PANIC at the Palace
It’s been one nightmare after another for the royal family so far in 2022. Prince Andrew paid $16 million to one of Jeffrey Epstein’s sextrafficking victims after she sued the Duke of York for sexually assaulting her when she was 17. (He denies the assault.) Prince Harry took on the British government over its decision to pull his police protection. Prince William and Kate Middleton drew international criticism for their “tone-deaf” royal tours of the Caribbean. And both Queen Elizabeth II, who’s been in declining health since the fall, and her son Prince Charles were stricken with COVID.
Now they’re dealing with a fresh new drama: the fallout from yet another explosive royals tell-all. On April 26, Tina Brown, the famed former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, released the book The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil, which is full of humiliating stories and claims about the embattled royal family. “With the queen not well and this being her Platinum Jubilee, where she’s celebrating 70 years on the throne, the timing couldn’t be worse,” a palace source tells In Touch. “It’s the last thing she needs at 96. The revelations in the book — including how a devious phone-hacking incident left the royals reeling — “have rocked the family and their courtiers, and the palace is panicking.”
INFILTRATING THE ROYALS
As far back as 2005, U.K. tabloid reporters and private investigators allegedly subjected Harry, 37, William, 39, and William’s then-girlfriend Kate, 40, to illegal phonehacking that spawned a barrage of sensational headlines about the trio.
In one leaked message, William tells Kate he was nearly shot in an ambush during a dummy exercise while training, and he calls her “babykins.”
William and Harry’s mother, the late Princess Diana, their father, Charles, 73, and their stepmother, Camilla Parker Bowles, 74, also had their phones hacked, in the ’80s and ’90s. Brown was shocked to learn “how deeply that phone-hacking and spying and stalking impacted their lives.” (Fergie was also caught on tape in 2010 accepting a bribe in exchange for access to Andrew.) Harry still won’t let the phone-hacking scandal go — he joined a lawsuit against two U.K. newspapers in 2019, accusing journalists of illegally accessing his voicemail years ago. It’s expected to go to trial later this year.
Brown also sheds new light on the controversy surrounding Harry and wife Meghan Markle, 40, during their short time in the palace after their 2018 wedding. An aide allegedly accused the Duke and Duchess of Sussex of having “a mutual addiction to drama” and claims Meghan was driven by a lust for more as she “couldn’t resist everything that was on offer on the celebrity buffet.” However, Brown insists Meghan was unfairly blamed for Megxit when she and Harry left the royal family for a new life in America in 2020. “The decision was Harry’s, with acceleration from Meghan,” Brown writes. But Meghan isn’t completely off the hook, says the source: “She can be so demanding, she makes Harry cry.”
THE SLEAZE MACHINE
As for Harry and William’s strained relationship, they clashed long before Meghan entered the picture, the book contends. They fought over royal patronages — Harry felt his brother was
“hogging” the best ones involving their beloved Africa and the environment. “Harry was a very, very angry man. I think those were absolutely Olympic rows.”
Then there’s the disgraced Andrew. Brown calls him “a coroneted sleaze machine,” “a dim bulb” and “something of an oaf.” One anecdote reveals how he mocks ex-wife Sarah Ferguson. According to Brown, when an American media businessperson met Fergie for lunch in 2015 at Royal Lodge, the home the Duchess of York, 62, still shares with Andrew, 62, despite their 1996 divorce, the prince sat down and asked, “What are you doing with this fat cow?” The businessperson was “stunned at Andrew’s level of sadism” and the blatant abuse.
KATE TRAPS WILLIAM!
The Palace Papers also makes a shocking claim about Kate, who withdrew from a more prestigious college she initially planned to attend in favor of postponing a year so she could enroll in William’s chosen institution, the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “I mean, what modern girl as beautiful, educated, in demand as Kate would actually spend 10 years molding her life around marrying the future king? Very few women would have had, frankly, the patience for that, or the strategy for that,” Brown believes, adding that Kate’s mother, Carole Middleton, was a “wonderful strategist” and “the Kris Jenner of Bucklebury.” Carole, says the source, “advised Kate on how to play the long game and trap William.”
Camilla also played the long game and won. In February, the queen publicly announced that she wants her son’s former mistress to be known as queen consort when Charles takes the throne. Brown writes that Camilla is “sexual and emotional comfort food” for the Prince of Wales, as well as the “horse whisperer of his emotional needs.” The author quotes the queen’s former press secretary Michael Shea as saying that Charles refused to buckle under family pressure to give Camilla up years ago because he “was hypnotized by her sexually.” (In the ’80s, a private call was recorded and famously made public in which Charles tells his then mistress Camilla that he wishes he could be reincarnated as a tampon so he could live inside her. The scandal was later dubbed Tampongate.)
THE ULTIMATE BLOW
And the hits keep coming for the royals, who are bracing for more drama as Harry prepares to release his own tell-all later this year. “[It’s] a huge issue for the whole family,” Brown warns. “They’re going to get another boatload of flak from inside their own family just at a point when the monarchy is very fragile with the queen... on a glidepath to the end of her life.”
The much-anticipated memoir could be the final blow for the royal family. “If Tina Brown’s book caused a panic at the palace, one can only imagine the havoc Harry’s book will wreak,” says the source. “He knows everything — and won’t be afraid to share it, especially with his relationship with the family becoming more and more fractured by the minute.” ◼