White Van at the School Gate: The Sussex Security Row Gets Real, Spencer's Book Tour and Its One Correction, Fergie's Seven-Figure Deal

0:03 Hello and welcome to Palace Weekly. I am your host, Mark Francis. It has been a week in which almost everyone in this story was arguing about something that happened in 1997. Charles Spencer took his book about his sister on a transatlantic media tour. A new documentary surfaced hours of Diana speaking in her own voice from the depths of her marriage, and Harry pressed ahead with a Diana film of his own. The Royal Soap Opera spent seven days, as it so often does, re-litigating a 30-year-old tragedy. And then, on Thursday, the present tense arrived, sharp and frightening, and entirely real. Two men with backpacks spent several hours doing what police described as reconnaissance outside the school where Archie and Lilibet now go before leaving in a rented van after weeks of critics dismissing Harry's security fears as a victim narrative. There it was, with a number plate attached. So the question worth holding this week is a hard one. When does the past finally get to rest, and who is actually watching the future while everyone keeps fighting about the past? Let's get into it. Start with The School, because it reorders how you hear everything else, according to ITV and Sky News.

1:27 Two men carrying backpacks were spotted near Archie and Lilibet's new school, watching the grounds and monitoring children as they came and went for several hours, before leaving in a rented van whose registration was traced to an international photographer working for a European agency. The family's spokesman called it extraordinarily reckless and drew the line precisely. There is a world of difference between legitimate journalism and photographers walking the perimeter of a school looking into the grounds Monitoring children, police are investigating. The details have gone to RAVEC, the committee still weighing the Sussexes' request for protection. Now, you'll remember that two weeks ago, the family pulled these same children out of their first school over the security of the run, and a good chunk of the commentariat scoffed. Harry, manufacturing a crisis. Megan, crying wolf. The whole thing a victim narrative, designed to squeeze taxpayer money out of RAVEC.

2:25 This week answered that scoffing in the bluntest possible way. Whatever you think of their parents, and there is plenty to think, Deep Crown put it as well as anyone. These are not the actions of journalists, but of people who have decided a photograph of a five-year-old or a seven-year-old is worth whatever fear it takes to get it. Children going to school, he wrote, is not complicated. On that there is nothing to debate. And yet, and this is what makes the Sussexes so maddening to defend... The very same week, Megan was busily undermining the case her husband is trying to make. She had not one, but two publicized pub lunches in the Cotswolds, one near Burford with Ellen DeGeneres, one at Stone's Throw from Soho Farmhouse with a friend. Both at venues the papers identified instantly, with photographs surfacing the same day. Tom Sykes dryly summed it up as Megan trading her privacy pleas for a hearty pub lunch. There were also reports, unconfirmed and exactly the sort of thing that gets invented, that Meghan now wants dinner guests to sign non-disclosure agreements before any evening where royal matters might come up, prompting the obvious observation that people want a glass of wine and a laugh, not a contract. And a clip went round of Harry walking down Madison Avenue, entirely unrecognised, which critics seized on as proof he needs no protection at all. So here is the uncomfortable truth one week delivered, and it refuses to take a side. The threat to those children is real, real enough to have a van and a police file.

3:53 And the Sussexes genuinely do undermine their own privacy case, constantly, by advertising their whereabouts the moment it suits the brand. Both things are true at once. The people who insist Harry is simply paranoid were answered this week by two strangers casing a playground. The people who insist the Sussexes only ever crave privacy were answered by Megan's own Instagram. The security review remains unresolved, and both of those truths are sitting in the file. More Palace in just a moment. While the present was banging on the school gate, almost everyone else spent the week with their backs turned, starting in 1997. Charles Spencer took his memoir on tour, People, CBS, CNN, a long sit-down with Tina Brown, and offered by turns a Grieving Brothers tribute and a series of fresh grenades.

4:43 He hinted that a book about the king, had he chosen to write one, would really be a jaw-dropper, which is the sort of thing you say when you'd quite like everyone to picture the jaw-dropper. He stood by his account of Charles after Diana's death while conceding under pressure from Piers Morgan's lawyers, one real and verifiable error, the Jim Photograph's timeline, for which he has apologised and which future editions will correct. That single correction did real damage because it handed every critic the same question. If he's that wrong about something checkable, how far do we trust the rest? Simon Kelter put it precisely. How many other small errors are in the book, and can we trust an author who presents assumptions as facts? The wiser voices were quietly begging everyone to stop. Charles Moore, who was inside the abbey for the funeral, wrote that it is simply time to close the book of 20th century disharmony and get on with the century we actually live in.

5:35 And Kelner identified the institution's real strategy, which is almost zen in its patience. The monarchy has never needed to win an argument. It simply needs to outlast it, which is exactly what William is doing. Declining, per the Sunday Times, every approach to make or appear in a competing Diana tribute, precisely so that he and Harry aren't pitted against each other over their mother's grave. Never complain, never explain, now applied to the memory of Diana herself. But the past wasn't finished. A separate documentary, Diana Unheard, is preparing to broadcast hours of Diana speaking in her own voice. the tapes she recorded in 1991, at the lowest point of the marriage that became the spine of Andrew Morton's book.

6:17 Its makers frame it, not unreasonably, as handing Diana back authorship of her own story. The palace will experience it as her private anguish from the unhappiest period of her life, broadcast to the world one more time. And over all of it hangs Harry's own planned film, for which we learned this week he has been quietly approaching Diana's friends. One asked about her taste in music, others about her early life, Her sisters, Lady Sarah and Lady Jane, have reportedly declined to take part, unwilling to be seen, choosing a side between her sons. Which is the whole tragedy in a sentence. Thirty years on, you still can't honour Diana without picking which boy's version of her you're honouring. If there was a bright spot in all the exhumation, it was the reminder buried in Spencer's book of how alive she actually was. He recounts Diana once asking him half-mischievously, Carlos, do you think I'd make a good American First Lady?

7:10 an ageing powerful suitor having told her he was sure he could win the presidency if she married him. Spencer reads it as pure Diana, tickled less by the man than by the thought of reinventing herself in a role that would make the Windsors sick with jealousy and out-glamour even Jackie Kennedy. For one line, amid all the grief and points scoring, there she is, funny, restless, impossible to contain. It is a better tribute than any documentary. More Palace in just a moment. Away from the ghosts, the living kept busy. Sarah Ferguson spent the week reportedly fielding a seven-figure secret bidding war book deal. Chapters drafted, subjects said to include Andrew, Epstein, Charles and the Sussexes, while her spokesman insisted there is no tell-all memoir. A denial Jenny Bond noted does a great deal of work, since without the tell-all part, the dollars simply don't flow. Bond's verdict was that a woman who once described her first Sandringham Christmases facing a firing squad is unlikely to volunteer for another.

8:11 More poignantly, Camilla is reportedly finding it hard to keep her distance from Sarah. The two were once as close as sisters, even as Charles and his advisors warn her that Fergie is, in the household's blunt word, radioactive. The Yorks endure. Some bonds, it seems, are harder to sever than titles. And there was a nice footnote to the whole Spencer saga. Diana's brother has reportedly filed to trademark Spencer Farms for a range of honey, tea, marmalade and wine. prompting one source to observe that, having first imitated Harry by attacking the royal family, he is now doing a Meghan and planning to make Jan. The grievance economy, it seems, has a gift shop. The scrutiny widened to the next generation, too. Town & Country reported that neither Beatrice nor Eugenie has ever personally paid rent on the palace apartments they've occupied for nearly 20 years, costs covered over time by the late Queen, by Andrew and now by Charles, a detail that, in the wake of the row over Andrew's royal lodge lease, politicians may find too tempting to leave alone. Even Dickie Arbiter, no Republican, thought the sisters should quietly pack up and go.

9:15 Not because they've done anything wrong, but because, in his words, anyone with common sense would see the optics and say, we're off. Then there was the money. Amazon is reportedly circling a major sponsorship of the 2027 Invictus Games, brokered of all people by Chris Jenner, who apparently connected Megan to Lauren Sanchez, who had Jeff Bezos' ear. Invictus insists it already has the funding it needs, but the symbolism was rich. Harry, the climate and burnout campaigner, potentially in business with a Bezos company and against his own Netflix partner, which gave the hypocrisy hunters a fresh afternoon's work. Harry himself, meanwhile, had the single most genuinely likable moment of the week, keeping a promise to a 102-year-old veteran by throwing himself out of a plane near Toronto. for charity, kissing the ground when he landed and ringing Meghan to say he was down. He said the children are happy at school, and that it is good to be back on British soil, and that he can finally focus on Invictus, for once no grievance, just a man, a parachute, and an old soldier beaming in the back of the plane. And the Walesers did what the Walesers now do, showed rather than told.

10:22 William and Kate turned up to cheer Sir Kevin Sinfield through his seven ultra-marathons in seven days for motor neurone charities. Kate helped elderly passengers onto a community minibus in West Sussex and gently coaxed a nervous little girl into finding her voice. William gave a cheerful interview about his love of Christopher Nolan films and Heath Ledger's Joker, prompting the internet to marvel that we got Prince William reviewing The Dark Knight before anyone got Grand Theft Auto 6. Kylie Kelsey invited Kate onto her podcast. And in the most telling small item of the week, Rob Shooter reported that William's famous fury, the adjective this program has watched the tabloids bolt onto him roughly once a week for a year, has finally burned out into something quieter and more final.

11:05 Not rage, but indifference. Harry, living 10 miles away or 5,000, a source said, makes very little difference to William now. He has stopped being furious. He has simply stopped caring. If true, that may be the most consequential development of the entire week. As for the king, he was on good, dry form. Unveiling a plaque at a project due to finish in 2040, he wondered aloud whether he'd still be alive by the time you complete it. Either gallows humour or a man genuinely at ease, in either way, the palace says his treatment has moved into a precautionary phase. We also learned, more tenderly, that Charles quietly tried to reach his old friend, the explorer Serenath Fiennes, whose well-being friends have been worried about only to be rebuffed, a small sad episode that nonetheless showed an instinct toward kindness.

11:51 And his stepson Tom Parker Bowles revealed that the king does all the voices when he reads Harry Potter to the grandchildren, which is a lovely thing to set against a week of so much coldness, remembered and alleged. So where does it leave us with a family so consumed by a death 30 years in the past that it very nearly failed to notice a threat forming in the present? Two strangers at a school gate, watching the children who are meant to be the whole point of the enterprise. The future, the past, is supposedly all in service of. Everyone this week wanted to own Diana's story. Almost nobody was talking about the two small people who share her blood and were, this week, genuinely frightened on their way to class. The past will keep its grip on this family as long as they let it. The question none of them seem to be asking is, who's minding the future?

12:36 And they 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. I'm Mark Francis. My thanks to John McDermott. This is Palace Intrigue. Good times.