Tina

Two weeks ago, in the middle of Prince Harry’s four-day trip to the UK, Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell Substack landed like a bomb. Brown devoted a chunk of her Substack that week to analysis of King Charles’s relationships with his two sons. According to Brown, Charles is currently “less irritated” with Harry than Charles is with his dour, dull and lazy heir, Prince William. Brown’s colorful language and analysis of the situation gave the British media the perfect opening to breathlessly repeat everything she wrote with their own twist. Brown’s piece spelled out the big “secret” in the royalist media: that William’s laziness is a huge problem, and that William is basically having a nervous breakdown over Harry’s meeting with their father and Harry’s popularity within the UK. Well, I missed this, but Brown also wrote a New York Times column last week, published in the middle of the Trump state visit. Brown continued to analyze the melodramas within the House of Windsor.

… And yet, Charles’s first few years as monarch have been something of a quiet triumph. Seasoned by countless foreign tours, marinated in his constitutional role through years of practice and now magically aligned with so much of modern citizenry’s concerns (his decades-long campaign against pesticides and food dyes, by the way, now sounds like the sane bit of MAHA), Charles may be the last man standing who can exude global gravitas in the dumpster fire of our digitally dominated world.

It is all the more tragic that his diagnosis of an undisclosed cancer may make his reign a race against time, which added poignancy to his long-postponed reunion with his estranged son Harry last week. Charles knows that in these times of ugly political discord, a fractured royal family is a bad look. But it was also the fulfillment of paternal longing. It’s no secret that Charles desperately misses his prodigal son who, in earlier days, was always the fun, ebullient scamp compared with the haughtier, more Hanoverian William. It’s understandably enraging for William to see his treacherous younger brother, who spent the last five years trashing his family on TV and promoting a back-stabbing, best-selling book, bounding around the British charity circuit, doing a well-received side-dash to Ukraine and upstaging the photo ops of William’s own diligent engagements.

But Charles, I am told, is tiring of his elder son’s self-righteous intractability in the family feud, and wants to re-embrace Harry — if only he can keep his mouth shut. Harry’s subsequent interview with The Guardian, in which the imperturbably cocky prince said, “My conscience is clear,” suggests to his haters the futility of expecting Harry Hotspur to play the old royal game.

Here in America, we are obsessed with the process and drama of presidential politics, the burden of office, the daily colonoscopy of the White House press corps and the intolerable intrusions into our leaders’ private lives. Former First Ladies moan about the pressures they endure during hellish years in the White House bubble. But only the people born or married into the institution of monarchy know the real meaning of life in a cage, defined by duty, service and unceasing public scrutiny with no exit except death or flight. It’s more akin to taking holy orders than living a grand, red-carpet life waited on by obsequious servants — something Harry’s wife, Meghan, never understood.

[From The NY Times]

Again, this came out before this weekend’s briefing games, where the Daily Mail pitted palace sources against each other, all to further enrage the incandescent one. Charles has spent the past two weeks telegraphing the fact that he wants to reconcile with Harry in any way he can, and that the reconciliation should happen for several reasons, one of which is “putting Work-shy William on his heels.” It’s interesting, I guess, that the conversation has seemingly shifted in one month to this, where everyone is speaking openly about how much Charles hates William and considers William to be a huge disappointment. I really don’t trust William OR Charles here, they’re both clout-chasing Harry and using Harry’s name for their own deranged purposes.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.