Sept. 6, 2026

Nine Bedrooms, a Film Studio and No Public Footpaths: Inside the Sussex House Hunt, and the New Power Harry Has Without a Title

Show Notes
Transcript

NINE BEDROOMS AND NO PUBLIC FOOTPATHS: INSIDE THE SUSSEX HOUSE HUNT — AND THE POWER HARRY HAS WITHOUT A TITLE

Mark Francis on a week when a man with no royal role became the most disruptive force in the family. Harry and Meghan are staying indefinitely at a wealthy friend's empty house on the edge of the Cotswolds while they hunt for a permanent home; three sources say nothing has been signed on the £12 million property reported elsewhere. The brief: nine bedrooms, room for a film studio, extensive grounds and no public rights of way. Plus: why William still won't be in the same room, what Princess Anne has reportedly told both nephews, and Deep Crown's rankings placing Harry second.

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Palace Intrigue is a daily British royal family podcast covering King Charles, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and the House of Windsor. New episodes every day. Follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Part of the Caloroga Shark Media network.

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Kalaroga Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Palace Weekly. I

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am your host, Mark Francis. It's been a week in

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which Prince Harry, who holds no job, no royal role,

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no official function, and by his own choosing, no place

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in the working monarchy, became, somehow, the single most disruptive

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force in the House of Windsor. He and Meghan are

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now in Britain, hunting for a house somewhere in the Cotswolds.

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and the entire family is quietly rearranging itself around a

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man with no title left to speak of. William won't

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be in the same room as him. Charles is thrilled

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and privately dreading it in equal measure. Even a 12-foot

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Australian crocodile got named after William this week and was described,

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I promise you, as likely to be consistently furious with

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his brother. So the question worth holding is this. What

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kind of power does a man have once he's given

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up all the official kinds? Because Harry, it turns out,

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has rather a lot of it. And it may be

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the only kind that was ever going to matter. Let's

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get into it. Start with the practical, because the practical

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is where the romance meets the mortgage. The Sussexes are

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reportedly staying, indefinitely for now, in a spare property belonging

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to an extremely wealthy friend near the Cotswolds while they

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hunt for a permanent home. And the brief, per the

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Mail's Alison Boshoff, is ambitious. Megan wants nine bedrooms and

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space for a film studio. Harry wants extensive grounds with

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no public footpaths crossing them. Three sources disputed reports that

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a 12 million pound house had already been bought. Nothing's

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signed and one American source shown a property under consideration

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reportedly took in the price and the acreage and responded

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with a flat. What? That's not possible. Friends are calling

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the whole plan finding freedom too. The money is the

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quiet engine under all of it. The New York Times

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ran the definitive autopsy of the California years, and the

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verdict was blunt. An enormous commercial promise never quite materialized.

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There was exactly one blockbuster, the Harry and Meghan documentary,

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70 million views and counting. And after it, a steady descent.

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With Love, Meghan fell from 6 million viewers to 2.

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Spotify yielded one season of Archetypes and a reported Harry

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pitch to two of the country taste-testing hot chocolate. Netflix

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declined to renew the big overall deal. One estimate suggested

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the couple may have personally kept only $ 10 to $ 15

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million across nearly five years. Not nothing, but not much

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set against the lifestyle GB News costed at roughly $ 600, 000

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a year just to run the Montecito house before you

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add the Portuguese property, a potential Â£ 8 million Cotswolds home,

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the private security and the looming Daily Mail legal bill.

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Mexit was sold as the road to financial independence. Six

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years on, independence turns out to require an awful lot

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of money. Which is why some are reading this less

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as a homecoming than as a trial run. A source

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told Rob Shooter that Megan is agreeing to try it

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and that six months is the test, that she wants

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an exit strategy. And the couple's own spokesman told the

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New York Times they genuinely don't know how long the

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chapter lasts. Could be six months, could be a year,

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could be more. But the reason they'll give you, and

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it's probably the truest one, is the children. Friends describe

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a father thinking hard about his own happiest years. Prep

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school at Ludgrove, two and a half miles down a

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dirt track. Fields on either side where the other boys

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treated him, and William is absolutely their own, right up

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until his mother died. That, the friends say, is what

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Harry wants for Archie and Lilibet. Not academia, which is

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very low on the list, but in a nurturing, outdoorsy,

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sporting childhood in a secure countryside microcosm. He sees himself there,

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one friend said, 12 to 15 years minimum. The dad

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on the touchline every Saturday, watching Archie play rugby. Megan,

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another noted, is mostly just shocked to discover British schools

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run on Saturdays. More in just a moment. Now, the

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thing that makes this more than a house move, a

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private citizen with no royal function should, in theory, be

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easy for the palace to ignore. Harry is proving the

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exact opposite. Royal insider Deep Crown caught it best in

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his monthly power rankings, which this month placed King Charles first.

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The recovered monarch reasserting control and Prince Harry remarkably second.

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Not for any title, Harry surrendered those, but because, as

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Deep Crown put it, his power has shifted from remote

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disruption to physical agenda setting. Consider what that means in practice.

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Every time an engagement is announced, someone must now work

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out whether Harry might turn up. And what happens if

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he does? When William plans his diary, his brother's presence

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in the same country is a variable that simply didn't

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exist before. The person who can determine where the future

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King of England will and won't appear, Deep Crown noted,

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holds a form of power that has nothing to do

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with offices or titles at all. Tom Sykes spelled out

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the mechanics using the Diana Awards, an event on the

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18th that Harry is expected to attend, and William reportedly

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is not. If Harry keeps showing up, at Diana events especially,

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and William keeps staying away, something corrosive sets in. Harry

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can simply arrive, extend a hand, and make his brother's

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absence the story. The son who came home versus the

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son who stayed away. That, Sykes argues, is not a

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posture William can hold indefinitely. The feud itself, meanwhile, has

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hardened rather than thawed. William reportedly has no desire whatsoever

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to reconcile. Shooter claims Charles begged him to join the

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July Highgrove meeting. Come, it will be a wonderful image,

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the three of us making peace. And that William, though

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only 20 minutes away, refused, simply saying, no, it will

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be a lie. Andrew Morton reports the brothers' tensions are

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greater than they have ever been, and that William is,

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in the reliable royal verb of our times, fuming. Vanity

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Fair says the move derailed what should have been a

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happy autumn, Kate well again, George off to Eton, and

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that William has sought his father's firm assurance that nothing changes,

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no engagements, no working royal status, no half in, half out.

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And here is the rock the whole thing keeps running

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around on, the Apologies. Friends who caught up with Harry

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this week reportedly expected some note of contrition and instead

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found the record unchanged since 2020. Still angry at the family,

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still frustrated by the men in grey suits, and still

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remarkably expecting an apology of his own to him and

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to Meghan. He is, as one source put it, still

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in that Oprah mindset, which is the quiet absurdity of

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the reconciliation task. Each brother is waiting for the other

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to go first. Into that standoff steps, of all people,

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Princess Anne, reportedly telling both nephews that everyone shares the blame,

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that the king is ill and has asked for peace,

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and that two grown men sulking over every slight while

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their father is unwell is, in her blunt assessment, appalling.

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She's said to be working hardest on William, the more

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hard-headed of the two. Kate, cast as ever as the pragmatist,

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is reportedly encouraging William to stay strong, but not to

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slam the door. The ideal outcome being not warmth, but

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a quiet relationship with clear boundaries and no public attacks.

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And a new front is opening on the Spencer side.

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Harry's bond with his mother's family keeps deepening. And this week,

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his cousin Lady Eliza Spencer, newly engaged, indicated that the family,

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both brothers included, would be invited to her eventual wedding.

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Which is the thing Harry's return changes overnight. He and

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William now move through the same family circles again. and

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the invitations, addressed separately, will keep arriving. Harry Mount, in

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the iPaper, went further warning of two rival courts, Wales

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and Sussex, the way there were two courts, Charles and Diana's,

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in the bitter years before 1992. He wondered, hopefully, whether

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Earl Spencer, a historian of the English Civil War, no less,

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might be the man to heal a royal schism for once,

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rather than widen one. More Palace in just a moment.

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So actually, who won this week? The commentators could not agree,

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and the disagreement is the story. Mark Dolan declared Harry

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the only winner, the balance of power in the marriage

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tilting back to him the moment they landed on his

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home turf where he is the king's son again, rather

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than one more famous face in Montecito. But a chorus

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of others read the same facts as a retreat. Camilla

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Tominey framed it as an ultimatum the Sussexes have brought

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upon themselves. Drop the titles or drop the grievances because

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you cannot spend six years attacking the crown and then

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move home to trade on its name. Robin Given in

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the New York Times saw a couple stuck in the in-between,

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no longer fully royal and with surprisingly little currency in

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the celebrity market they gambled everything on. The most affecting

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take came from Daniela Elsa who asked everybody to remember

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what the anger has buried. That Harry and Meghan were

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once bloody good at this. Rewatch Meghan launching the Grenfell cookbook,

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Elsa wrote, and you see a charismatic, articulate woman who

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could have been the best asset the monarchy ever invested in.

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A once-in-a-generation chance to make a thousand-year-old institution feel suddenly

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relevant to the very people who'd written it off. Losing them,

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she argued, may prove the palace's greatest strategic blunder in

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a very long time, with consequences reaching all the way

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down to Prince George's reign. Underneath all the litigation and

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the jam, she reminded us was a genuine story. swoon-worthy

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love story. She's holding out, only half-joking for a fairytale

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third act. So the rest, much of which, fittingly, concern

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the relatives Harry's arrival has shoved off the front page.

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Andrew is reportedly relieved, with the entire press corps chasing

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the Cotswolds, one source noted the spotlight has swung clean

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off him, feeding a genuinely cynical theory that Charles welcomed

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the timing, the return conveniently bearing his brother's scandal. Not

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that Andrew's troubles have paused. Congressman Thomas Massey stood up

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in Washington and flatly accused him of committing sex crimes

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in the United States. An allegation, not a court finding,

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and one Andrew has always denied. While a film about

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his downfall, The Janitor, is reportedly in the works, and

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the man himself was photographed on the French Riviera, in

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ray-bands and a red cap, house-hunting in the company of

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two women. The Yorks endure, some of them evidently in

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the sunshine. There were gentler notes, too, Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Thompson.

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The King's strikingly handsome senior equerry, beloved of royal watcher

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fan accounts and once pronounced exceedingly handsome by Martha Stewart herself,

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is leaving royal service, a small loss for the aesthetics

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of the reign. Camilla, we learned, came within a whisker

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of a cameo in Only murders in the building before

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British Union rules and security got in the way. And

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a resurfaced story revealed that Charles was reportedly seismic with

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rage back in 2017 when David Beckham posted photos from

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a private Buckingham Palace tea party. A party, as it happens,

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thrown by none other than Andrew. Which brings us back

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to where we started. The strange new power of a

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man who gave up all the official kinds. Harry has

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come home and discovered he can move a king's diary.

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unsettle a future king, and reshape an institution simply by

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being in the country. The power of presence. The one

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thing distance had always denied him. The tragedy, as Elsa saw,

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is what he might have done with that power pointed

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the other way. And the quietest reminder all week of

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what presence is actually worth came, of all places, from

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a hospital bed in California, where Megan's estranged father, Thomas Markle,

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a complicated man with his own long history in this story,

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said he'd learned from the news that the grandchildren he

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had never met were leaving the country. One day, he said,

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those kids will ask about their other grandfather, a family

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that cannot solve its fathers and its sons echoing across

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an ocean. Everyone this week was arguing about who gets

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to be in the room. Some people would settle for

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an invitation. And there you have it. If you'd like

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to email us or address us, thepalaceintrigue at gmail.com. If

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you're on Spotify, leave us a comment. If you're on Apple,

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hit that button up there that says listen uninterrupted and

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get the show commercial free for just five bucks a month,

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along with thousands of others from Calaroga Media. I'm Mark Francis.

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My thanks to John McDermott. This is Palace Weekly. Good times.

Nine Bedrooms, a Film Studio and No Public Footpaths: Inside the Sussex House Hunt, and the New Power Harry Has Without a Title

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