Was William "Furious" About a Tiara? The Camilla Wedding Snub Story, Meghan's Reported Spending Ultimatum for Harry.

0:00 Ah Caloroga Shark media that low and welcome to Palace Weekly. I am in post Mark Francis. It's been a week in which almost nothing happened and a truly heroic quantity of words were spent describing it. Prince William was reported to be furious about a tiara, Meghan was reported to be ordering Harry to stop tipping so generously. A memoir confirmed that Prince Edward is and I quote definitely not gay. A former housekeeper revealed that the secret to landing a royal job is spotting a dead fly on the carpet, and a branding expert offered Meghan's strategic advice she did not ask for the summer as ever delivers. So here's the question I want to hold on to for the rest of this show, because it's the one the week keeps circling back to. When the Royals do very little.

0:50 What exactly are we talking about? And the uncomfortable answer most weeks is ourselves. The Palace has finished quietly rewriting the description of the King's role. Last year, the Sovereign Grant Report called him Head of the Church of England and defender of the faith. This year, he is Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a man who protects the space for faith within the multi faith nation. Those two phrasings sound like a small edit. They are not. The title Supreme Governor was deliberately chosen back in the reign of Elizabeth I, precisely because it avoided implying the monarch held spiritual authority over the Church. The sovereign guards the church's constitutional position, while the bishops handle the actual religion.

1:35 So this is old, careful language, and Charles has spent his whole life poking at its edges. You may remember that in a nineteen ninety four documentary with Jonathan Dimbleby, the then Prince amused that he might prefer to be defender of the divine rather than defender of the faith. Not a missing word, a different word entirely. To most listeners, it sounded like gentle royal philosophy. To institutional scholars, it sounded like someone quietly suggesting the whole arrangement might be negotiable. The whole arrangement might be negotiable given that the coronation oath is fixed by an Act of Parliament dating to sixteen eighty eight and cannot simply be updated on a whim.

2:17 Charles always insisted he'd been misunderstood that he wanted to be a protector of faiths alongside defending the established Church, not instead of it. His coronation in twenty twenty three formally settled it. He took the oath, he was proclaimed Defender of the Faith, and the Archbishop of Canterbury added a careful little preface about fostering an environment where people of all faiths may live freely. The words stay the same, the frame around them shifted just slightly to acknowledge the country that now exists rather than one. The oath was written for a very British solution. Nobody entirely satisfied, nobody entirely displeased, And that really is the same question England has been quietly arguing since Henry the eighth was first handed the title Defender of the Faith by Pope Leo the tenth and fifteen twenty one. Who defends the faith?

3:07 Which faith? And what defending it actually requires? Even the Week's most substantial story was on inspection five centuries old now to the manufactured version of exactly the same activity, the tabloids deciding what the royals mean royal insight of deep Crown said, the quiet part out loud this week, and I want to give it room because it is essentially this show's entire thesis articulated by someone else. If you gathered every story published about the Prince of Wales in the last three years in which an unnamed source described his emotional state, Deep Crown wrote, you would picture a man in a condition of near perpetual white hot volcanic fury, pacing the corridors of Kensington Palace at midnight, rattling the wainscotting, frightening the staff. The English language, he noted, offers a magnificent range of words for human displeasure, vexed, agree, peaked, put out, rankled, And the tabloid press has surveyed all of it and decided unanimously and apparently forever, to pitch its tent on furious and never leave his theory, And it is not a flattering one for the press. Is that furious keeps Harry relevant. If William is furious, it means Harry got to him. The wound is fresh, the drama is live. But what if the truer word is that William has with some discipline, simply moved on. That is a far less exciting story, that is almost no story at all, and so we get furious instead. Deep Crownd says, the people who have actually been near William lately use different words indifferent, detached, and from one who's

4:42 known him for years, he's moved on. He's genuinely moved on, right on. Q the Weak supplied exhibit a Radar Online reporter that William was yet furious this time because Queen Camilla allegedly refused to let Peter Phillips bride Harriet Spurling borrow a tiara from the royal vault on the ground that she isn't royal by blood. An unnamed sore said William was disgusted Camilla would stir up trouble to show off her power. For context, Peter's first wife wore one of Princess Anne's tiaras in two thousand and eight, and Zara borrowed another of ants for her wedding in twenty eleven. So there is a genuine precedent buried in here somewhere, But the claim is anonymous, unconfirmed, denied by nobody, because it was put to nobody and arrives pre loaded with the only adjective the press permits itself. Harriet, in the end married without a tiara, and the world kept turning.

5:33 Even the advice columns joined the in. Nadine Dorries in the Daily Mail suggested William consult his mother in law, Carol Middleton, on the grounds that Carol has her own wayward younger sibling, naughty uncle Gary Goldsmith four times married a man of some tabloid history, and did not banish him from the family when Kate married in Gary attended the twenty eleven wedding. Put your pride aside, Dorries advised the future king, and you may just get your brother back. Sound counsel. Perhaps also an entire national newspaper column instructing a man on how to feel about his family based on nothing he has said or palancing just a moment.

6:14 Which brings us to the Sussexes, who this week generated an enormous amount of coverage and almost no actual facts, a distinction that, as we've established, rarely slows anyone down close. It reported that Megan is pushing Harry to cut away back on his trips to Britain on the reasonable sounding grounds that the bills are huge and there's nothing to show for it. The same unnamed source extended this into a general austerity drive. Harry is apparently a very generous man who loves to leave outrageous tips and lend money to friends no questions asked, and is now in district orders to think twice about opening his wallet. I have no idea whether any of this is true. Neither, i'd wager does the source. But it is a tidy little story because it lets you picture and Megan confiscating the credit card, and the pictures of what these stories are for. Meanwhile, Duncan Larcom, Writing and Woman Magazine reported that Harry's estrangement now reportedly extends past his father and brother to the wider cousinhood that this one's close friendship with Zara Tyndall has, in Larcom's phrase, almost entirely evaporated. This is the man who is often credited with introducing Zara to Mike Tindall at the two thousand and three Rugby World Cup, and who was, apart from a student cousin with university commitments, the only royal cousin absent from Peter Phillips Recent's wedding evaccurate.

7:27 That's genuinely sad if sourced the way everything else this week was sourced as a shrug in dinner jacket. Then the recycling bin Radar Online revived speculation of a documentary that has not been announced about a Diana anniversary still a year away, that Harry is second Megan might feature in any thirtieth anniversary tribute to his mother, and that women is deeply irritated by Harry's habit of comparing his wife to Diana. The comparison is real. Harry did say back in the twenty twenty two Netflix series that so much of whom Megan is echoes his mother's compassion and warmth. Everything built on top of it. This week was anonymous, and Hello offered the tender code of that Archie a little bit. Reportedly, don't grasp who the Royal family are at all, being raised as normal kids, though young Archie apparently loves that his granddad lives in the castle. Broadcaster Kirsty also predicted that in about twelve years these children will rebel and bitterly resent the British life taken from them, which is a bold forecast to make about the interior lives of a six and a five year old. If you want the sober version of all this, Tessa Dunlop supplied it in The Independent, and it's worth hearing because it cuts against the sentiment. Harry, she wrote, is on a losing streak that may get worse, and the naive among us who hoped Childs would give his stubborn, grieving son a soft landing are misreading the institution entirely. The monarchy has survived revolution, regicide and abdication precisely by not taking risks with the leaky prince who will very soon

8:59 be yesterday's news. She's harsh about it. She notes the relationship between Charles and Harry was never especially close by ordinary standards, given the boarding schools and the legions of staff. But she's making the honest point that the family is not obliged to be a soft touch, and the conservative press, the monarchy's lifeblood, is frankly enjoying the spectacle. And here's the line that ties the whole Sussex circus back to the top of the show. A friend of Diana told Rob Shooter this week that the late princess would have handled the press very differently from her youngest son, that Diana never saw every journalist as the enemy, that she built relationships with correspondence, she trusted and played the long game, that she'd been disappointed by the path Harry has chosen, declaring war on the media rather than learning to manage it.

9:46 Whether or not that friend exists, the observation lands because it's the difference between someone who understood she was inside a story and someone still trying to sue his way out of one. Catherine Mayer put the broadcast frame on it in Iron News, arguing provocatively that Britain actually needs Meghan. Throughout history, she wrote, Royal women have been pitted against each other and Blim versus Catherine of Aragon, Diana versus Camilla, and now the cartoon Kate versus the cartoon Megan, each strapped to a set of values she never volunteered for. An entire economy of hate has grown up around the Sussexes, Meyer argues, and the monarchy, which can only add to its balcony through marriage or birth, has just lost Andrew and it's putting short of working. Royals might one day regret failing to keep the people who saw themselves reflected in Megan, you needn't agree with a word of it to notice it's the same machinery deep Crownd described viewed from the other end, more palace in just a moment, Now to the good stuff, because the gaps between all that invention a handful of genuinely real moments slipped through, the ones where you actually glimpse a person rather than a narrative. Start with the King laughing. Dame Elaine Page received her damehood at Windsor this week, and, being, as she put it, particularly short, she found the King up on a dais, leaning down beside her ear to murmur keeping your hand in, are you? She shot back that she's working on a new album and would send him a signed copy, and Charles, by her account, roared with laughter loudly enough to break the choreography of an investiture.

11:19 She shared the ceremony with David Beckham, collecting his knighthood. Camilla separately has sent her a message for the Olivier Awards, calling her a defining figure in musical theater. It is a small thing, and it's also the most human the monarchy got all week, and speaking of the marriage at the center of it, the King, according to Giles Brandreth sometimes calls Camilla Mebuba, an Urdu word meaning my beloved, a nod to his decades of visits to India and Pakistan, and he's used it in public at a British Asian Trust event no less. Robert Hartman adds that friends have jokingly called Camilla Lorraine the Punton la Rain the Queen, a joke she found funny and Charles parent did not.

12:01 The sister Annabel Elliott describes them as Yin and Yang, polar opposites who work brilliantly, and calls Camilla his rock. Camilla's own explanation for a marriage that took a very long and very public road to get here is disarmingly plain. It's just sort of friendship, really laughing at the same things, getting on with life. Two memoirs opened the same window from further back. Ruthie Henshall, the West End Star, has written about dating Prince Edward from nineteen eighty eight to nineteen ninety three, and her account of a bow moral weekend is all removable, washable sofa covers and dogs everywhere, and the Queen, the actual Queen, perched on the arms of her sofa like any other mother face lighting up when Edward walked in, throwing her arms around him to talk about horses and wildlife. Henschell was struck by how informal they all were, right down to sneaking into palace cupboards for biccardi and coke. She also felt the need to record for the historical Archive that Edward was romantic gentlemen.

12:54 Her capital is not mine, definitely not gay, noted Former Royal chef Darren McGrady offered the same contrast in dessert form. When young William wanted chocolate ice cream at Buckingham Palace, the Queen would press a button some of the page in seat of a twenty minute relay through the head chef, the pastry chef, the silver pantry, the glass pantry, and the linen room. At Kensington, William would wander into the kitchen and ask McGrady directly, be told, help yourself and go sit on the windowsill, eating Hagan dance from the tub. The Queen loved dark chocolate sixty percent and up. Charles, for the record, doesn't like chocolate at all. He'd rather have an orange olive oil tea cakeer, a slice of banana bread. The whole institution in one freezer. The most quietly affecting thing this week came from a new biography by Tom Quinn, and it belongs right under Deep Crown's argument about Furious. A former Kensington Palace maid claims Kate had to teach William some of the ordinary business of parenting out of the children a piggyback, and that William said, very quietly, my father never gave me a piggyback. The same book describes Charles and William as two men who both get irritated quickly, who are picky, and it credits Kater's the household's peacemaker, the one who calms William when he gets fractious, the one who supposedly said he sometimes has to be treated as her fourth child. Read that next to a week of headlines calling him furious, and you get the real sympathetic version underneath the invented one.

14:18 Not a raging air rattling with the wainscoting, just an occasionally touchy man who grew up without piggybacks and married someone who steadies him. That's not a scandal. It's a person, and you can see that person in the work he actually does. I knuse Vicky Spratt spent three years following William's homewards project Newport, then Sheffield alongside Gordon Brown, then Aberdeen, where a young woman named Erin, newly housed after becoming homeless through a relationship breakdown, said she'd felt like a bird and now felt safe enough to properly show up for her own life. Spratt's blunt assessment is that with more than one hundred and thirty four thousand households in England stuck in temporary accommodation and rough sleeping in London at record highs, the future King is in affair, doing the government's job, and doing it rather well. No, anonymous sources required just a man carrying furniture up three flights of stairs. The odds and ends were as ever the fun bit. George starts at Eton with what one source called a ring of steel, drone monitoring teams on the rooftops, the perennial impossible brief of keeping a boy both safe and normal. A fashion columnist crowned William the style icon for the radical achievement of owning trousers that fit and declining to wear a quarter zip under every jacket, and a former royal recruiter revealed her favorite interview trick, leaving a dead fly on the carpet to see whether the candidate notices picks it up. One in ten does that, apparently is the special Housekeeper, which leaves Diana and I want to end there because the two got very different treatments this week, and the gap between them is the whole point of this episode. One treatment was the sludge

15:51 Radar online and others review the machinery. The French case file sealed until twenty eighty two, which stinks of a coverer, an x I six officers claims about strobe lights in a missing hour, Keith Allen insisting she was murdered over land mines, and the self described spiritual adviser recasting Diana as a white witch bearing gemstones in the Kensington Gardens for the record, The official investigation in both France and Britain concluded the crash was caused by a drunk driver going too fast while pursued by paparazzi, and found no evidence of MI six, the royal family or the government. Nearly thirty years on, the invention machine still runs. The other treatment was real and it was just a stack of old letters. Diana's school friend Katherine Hanbury is selling letters and photographs she's kept in the desk drawer for forty five years. And the young woman in them is not a witch or a conspiracy or a foil in anyone's culture war. She's a hopeful girl who thought she had met her prince and wrote home from her nineteen eighty one honeymoon about blissful sun and calm seas, who confessed she adored being outside all day and hated London, who said being married was wonderful and that royal life felt like playing with growener. She loved tidy in rooms and organizing drawers. She was, in Hanbury's words, the real deal, someone who never tried to be anything other than her real self. I don't think there will ever be anybody like her. That's the one worth keeping, Not the version we invent when nothing happens, The real one, in her own handwriting, before any of us decide what she meant,

17:23 go give you a kit. A piggyback by my France has been thanks to John McDermot. This is Palace Weeklygan good terms