry “that the monarchy likely needed her more than she needed them.”

Meghan also seemed to conclude the money wasn’t good enough. Which read as a false note? Not Meghan’s desire to make money, but Brown is clear that Harry didn’t just inherit $13 million from Diana. He also received a big sum from the Queen Mother upon her death. Brown straddles here a bit, or so it seems. No doubt the once second-in-line (now 6^th with the birth of William and Kate’s kids) Harry wasn’t receiving the income that William was, or would, but come on. There was a lot of money there. The bet here is that Harry made crucial decisions while in love, which is as wise as going to the grocery store when famished. Mistakes are made.

These opinions are based on the book, but mostly on the Oprah interview. How, if Meghan loved Harry so much, could she have done this to him? The interview was embarrassing, it arguably separated him even more from his family, but as the song says, when a man loves a woman….

More broadly, the view here is that Brown went too PC herself in reporting on Meghan. So much about race and racism. None of this is to deny that it doesn’t exist, but Markle attended Immaculate Heart in Los Angeles, followed by Northwestern University. The former is a key high school in southern California, the latter one of the U.S.’s most prestigious universities. Are we really supposed to believe that Markle felt seriously put upon in her life for reasons of race? Within the royal family? Such a belief is hard to countenance, plus it shrinks Markle who, by all accounts, brims with confidence. About all this, Brown references a man by the name of Wyndham Lewis who “famously said that Englishmen are born branded on the tongue. If you are Black but to the manor born, and if you have the right accent, racism alone is unlikely to defeat you.” Precisely. Though Markle doesn’t have a British accent, her background is a sign that by American standards, she too is largely “manor born.” Markle plainly and rightly feels she belongs in whatever room she enters, including one filled with the titled, which makes the race angle as a possible driver of the royal split less than compelling. The guess here is that Brown agrees. Her seeming pandering here was a disappointment.

So was Brown’s intensely cringe-worthy attempt to compare the “blanket of sorrow and suffering that descended on the British people with COVID-19” to “a traumatized people in the Blitz.” Oh please. Brown is so smart, so savvy, so sophisticated. How could she be so over the top? To be clear about the previous question, it’s not medical in that there’s no reason for it to be. During the allegedly darkest days of the virus, the alarmist CDC stateside reported that the hospitalization rate for those infected with the virus was .01%. Of course, the mere use of statistic is overkill. We know this to be true simply because if the virus had been a major killer, or even a major cause of serious illness, there would have been no need for lockdown mandates, mask mandates, and other tragic takings of freedom. People are wise, and they’ve been bred over the millennia to protect themselves. If your reviewer were politically correct, or prone to “canceling” people, he would seeks Brown’s “cancellation” for her mentioning the horrors of London Blitz in same breath as a virus largely associated (in a lethal sense) with a very small percentage of the nursing home population.

Happily, however, Brown didn’t write a book about COVID, or race. She instead wrote a very entertaining story about a family that fascinates. In the book’s Prologue, Brown writes at its end that “The book in your hand is the one I wish Meghan had been able to read before she packed up her house in Toronto and boarded the plane to England to plan her wedding to the younger son of the heir to the British throne. She would have learned that no one is a bigger brand than the Firm.” As much as The Palace Papers read very well, this sentiment similarly read as false, and too easy on Meghan. Royalty is intoxicating, and no amount of warnings or anecdotes would scare off those capable of joining “the Firm.” The problem was Harry, for letting emotions guide marital decisions that can’t be emotional if the Firm is to survive. Brown’s excellent book supports the previous supposition from a non-expert more than it does the one suggesting Meghan was unaware. She knew. She wouldn’t be married to Harry if she didn’t.