Two Courts in One Week: Harry’s Walkabout and His GQ Interview, a Sultan at Windsor, and Sixty Years Since Aberfan

0:03 Caloroga Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Palace Weekly. I am your host, Mark Francis. It has been a week in which Britain got to watch two royal families at once and decide more or less in real time which one was real. On one screen, Harry and Meghan staged a walkabout in Nottingham, complete with flowers, selfies and adoring crowds, and Harry sat for a soul-bearing magazine interview about grief and reconciliation, the full performance of royalty. On the other screen, three members of the actual royal family welcomed a sultan to Windsor in the pouring rain, and then stood in a Welsh village that buried 116 of its children 60 years ago this week, the substance of it. One was the look of the thing, the other was the thing, and a YouGov poll landing in the middle of it all suggested the public can still tell the difference, ranking Princess Anne first and Prince Harry tenth. So the question worth holding is this, what is the difference between looking like royalty and being it? Let's get into it. We begin with the walkabout, because it was, by some distance, this week's main performance. Harry and Meghan returned to Nottingham for their first joint engagement since coming home, and not just anywhere. but the very city where they made their public debut as an engaged couple in 2017. They were

1:33 showered with bouquets and balloons, they crouched for school children and posed for selfies. It's great to be back, Megan told the crowd, and the charities, it must be said, genuinely adored them. The recording studio staff described young women in tears at the news she was coming, and the grinful cookbook women Megan worked with years ago told reporters simply, we love her. That part was real and worth saying, plainly. But it also looked, in the words of Jenny Bond, like a royal engagement in all but name. And that's where the week's central argument caught fire. Everything about it was staged like a working royal trip, advanced briefing notes about the charities, published timings so supporters knew where to gather, and the Sussex's very own press rota with, tellingly, a veto that has rendered at least one tabloid persona non grata, At one stop, a reporter overheard charity staff coming out beforehand to coach the crowd on how loudly to cheer and what to shout. The Nottingham Post's own editor wrote a blistering piece about council protection officers diverted and barriers deployed and a police car blocking a road, none of it for free. All for a couple Buckingham Palace itself calls private citizens in one of the most deprived districts in the country. And the mayor was Rebecca English asked the sharpest question. Why publicise your movements, draw a crowd you cannot police, and then point to the lack of protection.

2:58 It does, she said, make you wonder about their motives. Bond's own verdict was the generous one, and it deserves airing. What's in a label, really? Here are two people who want to use their position to do a bit of good on their own terms. It won't please William, and everyone will just have to get over it. That's a fair reading. But it collided this week with a far less generous one, triggered by a friend of the couple who told Hello... Though the Sussexes never agreed they wouldn't be half in, half out, that was foisted upon them, which sent anonymous courtiers into orbit. The idea once said that you would ask the late queen to sign a contract with a member of her own family is absolutely disgusting.

3:38 Six years on, the oldest fight of the whole saga, half in or all the way out, is somehow live again. And then Harry did the thing Harry does. He sat down with GQ and asked whether he grieves his lost relationships with his father and brother, said, Some people don't want it to work out. I want it to work out. He named no one. He didn't have to. Half of Fleet Street filled in William before lunch, at which point his spokesman read out a clarification, insisting it was a general point, not a swipe at anyone. The interview was, in places, genuinely moving on grief. But it was also, as Melanie McDonough put it, exactly the problem. if you are serious about reconciliation, you do not conduct it through a magazine. Piers Morgan, never subtle, called it a flamethrower wanting to make peace with the people whose houses he torched.

4:30 And Tom Sykes identified the real wound. Being publicly lectured about reconciliation by the man who caused the rupture is precisely the thing William finds impossible to forgive. More Palace in a moment. Because while all of that played out on one screen, the actual monarchy spent the week doing the unglamorous, unperformable work the rival court can't quite replicate. It welcomed a sultan. Charles, Camilla, William and Kate gathered at Windsor in a downpour for the state visit of Sultan Haytham of Oman. Carriages through the rain, a guard of honour, Kate in a lemon yellow Ellie Saab gown and the lover's not tiara at the banquet that evening.

5:12 It's easy to dismiss the pageantry, but the substance was real. the first state visit by a sultan of Oman since 1982, at a moment when Oman's quiet diplomacy over the Strait of Hormuz matters a great deal to Britain, and Charles used his speech to look past all of it to the world his successors will inherit. Climate change altering the land and seas, artificial intelligence holding both promise and peril, competition for resources testing the international order, and to the one thing those successors will need above all, trusted friends willing to work across territories, difference than to think in generations, not years. That is what the job actually is, not a walkabout, a relationship, maintained for 44 years, passed carefully to the next hand. William, it should be said, is making the real court look like rather good fun these days.

6:02 He spent part of the week on his feet, punching the air as Aston Villa won 6-0. He cheerfully confessed to the BBC Asian network that ahead of Mumbai his spicy intake is pretty limited, and that curry makes him sweat. and when a well-wisher on the mall leaned in for a kiss, he smilingly declined with, reportedly, I don't usually do kisses, untouchable in the polls and visibly enjoying himself, which for an heir is its own kind of soft power. Royal Insider Deep Crown drew the line between the two courts more precisely than anyone, and he did it as he always does through the diary. The Amman State visit, he pointed out, was announced on the 3rd of September. No secret carried by Reuters within the hour, sitting in every royal correspondent's calendar for seven weeks. And the GQ interview dropped the very same morning. Now, GQ publishes on Tuesdays, that much is just scheduling. But a guest of the Duke's standing who asks a magazine to hold a piece for a particular week, Deep Crown noted, is generally given it.

7:02 So either someone on Harry's side knew the state visit was that day and let the interview run against it anyway, or nobody thought to check. If nobody asks, he wrote, that is the more telling answer. A real royal household spaces its diary so it never tramples another member's day. A rival court simply lands on top. The Prince of Wales, Deep Crown added dryly, may not be furious, but I am. And then there was the week's true measures to the difference in a Welsh valley. On Wednesday, Charles Camilla and William travelled to Aberfan to mark 60 years since a collapsing coal-tipped buried Pantglass Junior School. 116 children and 28 adults gone on the last morning before half-term. At a quarter past nine, Wales fell silent. The family laid wreaths.

7:47 Camilla's posy carried rosemary for remembrance and rosebuds for childhood. Jeff Edwards, the last child pulled from the rubble alive, thanked the king for 60 years of returning. You have remembered us. You have stood with us. And William, who was meant to move on, simply didn't. I could spend all day listening to your recollections, he told one group and stayed. There is no briefing note for that. No press rota. No crowd coached to cheer. It is the oldest and least glamorous thing the monarchy does, bearing witness to other people's grief for decades, asking nothing back. And it is the one thing a rival court cannot stage. There was even a small human grace note. The school's headteacher showed William a letter Prince Philip once wrote, describing her as young, enthusiastic and glamorous. Then William, grinning, pronounced his grandfather a bit of a charmer. 60 years of a relationship right there, carried quietly across the generations. More palace in just a moment. Which brings us to the verdict, because this week one actually arrived. A YouGov poll ranked the royals by public approval. And the order tells you everything about what Britain values. Top, at 67%, Princess Anne, the family's least glamorous, least confessional, most relentlessly hard-working member.

9:07 who has never once given an interview about her feelings. Then Kate, then William, then Charles, Harry Kane 10th on 29%, Meghan near the very bottom, Sarah Ferguson 18th. The public, it seems, can tell the difference between the court that performs and the court that works, and it rewards the woman who just gets on with it. Fittingly, Anne's virtues were thrown into relief by a Labour peer, Lord Fulkes, who used a Lord's debate on royal funding to argue that ribbon-cutting is not real work, not like a nurse on a 12-hour shift, before making one exception, Princess Anne, whose children he noted pointedly gave up their titles and went and got jobs. It's a challenge worth hearing even for monarchists, and a backhanded tribute to the one royal nobody can accuse of coasting. Elsewhere, the Yorks continued their strange downward faintly surreal saga. We learn the king has quietly lent Andrew a two million dollars to settle the repair bill on Royal Lodge, the brother bailing up the brother one last time. Even as Andrew's friends, emboldened by his courtroom win, reportedly urge him to fight to reclaim his titles. The spirit of the grand old Duke of York rekindled. Sarah, meanwhile, is now persona non grata at his door, A charity quietly removed a plaque that she unveiled 35 years ago and the detail that defeats parody.

10:27 Andrew has reportedly acquired a new girlfriend in Norfolk, who, the story goes, simply rang him up and suggested they keep each other company, which prompted Paula Frolic to ask the only sensible question, what exactly is going on with the women of Norfolk? The rival court's commercial engine, meanwhile, was sputtering. Megan's long-rumoured role in Guy Ritchie's The Gentleman is Dead and one friend conceded she may simply have been used to promote a weaker second season. Worse, Bella Baharia, the Netflix executive described as the Sussex's biggest champion, has left the company, replaced by a man reportedly charged with finding the next Stranger Things, not some royal-linked vanity project, has ever at least got its first real numbers this week, an estimated $ 1 to $ 2 million a year, a genuine small business built on a startling quantity of jam, if not the empire once imagined, there was, too, a fresh anxiety.

11:22 A reported film in development around Angela Kelly, the late Queen's dresser and confidante, whom Harry attacked in spare, and who had a front-row seat to everything, which left the Sussexes, per Closer, seething. And William, per the same source, rather enjoying the prospect of his brother getting a taste of his own medicine, and, lest anyone mistake Nottingham for a peace offering, Rob Shooter's sources claimed six more such outings are planned. One insider calling it Not a reconciliation tour, but a revenge tour, on the logic that every appearance that irritates the palace is these days part of the fun. Which rather gives the game away, and the Sussexes will spend Christmas not at Sandringham, but in California with Meghan's mother.

12:03 Harry reportedly desperate for an English Christmas with his father, Meghan by every account immovable. The rival court is going home for the holidays, to the other home. So here is where the week leaves us, for one week. Britain saw the two courts side by side and was invited to compare. One staged a flawless walkabout and gave an interview about healing. The other welcomed a sultan, debated its own worth in Parliament and stood for the 60th year with a village that lost its children. You can replicate the walkabout, the bouquets, the briefing notes, the crowd told what to chant. You cannot replicate the rest. The 44-year friendship, the 60 years of showing up when there is no brand to launch and no camera that matters. Harry told GQ the most important thing is to reconcile, perhaps, but the most important thing the monarchy actually did this week, it did in a Welsh cemetery. Asking nothing. Selling nothing.

12:56 Simply present. That is the difference between looking like royalty and being it. The rival court can borrow the look, the real ones keep the job, and the public this week knew exactly which was which. And there you have it. If you'd like to email us, our address is thepalaceanddrink 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. We appreciate your support. And if there's a creator or a social media creator in your family, tell them to check out a new program from Calaroga called Linnet, L-I-N-N-E-T. And you can find it at linnetmedia.com. It's a program to help you be a better creator. And it's the program we use to make this show. We appreciate all your support. I'm Mark Francis.

13:42 My thanks to John McDermott. This is Palace Intrigue. Good times.