The People’s Verdict: Harry Booed at Welford Road, Andrew Wins in Court and Loses Everywhere Else, Charles and William Head to Aberfan

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Palace Weekly. I am your host, Mark Francis. It's been a week in which two verdicts came in, one from a high court judge, one from a stadium full of rugby fans, and they pointed in opposite directions. The judge's verdict went to Andrew. A court quashed the warrants police used to search his home's handing him his first apparent win in the entire Epstein saga. The stadium's verdict went to his nephew. Watching a match at Leicester, Harry appeared on the big screen and a section of the crowd booed. One of those men won in a courtroom and remains in the public mind exactly where he already was. The other has spent six years insisting that whatever the press and the palace think of him, the British people are still on his side.

0:56 And this week, a grandstand told him something he did not want to hear. So the question worth holding is this. When the law says one thing and the crowd says another, which verdict actually counts? Let's get into it. Start with Andrew because his was the week's hardest piece of news and its emptiest victory. At the High Court, Mr Justice Hilliard quashed the search warrants after Thames Valley Police conceded they had been obtained under the wrong legal provision. Technically a win, but the judge was careful to drain it of meaning in the same breath. The quashing, he said, does not end the investigation or render it unlawful, and police are now applying to keep the documents and devices they seized anyway, under a different provision. As we noted last week, a quashed warrant is not an innocence. It's a paperwork error with a good lawyer attached. Andrew denies all wrongdoing and remains under investigation uncharged. And the family delivered its own verdict in the most Windsor way imaginable, by saying nothing at all. Hours after the ruling... The royal account posted a warm message wishing the Duke of Kent a happy 91st birthday. Of Andrew and his day in court, not one word. In a family fluent in the language of pointed omission, that silence was the whole statement. Meanwhile, the week piled on. Andrew may be called to testify in a $ 53 million civil fraud trial in December. The Bentley he drove to Prince Philip's funeral sold almost the instant it was listed, and he collected around $ 400, 000 in compensation payments. for surrendering the Royal Lodge lease. The courtroom

2:30 gave him a win. Everyone else gave him the cold shoulder. Which brings us to the verdict that actually stung. At a Leicester rugby match, Harry's face went up on the big screen, and part of the crowd booed. Now, in fairness, some present insisted the boos were aimed at the referee, and that's genuinely possible, but the significance isn't in who the boos were for, it's in what they threatened. Tom Sykes put it with real precision. The entire Sussex story rests on a single load-bearing assumption, that the press are hostile and the courtiers are grey-suited villains, but the British people are still deep down on Harry's side. When the tabloids attack, he can sue. When the palace sends a cold letter, he can blame the men in grey. But boos from an ordinary grandstand are not a media conspiracy.

3:14 They're the people's verdict. And according to Rob Shooter, Harry was, in his source's words, absolutely crushed, fighting back tears. because the one rejection his whole narrative never budgeted for was rejection by his own country. And here is the cruel timing of it. That very week, Harry released a grief masterclass, a genuinely moving one. He spoke with real vulnerability about the panic attacks that used to grip him before engagements, the collar of a dress shirt feeling like suffocation, about slipping into depression after leaving, about forgetting his mother's laugh and a therapist's suggesting he use her perfume, which unlocked everything about realising at last that Diana just wanted me to be happy. It is Harry at his most open and most sympathetic. It is also, the critics noted, a masterclass he was paid a reported quarter of a million dollars to record, and one in which, per Shooter's source, he would discuss Diana but not William, Kate or Andrew, because, as the source put it, those memories are worth a quarter of a million dollars. The grief and the invoice in the same breath. You can be genuinely moving about losing your mother and also be selling it, and the crowd this week seemed to notice. Even the comedians rendered their verdict. Saturday Night Live UK staged a Sandringham reunion in which a fictional William greeted his brother as Prince Gingerpubes.

4:34 Kate needled the woman from Suits, and a blustering Andrew burst in announcing himself with, Did somebody say Pizza Express working? Before a weary Charles told him, You represent an outdated institution that's had centuries of war, tax evasion and slavery, and that's all great, but you've also been accused of terrible things, and that's where I draw the line. When the sketch shows get the measure of you that precisely, the public has already decided. More Palace in just a moment. While Harry was absorbing the crowd's verdict, Meghan spent the week trying to win one. She surfaced in central London for the first time since the move, taking tea with the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai at Claridge's, a lovely worthy thing to do, somewhat undercut by the $ 37, 000 outfit the male priced her in, and by the flamboyant hug she delivered Malala on the hotel steps, in full view of a bank of photographers, which prompted the question half of Flea Street asked out loud, who exactly told the cameras she'd be there? This is the Duchess who two months ago had her husband arguing it wasn't safe to bring the family into London, now posing on the steps of the city's chicest hotel, in an outfit the internet unkindly compared to Obi-Wan Kenobi, the privacy and the publicity once again holding hands. There was a genuine charitable hook, a day's as-ever jam proceeds to the Malala Fund, but even the good deed came with a shop link. Then on Thursday, the real campaign, Harry and Meghan's first joint public engagement since the return in Nottingham, and not just anywhere in Nottingham,

6:04 the city where they first charmed the country back in 2017, in a sea of Union jacks, newly engaged and adored. The symbolism was not subtle. This was an attempt to revisit a verdict, to stand again in the one place where Britain once loved them without reservation, and see if any of it could be summoned back. Piers Morgan called them unofficial grifters exploiting their titles. Amanda Patel more gently noted they were simply trying to revisit the happiest day of their public lives. Either way, it was a bid for a reception. and after the booze at Leicester, you could see why they needed one. Underneath it ran the usual drumbeat about the marriage, some of it genuinely ugly. One radar piece built an entire story about Megan planning to run off to a hotel with the children on the back of an unsourced affair rumour. About as flimsy and aggressive a piece of gossip as we've seen, and we're not going to dignify the claim, but the studio reporting all pointed the same way, that Megan is homesick, misses her mother on the beach, and she reportedly complains even her own bed that the couple will spend Thanksgiving and Christmas in California rather than at Sandringham. Not waiting for an invitation, a palace source bluntly confirmed isn't coming.

7:11 If Meghan is rendering a verdict of her own this autumn, it's a quiet one and it points west. The brand, meanwhile, ground on, as ever, announced it will finally sell in Britain. Tea tins, candles and bookmarks carrying phrases in Meghan's handwriting, including with accidental poetry. Fell asleep here. The jam, thanks to import rules, isn't coming yet, which is awkward. Because Alison Boshoff claimed the whole point of this autumn's holiday hampers is to offload the tons of unsold fruit spread before it expires next summer, and in the week's tidiest little irony, Earl Spencer, himself busy trademarking Spencer Farms Jam and Honey off the Althorp estate, reportedly offered Harry and Meghan a rent-free house on his grounds. Diana's brother selling preserves and offering the Sussexes a bolt hole in the same breath. The whole family, it seems, is in the jam business now. More palace in just a moment. And then there's the one member of this family on whom the public verdict is, at the moment, simply not in doubt.

8:12 Richard Palmer observed that there was a time no editor would dare criticise Prince Harry, and that these days it's William who is virtually untouchable. He spent the week proving the point. He brought cricket to the mall, batting and bowling alongside Joe Root and Brian Lara to drum up interest in next month's Earthshot Prize in Mumbai. And as the papers dryly noted, stopping everyone from talking about the Sussexes for an hour. He turned up in Belfast in the rain. Kate and Princess Charlotte were spotted riding the Elizabeth line like ordinary commuters. He quietly donated to a former marine who'd rowed solo across two oceans, and on World Mental Health Day he posted a plain, direct appeal to check on the people you've worried about. The contrast with his brother could hardly be sharper. Harry got booed at a stadium. William got selfies at one. But, and this is the week keeping itself honest, the adoration is not entirely unmanufactured either. Daniela also took a well-aimed shot at the Just Like Us act, Kate confessing this week that she loves washing up. William on tea towel duty in the whole relatable double act. Lovely stuff. It sits, Elsa noted, rather awkwardly beside the $ 15 million helicopter that ferried William to engagements 52 times last year, the Korshevelski Chalet, the $ 38 million superyacht they holidayed on in Greece, none of which, funnily enough, made it into the Instagram, which stuck to windswept Norfolk beaches. The Waleses sell relatable while quietly living a 0.1% life, which is worth saying plainly because the booing of one brother and the adoring of

9:45 the other are both, in part, performances, and the only honest position is to note as both. The warmer notes came from the older generation. Camilla, in a lovely BBC documentary about books, revealed that she read Lady Chatterley's Lover by Torch under her pillow as a teenager, and that she and Charles read together before dinner every evening. The best tonic in the world, though she's regularly thrown off her page by the king roaring with laughter at PG Wodehouse. And we learned via Penny Mawdaunt that during a coronation rehearsal, the king was bored out of his mind until five-year-old Prince Louis turned up at which point Charles stopped the entire proceedings to show his grandson the crown jewels. He was in similarly good humour at Battersea Power Station, where a young musician who performs as Princess played him a track with the line, I'm a princess and I need my king. The king grinning and calling it clever work, a man plainly still well enough and human enough to be delighted. There was even a small verdict rendered on last week's Advent calendar row, when two clergymen gently suggested a £ 5. 99 charity alternative To Megan's $ 148 calendar, they were abused online by Sussex Defenders, and the Leprosy Mission, the charity they'd pointed people toward, promptly reported a surge in sales. Diana, as it happens, was its patron until her death. Sometimes the people's verdict comes in pounds and pence, and it lands exactly where you'd hope. Which leaves the week's most solemn and most important engagement, the one that puts all the booing and brand-building in its proper place. On Wednesday, Charles,

11:16 Camilla and William travelled to Aberfan to mark 60 years since a collapsing coal tip buried Pantglass Junior School and killed 144 people, 116 of them children, in their classrooms on the last morning before half-term. It is the sight of the single moment the modern monarchy is widely held to have misjudged. Prince Philip went the day after. The Queen waited eight days, fearing her presence would hinder the rescue, was criticised for it and later called it one of her deepest regrets. She returned three times. Charles has carried that thread ever since, and that, in the end, is the verdict that actually matters. Not the one handed down in a courtroom or jeered from a grandstand, but the slow one, earned over 60 years of quietly showing up to stand with the people in the worst grief imaginable, long after the cameras have gone. Because that's the thing the week kept circling without quite saying. Harry monetised his grief and got booed for it. The monarchy at its best does the opposite. It bears witness to other people's grief, unpaid for decades, asking nothing in return. One of those is a transaction, the other is a job. Andrew won his afternoon in court and it changed nothing. Harry won his vindication and heard the boos anyway. But the only verdict that endures isn't delivered in a single afternoon at all.

12:28 Not by a judge, not by a crowd, not in a masterclass with a price tag. It's delivered slowly over a lifetime by whether you showed up. This Wednesday in a Welsh village that buried its children, three of them will. And there you have it. If you'd like to email us, our address is thepalaceintrigue at gmail.com. If you're 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 just five bucks a month. Also, if there is a podcaster or a social creator in your family, We have a new program out called Linnet, and you can get it at linnetmedia.com. It's built by your people here at Calaroga Media. I'm Mark Francis. My thanks to John McDermott. This is Palace Weekly, and good times.