Meghan Sells a Montecito Christmas From a Rented Cotswolds House, Andrew's Search Warrants Ruled Unlawful, Harry's Calls Unanswered

0:03 Caloroga Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Palace Weekly. I am your host, Mark Francis. It's been a week in which Meghan Markle launched a Christmas catalogue selling an idyllic California life. The Montecito house sketched on the advent calendar. The chocolates inspired by our Montecito garden. The whole thing radiating... We can't wait to get back there for Christmas. From a rented house in the Cotswolds, she reportedly can't wait to leave. Tom Sykes put it best. She is selling a life she doesn't actually live in. And once you notice that, you see it everywhere. The reconciliation the headlines keep selling, while Harry's calls to his father reportedly aren't even being put through. The ordinary pub lunch sold via suspiciously flawless paparazzi photographs... The innocence Andrew is selling, in a courtroom, rather than proving, half this family spent the week performing a life it does not actually have. So the question worth holding is a simple one. When everyone's selling the life they wish they had, who was actually living one? Let's get into it. We start with the catalogue, because it was the week's main event and its perfect emblem.

1:24 Megan's As Ever brand went full tinsel. $ 148 advent calendar. made with a Los Angeles chocolatier. Its box, a sketch of the Sussex's Montecito home, its numbers hand-painted by Megan in edible gold, and it sold out. Alongside it came three chocolate bars, a double deck of parlor playing cards, and a run of wicker hampers, a pantry basket at $ 259, a parlor basket at $ 242, a hostess basket at $ 211, The Royal Collection Trust, as several people gleefully pointed out, sells its own advent calendar for £ 12, with the profits going to charity. That £ 100 gap was the least of it.

2:08 The accusation that stuck was that Meghan, the self-described California girl whose brand was supposedly inspired by California life, had produced a range of jams, honey, teas and country hampers that looked uncannily like the one King Charles has sold out of Highgrove for years. California girl to English country estate. One critic wrote, originality took the day off. She launched it with a montage set to the cranberries tracing her path from her childhood selling scrunchies and lemonade. Over the caption, behind every successful woman is herself. A line a great many people found, shall we say, generous to its author. One viewer summed up the mood, I have never seen anyone so enamored with themselves. The machine has ever found its targets, a promotional photo seemed through an optical illusion to give Megan six fingers. Another showed her cooking at a range in $ 66, 000 of jewellery, which eagle-eyed critics noted, the gas visibly switched off beneath the pot. Two British clergymen who gently suggested a £ 5 charity alternative was abused online as demons and a disgrace to the cloth. The mockery is often cruel and usually beside the point. But the point underneath it is the one Sykes identified, and it's real. The entire campaign sells a warm, perfect Montecito domestic ideal. The children, the dog, the beautiful kitchen, Christmas by the garden. At the precise moment the family has physically abandoned it for a rented house an ocean away.

3:41 And the reporting this week was unanimous that Megan is homesick for the real thing. She reportedly wants to go back to California for Thanksgiving, and again for Christmas, aching for her mother, her friends, her routine. The actual life the catalogue is busy romanticising. She is selling the postcard from inside the thing she left. It isn't landing locally either. The Cotswolds, it turns out, is not Montecito. There's no Oprah down the lane to smooth the way, and the designer Lawrence Lewin Bowen offered the sharpest warning of the week, noting that Cotswolds folk can really sniff bull, and that a duchess doing the school run had better arrive without the airs and graces. A village WhatsApp group near Soho Farmhouse has reportedly been buzzing with complaints about security convoys and perceived special treatment. You cannot sell ordinary local to people who can name the cow their beef came from.

4:37 Even the attempt to look ordinary looked to some eyes manufactured. The couple were photographed holding hands on the way to a Cotswolds pub. The first pictures of them out together since the move. And Sykes, studying the suspiciously crisp images, the photographer's position, and the absence of a credit, pronounced himself profoundly unconvinced that this was a casual trip to the pub. Even the spontaneity, in other words, may have been staged. When the ordinary has to be produced, it stops being ordinary. More Palace in just a moment. The selling didn't stop at Jan. This week, the Sussexes were also reportedly selling a reconciliation. The headlines arrived on cue.

5:21 Harry and Meghan want a private meeting to apologise for the Oprah interview. Meghan finally ready to say sorry for the claim about Archie's skin colour that she now regards as her biggest mistake. A meeting with the King supposedly already in the diary before Christmas. It is a lovely story. It also sits awkwardly beside a rather less lovely one from News Nation, which reported that Harry's calls to his father simply aren't being put through. That Charles and William are treating him exactly as they did during the Montecito years, because the source claimed he doesn't ring to catch up, he rings to complain and to press for his security back. One of those stories is being sold, the other has the ring of what's actually happening. As the Express's James Walker put it, bluntly, forget the apology, They just want money back in the coffers, the armed police, and their lives made easy again. Underneath the peace talk ran its usual shadow, a marriage the gossip pages insisted drifting. Harry and Meghan are spending more time apart than either would like, one account claimed. Carol Malone detected them moving away from each other, personally and professionally. Meghan steering clear of the bad publicity that follows her husband. It's unconfirmed, it's exactly the sort of thing that tabloids invent, and yet the pattern it points at, him at the charity gigs, her at the pub with Ellen DeGeneres, him working his contacts to open doors for Megan while she builds a circle that pointedly isn't his, is at least visible in this

6:53 week's actual photographs. And that circle itself is a kind of counter-cell. With the Beckhams now firmly Team Wales, Megan spent the week reportedly cultivating her own power base. confiding in Ellen, Zooming with Simon Cowell's wife Lauren about online child safety, even floating a British yoga and wellness venture. The brand expert Nick Ede offered the only advice that matters here. The worst thing Meghan could do is try to compete with Catherine, because the moment she chases the same rooms, she invites the same comparison. And in that comparison, the woman who will one day be queen does not have to sell anything. The celebrity comes to her. And then there was Diana, because there is always Diana. Harry's planned anniversary documentary took a provocative turn, with reports that he wants Meghan to be its narrator. The voice, as one insider put it, the viewers hear telling Diana's story.

7:47 If you wanted to design a single decision to enrage William, it would be hard to beat installing the wife he distrusts as the voice of the mother he lost, feeding the Diana 2.0 comparison he's said to find intolerable. William, for his part, reportedly holds a card Harry cannot match. The possibility, once he is king, of posthumously restoring the HRH that Diana was stripped of in the divorce. An act that would endure in the historical record long after any documentary has streamed and faded. A television program comes and goes, one source noted. The HRH Diana is forever. 30 years dead and her sons are still arguing over who gets to give her back her name. Charles Spencer, for his part, kept the whole thing simmering, touring America and claiming the palace had galvanized sections of the UK media to take vengeance on his behalf, a grievance that, through or not, conveniently extends the publicity. And the strain reportedly reached Clarence House itself. One gossip outlet claimed Charles and Camilla were at breaking point over the book, the king sleepless and short-tempered, the queen retreating to her private retreat in Wiltshire. It's thinly sauced and probably overcooked, but even the invented version tells you how much oxygen a dead woman's memory is still consuming. More palace in just a moment. One thing before I jump back into this week's story is a quick note from me. Many of you told me over the years that someone in your

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10:02 And if you've ever thought you might have a story or two of your own to tell, well, you know where to find it. Give it a shot. We really appreciate your support here. Moving on. This brings us to the other man selling something he cannot quite prove. Andrew, in this week's most Consequential piece of hard news, the former prince asked the High Court to rule that the warrants police used to search his homes, part of the misconduct investigation into his dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, were unlawful. The Telegraph's Hannah Furness noted, with magnificent dryness, that this is the first time a member of the royal family has challenged the lawfulness of criminal actions against them since Charles I in 1649, and we all know how that went.

10:46 Charles has reportedly told his brother that not a penny of the private allowance he gives him may fund the case. And Furness identified the gamble precisely. Even a win couldn't be a win that matters. Because there is only one way Andrew can actually clear his name. And that is to actually clear his name. A quashed warrant is not an innocence. It's a procedural off-ramp soldier's vindication. Meanwhile, and this tells you everything, Andrew is reportedly having a lovely time. out shooting with loyal chums, not sitting around feeling sorry for himself, and quietly, gleefully, at watching his brother get exposed by Spencer's book. The Yorks endure, one of them apparently with a shotgun and a grudge. And then, in the middle of all this selling, one man spent the week simply doing the job, and had not coincidentally the best week in the family. William went to Wales to talk about flooding and plant trees, climbed a barbed wire fence on a little step so as not to rip his trousers off, used his height to reach the high seeds, and got cheerfully ambushed by a man who remembered him buying a CD off him at a childhood car boot sale.

11:52 Dodgy car boot sale, yes, I remember that. He recorded a tribute to the late Dame Deborah James on what would have been her 45th birthday, remembering her rebellious hope. He wrote a personal thank you note to Dame Kelly Holmes for speaking at a mental health event. He traded traitor's spoilers with Ross Kemp, and in Ill Minister, he stopped to wish a happy 80th birthday to a woman named Jamila, who had waited 80 years to meet any member of the royal family and had walked there on an injured foot, her daughter left in tears. Deep Crown's October rankings, for the record, put Meghan at number one for influence and the king down at six. But the weak rather made the opposite case, that the most powerful thing anyone did in this family was climb a fence to plant a tree and wish a stranger many happy returns.

12:38 No catalogue, no courtroom, no documentary, just the work. The rest was the usual delightful miscellany. We learned that the brothers once saved staff numbers under nicknames. William as Bobcat or Wombat. Harry as Baz. Kate as Mrs. Bobcat. And that a young William, unable to say Granny, once fell over at the palace crying, Gary, Gary. Prompting the Queen to explain to her baffled guest, I'm Gary. Princess Anne revealed her method for ending a dinner party. Hand everyone a chocolate ice to eat in the car because one wants them gone by quarter past nine. Camilla, her son disclosed, roasts a chicken with a lemon in the neck cavity, not up its bottom, as she always says. And King Charles, well enough to keep a full diary, joined Elton John at a music workshop in the restored Battersea Power Station, a building that once powered Buckingham Palace through a switch discreetly labelled Carnaby Street, so that no one would be tempted to turn the lights off on the monarch. The King's genuine challenge this autumn is a weightier one. He flies to the Caribbean later this month. the Bahamas, Guyana, then Antigua for the Commonwealth Summit, into mounting calls for an apology and reparations for slavery, with the Bahamas Reparations Committee bluntly warning him, don't come here empty-handed. The palace's line is careful. The visit will not shy away from the darkest days of our past, but apologies and compensation remain a matter for the government, not the king. It is the sort of genuinely hard, substantive diplomacy that gets buried under advent calendars. and a reminder that under all

14:10 the soap opera, the actual job is still being done. One source noted the relentless run of controversies is really wearing him down, which dealing with cancer at the same time is not hard to believe. And just to keep the palace humble, a new documentary revealed its annual autumn war on rats, including the time one was spotted in the rooms where the Obamas were staying, prompting the president to ask staff, please not to tell Michelle. So where does it leave us? With a family in which nearly everyone was selling something this week, a brand, an apology, a mother's memory, an innocence, and only a few people quietly living. Megan spent the week painting gold numbers onto a picture of a house two continents away, marketing a Christmas she's homesick to spend somewhere else. Andrew sold his innocence to a courtroom. Harry sold a reconciliation to the papers where his calls went unanswered. And William climbed a fence in a wet Welsh field where nobody was buying anything at all and wished an 80-year-old many happy returns.

15:07 They keep telling us Diana is the thing they're all fighting to own. But you don't honor someone by selling them. You honor them by showing up. This week, in the mud, one brother did. And there you have it. If you'd like to email us, our address is thepalaceintrigue at gmail.com. If you are on Spotify, leave us a comment. If you're on Apple, hit that button up there that says listen uninterrupted and get the show commercial free for five bucks a month. And if you have a podcaster in your family or would like a program to help you create show content, check out linnet at linnetmedia.com. That's L-I-N-N-E-T media.com. We appreciate everything you do for us. I'm Mark Francis.

15:50 My thanks to John McDermott. This is Palace Weekly and good times.