Prince William was “horrified” when Queen Elizabeth II recorded a Christmas message without a photo of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on her desk, according to a new biography by Tina Brown.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were in Canada for Christmas 2019 just before leaving their royal duties the following month.
And the monarch’s annual broadcast that year had one notable absence: an image of the pair that had been present the year before. Former magazine editor Tina Brown describes in her new biography, the palace papershow Prince William feared the move would provoke a tantrum from his brother.
In the book, published on April 26, he wrote: “William is said to have been horrified when he saw that the Sussexes had been eliminated. He knew his brother well enough to predict a Category 5 tantrum.”
Steve Parsons-WPA Pool/Getty Images
There were already signs that Harry and Meghan wanted out of royal life before the queen’s pre-recorded speech, but it was time to “pull the trigger,” according to the book.
Brown wrote: “The previous Christmas, a family portrait of Charles, Camilla, the five Cambridges and Harry and Meghan was displayed alongside Her Majesty. But by December 2019, the Sussexes had evaporated, their image removed as cleverly as Stalin would have done. an apparatchik out of favor.
He added: “Her Majesty pointed out an attractive portrait of Harry, Meghan and baby Archie. ‘That one,’ said the Queen. ‘I guess we don’t need it.'”
The book notes that the selection of photos was supposedly no accident and has been “cleverly changed” every year since Elizabeth began broadcasting an annual televised Christmas broadcast in 1957.
Brown wrote: “If the Sussexes had any residual doubts about whether they wanted out, those doubts vanished when they saw the Queen’s televised Christmas message in 2019. With their own eyes, they saw that they had been banished to the fringes of the Monarchy. . Her Majesty eloquently made the point in her speech by not saying anything. The subtext was all in the flotilla of carefully arranged family photographs placed on her desk.”
Just a few weeks later, the news appeared on the front page of the UK tabloid. Sun that Harry and Meghan planned to spend more time in North America. In the wake of that revelation, the Sussexes published their own detailed roadmap for a new post-royalty life in which they would continue to serve the queen but also have more independence.
The duke told Oprah Winfrey in March 2021 how he tried to set up a meeting with the queen before posting his plans on his now-defunct Sussex Royal website.
For more real news and commentary, check out news week‘s the actual report podcast:
–
However, he suggested that royal staff blocked the meeting, leaving the queen telling him that she was too busy to meet.
“That announcement that we published on January 8, 2020 (when we stopped working as royals), the content of that was put in a letter to the institution, to my father, which was then shared at the end of December, when they were in Canada,” Harry said.
“And then coming back on the 6th after my grandmother said ‘the minute you land come to Sandringham we’d love to have a chat come and have tea why don’t you stay for dinner because it’s going to be a long journey and you will be exhausted,'” he added.
“The minute we landed in the UK, I got a message from my private secretary, Fiona at the time…cutting and pasting a message from the Queen’s private secretary, basically saying ‘please forward to the Duke and Duchess from Sussex that he cannot come to Norfolk. The Queen is busy, she is busy all week…don’t come here.’”
Brown wrote that Harry and Meghan were trying to blur the line between Elizabeth’s role as grandmother and Britain’s head of state by hosting an informal meeting to discuss an important issue.
Samir Hussein – Pool/WireImage
She cites a palace source: “Such talks would have to be done in the spirit of Elizabeth II as sovereign, so there would be agendas. The talking points would have been agreed upon beforehand between the private secretaries… What the Sussexes tried to do was circumnavigate that and go see her because she, by her account, she is famous for saying yes. She collapses.”
Brown added: “Sometimes it falls to the queen’s private secretaries to alert her to family members trying to blur the lines to ensure inappropriate outcomes. In corporate terms, it’s called CEO denial. In this case, Harry’s goal of making the ending go beyond the queen’s advisors was very clear.”
When Harry and Meghan posted their plans online, the British media accused them of cheating on the queen.
Harry refuted the accusations to Oprah: “No, I would never surprise my grandmother, I have too much respect for her.”
Brown, however, seemed to share the media’s point of view, writing: “Whatever conversations Harry insists took place, the Sussexes’ completely baked-in proclamation of intent on their website was an insult by its existence alone. .
“‘It was total madness,’ was the verdict of a palace source. For once the monarch and the Prince of Wales were united in feelings of offense.”
He added: “Establishing the rules of the new ‘work model’ was a bit like making public the conditions of your employment as fait accompli before any job was offered.
“The language of Hollywood public relations was naively evident in the language of the manifesto. After the redefinition of her roles, she declared, the Sussexes would continue to ‘collaborate’ with Her Majesty the Queen, as if the monarch were the co-executive producer of a television series. But the Queen does not cooperate. She rules, as her impetuous grandson was about to find out.
The book says that Harry and Meghan had a rocky exit in which the duke would eventually have to give up his honorary military titles.
A former adviser told Brown: “Harry and Meghan were really stunned. They didn’t expect that to happen.”
–
Not all news on the site expresses the point of view of the site, but we automatically transmit these news and translate them through programmatic technology on the site and not from a human editor.
