Harry and Meghan Take Aim at Elon Musk Over Grok, Eugenie's Daughter Is 15th in Line, Why Camilla Outranks Everyone

0:00 Ah Calorogus, Shark media, how Lo, and welcome to Palace Intrigue Weekly. I am your host, Mark Francis. It has been a week in which Royle, inside a deep crown, published his royal power rankings, placed Queen Camilla at the very top and Meghan Marker at the very bottom, and then the week obligingly spent seven days proving him right. A new baby arrived in Lisbon, Meghan turned forty five, and the Internet convened an inquest into every frame of it. King Charles pulled on a kilt, sipped a whiskey and remembered an avalanche that nearly killed him, and an eight year old pool faces at a velodrome and briefly became the most beloved man in Britain. So the question of the week keeps circling is as a simple one in this family, where does power actually sit? Because it's almost never where the noise is. Let's get into it. We begin with the happiest news, because there was some. Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbink welcomed their third child, a daughter, born in Lisbon on Monday evening, a little sister for August and Ernest. The palace, said, the King and Queen were delighted. Eugenie announced it herself beyond in love without girly, the name to follow in due course, as is the family custom. The baby is now fifteenth in Lyne to the throne, will not be a royal highness, and this is the important part, will almost certainly never come within one hundred miles of the crown, which is quietly the whole point of her hold. That thought. Now to the

1:32 rankings that framed the weak deep crown put Camilla first, and not for survival alone, though she has survived plenty. She entered public life as the villain of the most watched love story in modern history, was loathed and protested, and became queen. Anyway, What earns her the top spot, he argues, is what she does with it. She has Charles's ear in a way no courtier or politician does. Behind every significant decision, there is a conversation we are not privy to. She is in the room. When his health fulted, she stepped forward and held the institution together with the particular competence of someone who has spent years being underestimated at the very bottom tenth of ten. He placed Megan what she has, He wrote, his soft power, the kind measured in press releases, podcast launches, and an artisanal jam that generated a great deal of coverage in a rather more modest amount of revenue. The jam sold, the mockery sold better. Her power independent of Harry, he argued, is essentially theoretical. The Netflix chapter under delivered, the Spotify chapter ended. The lifestyle brand keeps accumulating announcements and shedding audiences.

2:41 The Palace, he concluded, does not fear her. They have simply stopped thinking about her very much at all harsh. But then the week set out to illustrate both ends of the list. Take Camilla, according to New Idea, she had been very clear that nothing from the Sussex's visit should appear on social medium, and when Meghan posted those summer photographs that appeared to show the family at allthorpe a source said, Camilla felt the condition had been broken, and that if Megan believed Diana's family home was somehow an exception, the door would remain shut for her forever. Believe the anonymous sourcing or don't, but the shape of it is telling. The person reportedly holding the door is Camilla. Her biographer Catherine may have put the same thing in grander terms, calling Camilla non negotiable for Charles, the one person he decided, after the divorce and after Diana's death, that he simply could not do without. That is power, quiet, unglamorous, decisive, And here is the purest example of the kind of power that actually matters in a family like this. Robert Jobson reported that the one person who can tell William his being pompous and have him take it is his cousin Zara Tyndall. She knew him, Jobson wrote, before he was a headline. She has no official role to protect, no agenda beyond honesty, which is precisely why he listens in an instant hush and drowning and courtiers and unnamed sources.

4:02 The rarest and most valuable thing anyone can offer the future king is the truth with no angle attached. Zarah has it. Most people around him don't more palace in just a moment. Now to the noise, because the noise was considerable, and nearly all of it was about her birthday. Megan turned forty five, and the machine ran at full throttle. She posted a video picking blackberries and white shorts and a wide brimmed hat, and the Internet convened to explain that no one who has met a BlackBerry bush picks fruit in white shorts and lives to smile about it. She posted a kitchen dance and a tiara and a T shirt reading It's giving Missus, and was accused of copying a Victoria Beckham video. She posted black and white photos jumping into a pool holding balloons and was accused of copying Princess Diana. She wished herself a happy birthday and was informed that wishing yourself a happy birthday is needy.

5:00 Every frame was decoded, every gesture assigned a motive, and when the royal family posted no birthday message, several outlets called it a snub, until Tom Sykes had to point out the obvious that birthday wishes to a private citizen are sent privately, and that Charles, a scrupulously polite man, almost certainly sent his quietly, Which is the trouble with being ranked tenth. Everything you do is loud, none of it is power. And yet a fairer note also from Deep Crown, who allowed himself a moment of genuine wistfulness this week imagine, he wrote, the duchess. Had she stayed the first American born senior working royal standing beside Catherine at some commonwealth engagement, suddenly opening the monarchy to demographics it had never been able to touch, she could have been in the correct framing, one of the most consequential additions to the modern monarchy in a generation. Instead we got the jam. The distance between those two sentences is the saddest thing anyone published all week. There was buried under all the birthday content a genuinely serious Megan story that almost nobody amplified. She and Harry publicly backed Minnesota's new law banning AI neudification software, the technology that generates fake sexual images, and took direct aim at the company behind Ax's groc for challenging it in court. Should our children pay the price while we wait to find out?

6:26 They asked. It is exactly the kind of substantive advocacy that once made people think the couple might matter. It got a fraction of the attention of the pool photo. Even the sympathetic voices found the transition hard to pass. Martha Stewart, who bumped into Megane at a California dinner, party the other night. Put it plainly to people, if you're an actress, it's hard to become a princess, and harder still to go from princess to homemaking guru. It doesn't sort of follow, she said, which is about as gently as anyone has phrased the central problem of brand Sussex. On the money, the numbers kept closing in. Kevin O'Sullivan never won to undersell a phrase called Harry the dim Duke facing a personal bill north of two and a half million pounds from the Daily Mail case and pronounced the idea of Elton John writing to the rescue extinguished like a candle in the wind. But it was an all red ink cookie. Queen's The Girl Scouts documentary Harry and Meghan produced actually premiered to ninety two percent on rotten tomatoes and warm reviews, a real quiet win, the sort that doesn't trend. And then the security question sprouted a new wrinkle and emerged that during the last month's visit, the family had slipped away to Tenera, more, a private island off Scotland's northwest coast, cruising the coastline on a restored vintage steamboat entirely undetected until they'd left, which critics were quick to say rather complicates Harry's argument that he cannot move safely through Britain. The trip stayed private, his

7:56 supporters counted, precisely because careful planning works. The irony, as ever, is that we only know about it because a scenic photo turned up on Instagram more pals in just a moment. Meanwhile, the actual King was in Scotland, being quietly the most powerful person in the story. Charles opened his summer at the my Highland Games in a kilt, congratulated a tug of wartem made up of local fire fighters, shared a dram with Lord Thurso, and planted the King's rose in the castle gardens, the sort of unshowy continuity as Grandmother built the place around. He also had a genuinely affecting moment.

8:37 Hosting a mountain rescue team, he spoke about the nineteen eighty eight Clusters avalanche that killed his close friend Hugh Lindsey and very nearly killed him. It was a close thing, he said, still vivid nearly four decades on, and we learned in the week's most charming footnote that when Charles was a boy at Gordonston, Prince Philip had a twelfth century stone font hauled five hundred miles north so the future king could have it near him at school, a font quite literally fit for a king. At the Commonwealth Games, meanwhile, he was photographed as he increasingly is, wearing a friendship bracelet reportedly made by Princess Charlotte, the most powerful man in the family, brist wrapped in his granddaughter's beads. There was admittedly one small piece of collateral damage from that game's opening. Charles and Camilla made their grand entrance out of a Doctor Who Tardise and Radar noted. The cameo landed at an awkward moment for the BBC, which is reportedly wrestling with the show's future. No announced successor to its latest Doctor A Christmas special said to be shelved Disney declining to renew A celebratory moment for a flagship franchise turned into an inadvertent reminder that the franchise is in some trouble. Indeed, Crown, ever helpful, suggested Harry would make a good Doctor. He's not entirely wrong for Andrew.

9:59 The grind continues in its usual direction He is now expected to testify by videolink in December in the trial of the man accused of threatening him. He received a bow moral invitation from his brother, with the exquisitely humiliating condition that he arrived only after Charles and Camilla have already left, and across the Atlantic members of the US House Oversight Committee kept pressing for him to cooperate with the Epstein investigation. Sarah at least may have caught a break. The death of her old flame, Paddy McNally, reportedly worth six hundred million pounds, has prompted speculation she could finally be financially secure, with one commentator marveling she's had more comebacks than Frank Sinatra, though the past kept its grip even so. Newly surfaced emails reported by the Eyepaper suggests Epstein once assembled her private correspondence to pressure her after she publicly condemned him in what her own representative at the time called something that could be construed as attempted blackmail.

11:00 The Yorks endure, one of them, possibly upward, the rest of it never quite let's go, and the William front stayed precisely where it's been. Heath reported that his private meetings with his father left him in a terrible mood, with Kate left to calm him down. Radar reported he was furious that word, again the only one the tabloids seemed to own. The Camilla had inserted herself into the High Grove reunion, convinced it proved she wilds more power than he does, which, if you've been following Deep Crown's rankings, isn't paranoia so much as accurate arithmetic. William was also, as usual, photographed having a perfectly lovely time with his family at the Velodrome, choking that he and Kate embarrassed the children quite enough already. Both things, as ever, are true at once, because that Velodrome day was the real answer to the week's question. While the adults fought over Instagram frames and Kurt season, who holds power over whom?

11:54 Prince Louis, aged eight, made his debut at a major sporting event and simply pulled faces at the cycling until he came the most the love figure of the weekend. No strategy, no brand, no angle. Kate told her gymnast that Louis was perfect in his handstand. Louis clarified with total honesty that Charlotte says I'm not very good. That is a family, not a narrative. Kate, for what it's worth, was also named to Britain's Best Dressed by Tattler this week, reclaiming a title she last held in twenty twenty two. That kind of soft power that, unlike Megan's, tends to sell out the dress rather than the punchline. It's worth remembering the monarchy has always understood that the deepest power is the quiet, continuous kind the story, rather than the shout.

12:36 Nearly three centuries ago, as one lovely piece in the Conversation reminded us this week, Queen Caroline built a folly called Merlin's Cave to sell an imported German dynasty to a skeptical Britain, wrapping the Hanaverians in the legend of King Arthur. Because Arthur belonged to everyone and no foreign house. She grasped what the loudest voices this week did not. The continuity, not spectacle, is what actually endures. And in the end, the truest and quietest thing that happened all week was a baby girl born in Lisbon who will never wear a crown and doesn't need to the line of succession shifting by one wordlessly the way it always has. Everyone else spent the week performing power. She just became fifteenth in line and went to sleep. That, in the end, is the real machinery. Everything else is always is noise.

13:26 And there you have it. If you'd like to email us, our addresses the Palace intriguert, Gmail, and dot com. If you're listening on Spotify, leave us a comment. If you're listening on Apple, hit that button up there that says listen uninterrupted and get the show commercial free for just five bucks a month, along with thousands of others from Callaogu, Shark Media by Mike Francis my thanks to John McDermott. This is Palace Weekly and Good Times