It’s hard to look away as Tina Brown delves into decades’ worth of royal scandals
‘The fascination of monarchy is that its themes repeat themselves because its protagonists are earthly,” is Tina Brown’s conclusion to The Palace Papers, her latest book about the British royal family. This is a very Tina Brown way of saying – after more than 500 exhaustive pages of Windsor arcana – “Oh well, we’re all human.” In fact, I think the fascination of the monarchy is that no matter how many books are written about them, and no matter how hagiographic they intend to be, there’s always some new information within that proves they’re even more repulsive than you originally thought.
This is genuinely impressive – superhuman, even – given that the Windsor’s shenanigans are about as unexamined as the assassination of JFK. I’m no royalist – after all, I do work for the Guardian, which Brown describes as “mercurial” and “sour” due to its rude republicanism – but hey, I watched The Crown. I’ve even read Brown’s previous royal book about that similarly untapped subject, The Diana Chronicles. I’m up on the royals, OK? Or so I thought until I read in The Palace Papers about Charles’s other mistress in the 1970s and possibly 80s, Dale Harper, who was dropped by Charles for being too keen on him. Later she fell out of a window and was paralysed below the waist. When she “frantically pursued Charles in her wheelchair” at a polo match in 1997, he issued “a chilly statement saying they were no longer the friends they once were”. Or how about this one, which was told to Brown by “an American media executive” about the time he had lunch with Sarah Ferguson in 2015: “Andrew came in and sat down and said to me, ‘What are you doing with this fat cow?’ I was so stunned by his level of sadism. She has to sing for her supper.” In other words, Brown concludes: “He bails her out when she’s in trouble, and she backs him up when he’s assailed by scandal.”
