Another weekend, another load of royal headlines dominating the British press, detailing the fall-out between Princes William and Harry and their wives – this week, concentrating on the anguish felt by the then Duchess of Cambridge in being forced to stage a public walk-about with her in-laws two days after the late Queen’s death last September.
The details are in a new book by royal journalist Robert Jobson, which is being serialised in the Daily Mail and picked up everywhere else.
On September 10th last year, crowds watched as the royal quartet teamed up for an unscheduled walkabout to collect flowers and talk to well-wishers, at the gates of Windsor Castle.
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As Jobson has it, “Catherine later admitted to a senior royal that, such was the ill-feeling between the two couples, the joint walkabout was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do.”
The book also details:
Princes Charles and William making the decision not to be alone with Prince Harry following the Sussex’s interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021;
That they feared the so-called Sandringham summit, negotiating the details of the Sussex’s exile from British public life, would be leaked if they provided a video link to Meghan, then in Canada;
Back in 2016, Prince Charles being peeved by his son’s statement confirming his relationship with Meghan Markle, as it overshadowed his tour of the Gulf. The book has Charles complaining of his son’s “bad manners.”
While, in the context of the ongoing froideur between the two sides of the family, there is nothing particularly new or surprising about any of these headlines, it’s all in the timing. This book is being released with just weeks to go before King Charles’s Coronation in London on May 6th. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have yet to confirm their attendance at the ceremony, with media on both sides of the Atlantic reporting that their public roles in the proceedings have yet to be ironed out.
