Endgame, p.34
Endgame, page 34
The Sussexes were the big story, so, under English’s fabricated rule, anyone, especially an honorary member, with strong access to the couple’s world should not be allowed additional benefits as well as rota perks. “Newsroom budgets were shrinking fast, job security was becoming a concern to many, and the focus of some in the rota became less about what was fair and more about protecting one’s job and the ability to pay school fees or a mortgage,” one longtime royal correspondent admitted to me. The Palace, on the other hand, quietly made sure that foreign correspondents excluded from the rota had everything we needed (I was “snuck” out of barricaded media positions and inside engagements by certain press secretaries on many occasions) but, as one aide said to me with a sigh, “We really don’t want to interfere with the rota.” They were, as several expressed to me over the years, scared. After all, if unhappy rota members had the power to shift the tone of their coverage with the wave of a pen, the Palace was most definitely going to do whatever they could to keep it that way.
Restricted access for Commonwealth outlets, digital news organizations, or U.S. publications (the latter being relevant to a newly installed American duchess in the House of Windsor) didn’t make much sense to many of us. With the support of two senior Palace aides, I wrote a letter to relevant senior individuals at Buckingham Palace about why it was important to open an additional position in the rota—one that could at least be shared by the aforementioned groups. Harry, I was told, was also keen to back the effort. But it quickly hit a dead end. Rather than decide themselves, Palace aides called in English and The Times’ royal correspondent Valentine Low, the rota’s overseas tour captain (who was admittedly far less bothered about petty politics and mostly attempted to be fair in this less-involved role), for a meeting. English told them that letting “others” in would be unacceptable. “To be honest the rota is just a headache none of us want to deal with. It’s easier to just leave it as it is,” a senior courtier said with a shrug over coffee with me. Yet another case of institutional fear and blinkered acceptance of the status quo when it comes to the media.
Harry and Meghan, who were having their own conversations about the same issue, were then told that if they wanted to break away from the rota system and give other journalists access to their work, they would have to foot the bill for their own engagements. The list for their reasons to leave was getting longer by the month. Harry vented in Spare, “I’d had it with the royal rota, both the individuals and the system, which was more outdated than the horse and cart . . . It discouraged fair competition, engendered cronyism, encouraged a small mob of hacks to feel entitled.”
To Harry, the rota wasn’t just a symbol of the prevailing but noxious link between the media and monarchy, but proof of the backroom deals made between the two institutions, the underhanded agreements that are often personally destructive. He famously called this pact the “invisible contract”—a tacit agreement in which orchestrated public exposure is offered with a certain level of scrutiny accepted, in return for privacy behind palace gates. Amol Rajan, who produced the BBC documentary series The Princes and the Press (which, for transparency, I participated in), describes it like this: “Journalists are always doing unspoken deals with people. I worked in newspapers for the best part of a decade; I cut a few deals myself. The Windsor deal is: The royals get to live in a palace, they get some tax-payer funding. In return—so long as they grant access and a steady supply of stories and pictures—they get favorable coverage. But that deal only works if both parties stick to their side of the bargain.”
Prince Harry’s black-and-white description of this invisible contract in Spare and more recent interviews reveals a world in which almost every press officer and courtier has a hotline to the press—a wide-open connection to dish dirt on other family members in order to protect their own bosses and bank future favors. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. Many old hands in the royal press pack will (and do) categorically say that no such invisible contract exists whatsoever and that this is all part of Harry’s axe-grinding campaign to take down his family and the media along with it. In my own experience, the real truth lies deep in the murky middle. The Express’s longtime royal correspondent, Richard Palmer, has said in interviews he doesn’t recognize Harry’s description in the slightest, while veteran royal editor Robert Jobson said in 2021, during the period of leaks around Harry and Meghan’s troubles, “They can deny it all they like until they’re blue in the face, but there’s been an awful lot of leaking, particularly from Kensington Palace.”
While royal “churnalism”—the regurgitation of press releases, rewriting details from royal rota reports, and parroting briefing notes sent out by Palace aides—takes up the majority of the slate for some journalists on the beat, bigger outlets also need their own stories. Exclusives, leaks from sources, and on-and-off-the-record briefs make up the second type of relationship between the Palace and press. While big scoops do sometimes come directly from Palace aides (especially those hunting for favors or armed with an agenda), many are still down to good old-fashioned reporting efforts. Having access to the world the royals occupy provides journalists, myself included, with the perfect opportunity to build relationships with an assortment of those who live and work up close and personal with the royal family. Sometimes it’s their communications secretaries or private secretaries, and other times it’s those who are not based at the palace or work independently, such as assistants, stylists, hairdressers, and protection officers. It’s no different to the way in which one covers politics, sports, or entertainment news—you cultivate sources wherever you can find them. Some of these sources are on a mission from HQ and others simply dish up the goods because they love to vent, gossip, or feel heard. And, of course, there are those who do it for the money—British papers historically pay handsomely for insider information (even when it’s illegal, in some cases).
Off-the-record briefings and sources speaking anonymously are by no means a bad thing in and of themselves, and journalists depend on these things for reporting. Publicists and representatives for the likes of celebrities, sports stars, politicians, businesses, and governments all rely on an open channel to discuss stories or issues that are best talked about on background or off the record. In the Palace’s case, it is often a convenient way to share useful or sensitive information ahead of an engagement or a royal mile-marker, or to address a story they want to quash, derail, or explain without the fuss of putting out a statement. While the Palace often chooses to “no comment” most things, staff in the communications offices will sometimes instead give quotable “guidance” as a source to provide further information or context. It’s partly why we have a WhatsApp group with the communication aides to fire off questions and comment requests at all hours of the day.
What makes the House of Windsor unique in this dance with the media is the competing households within it, all with their own agendas, and all doing their best to please their royal bosses. Up until the Queen’s death there were three houses, each with a team assigned to work with the media: Kensington Palace for William and Kate, Clarence House for Charles and Camilla, and Buckingham Palace for the monarch. There were also smaller teams under the BP umbrella who worked with other family members like Edward and Sophie, Princess Anne, and (pre-departure) Harry and Meghan. Though all part of the same institution, the rivalry between these teams is real in many ways and often derails a unified message. Each house is often angling for the same space in newspapers, hand-waving for attention with regards to their work, grabbing the ideal dates and locations for their tours and engagements, or scrambling for first dibs on charitable causes. And this rivalry often causes rifts, problems, and confusion downstream after a particular household offers breaking news or choreographs a PR operation. It was an “absolute headache” when Charles, William, and Harry all wanted to do similar high-profile environmental work, an aide once told me. “None of them were into the idea of collaborating; they all wanted their own big moments away from the other . . . It was all about competition, and the households were purposefully holding information back so others couldn’t try to get ahead,” they explained.
Naturally, as paid members of the team, household staff for each of the three offices look out for the royals they represent. This is where “briefings” get complicated, because while the aides are all working to prop up the Crown, they owe nothing to the family members they don’t report to. In the stormy days of Charles and Diana’s fractious marriage, both had friends in the press that they directed their aides (and friends) to saddle up to. In recent years, the Sussexes have repeatedly claimed that staff from other households betrayed them by briefing negative stories to journalists about them, and that Charles specifically authorized aides to give out details and fabrications to his preferred media outlets. Harry called it a “dirty game” in his Netflix docuseries.
When it comes to this game, it involves more than just standard communication efforts for their bosses. Palace courtiers, as previously discussed, also have a long history of leaking information about other royals—for a multitude of reasons. With different households, it is common for an aide to look out for the royal they represent by using information about another member of the family (from a different household, and preferably less senior) as currency to win over the more ruthless media outlets or to kill a potentially damaging story about the “principal” they serve. Just think back to the 2018 tabloid stories about Meghan’s 5:00 a.m. emails and the supposed drama around her wedding tiara. These reports, and many others, included anonymous quotes from Palace sources and aides working for other members of the royal family. And this was hardly a secret. Over the years, many Palace staff have described what can only be called a toxic culture of leaking and negative briefings within the institution, especially poisonous when it comes to Harry and Meghan. Some of the staff I have spoken to in the past and for this book said the couple was an easy target because they believed other family members were jealous of their unrivaled popularity at the time, while two others shrugged and said that was “just how it goes.” And a handful of aides told me they thought that much of the venom was a result of the fact that some family members and staff just flat-out disliked Meghan for both rational and irrational reasons.
Journalist Anna Pasternak, who received legal threats from the Palace and attacks from British newspapers for a Tatler profile on Kate, which included mild criticism, in its July/August 2020 issue, said briefings often come to those journalists playing the right game. “[To receive them] you have to consistently write pieces that flatter the relevant members of the royal family, that you have to be seen to be more negative about others [in the family],” she explained.
These conspiratorial briefings happen much less often with broadcast journalists because they so rarely have the ability to lean on anonymous source quotes for reporting (although background information can easily shape the tone of a news script), but it’s exceedingly common with traditional print outlets and their online companion sites. Journalists who say otherwise either haven’t managed to build those kinds of relationships with the Palace or are lying to avoid putting their access at risk. But this doesn’t mean television doesn’t get dragged into the drama. And when it does, it can get heated, fast. Case in point: when I reported details of an insidious briefing war between Kensington Palace and Prince Harry, the Palace hit back hard. For a 2021 investigative show on Britain’s ITV network, I said that it was no coincidence that stories of Prince William’s “fears” for his brother’s “fragile” state of mind appeared in newspapers less than a day after the Duke of Sussex publicly opened up about the growing distance between him and his brother. Based on information I had confirmed from several sources and Palace aides, I added that the Sussex camp were well aware that a senior member of the then Duke of Cambridge’s staff cynically used supposed concerns about Harry’s mental health as an opportunity to spin positive press for William. Furious that I had exposed this, Kensington Palace—personally instructed by William, one of his aides let slip—rapidly intervened and applied the requisite pressure to stop the truth from spreading. Such claims would not paint their boss in a positive light, especially given his active role as a mental health advocate.
The producers of the show were sternly encouraged by Prince William’s lawyers to remove my comments from the documentary. Aides at Kensington Palace warned the network that my accurate revelations were “potentially” defamatory. The tug-of-war rose to ITV’s executive level until the broadcaster made an eleventh-hour agreement to mute the audio of my voice when it aired. I was told by a source that ITV was concerned about losing access to the royal family for other big-ticket TV items (such as Kate’s Christmas concert specials).
Dead air on network television is extremely rare, so when my voice cut out for five seconds the night Harry & William: What Went Wrong aired, it made for an incredibly awkward silence noticed by viewers and pundits alike. Kensington Palace continued their damage control by telling certain royal correspondents that I had “no evidence” to support my claim. Eager-to-please reporters repeated this accusation, despite knowing the truth. “It provided a vivid example that Kensington Palace is certainly more prepared to wade in to influence media coverage when it chooses to,” said the documentary’s award-winning journalist-turned-director Richard Sanders. “On the day of transmission, the Palace demanded that we remove [the] quote. People more important than myself acquiesced, although it seemed to me perfectly, legally defensible.” Defensible, indeed. And somehow, in all this back-and-forth and he said–she said nonsense, the real story was lost to the noise.
Continuing William’s campaign to emerge from the brothers’ public squabble looking like the caring older sibling, the heir’s Kensington Palace team did everything they could to carefully control that narrative. They were determined to paint him as the more mature and responsible one who had done all he could to salvage the relationship. But they can’t bury the articles that included the strategic briefings I initially exposed, which clearly quote Kensington Palace sources. “WILLS: MY FEARS FOR FRAGILE HARRY” was The Sun’s October 21, 2019, front page. Inside the paper, a senior royal source revealed that William was worried about Harry’s “fragile” state of mind after Harry and Meghan: An African Journey aired that week. Another source in the story added, “Harry is not in great shape . . . I’d say he’s not well.” And a Kensington Palace source was also quoted by BBC News on the same day, revealing that the Duke of Cambridge was “worried” about his brother. Harry and Meghan, they added, were in a “fragile” place. Similar language appeared in a number of other outlets, including the front page of the Daily Mail: “WILLIAM’S FEARS FOR TROUBLED HARRY.”
My proof of Kensington Palace’s schemes at work wasn’t just in the newspaper coverage. I also had close working relationships with Buckingham Palace aides and people on Harry and Meghan’s team. Back in 2019, one of the Sussexes’ main communications aides felt strongly that William’s staff, led by press secretary Christian Jones, crossed a line with the mental health stories. One of the couple’s team called me the moment the “William’s concerns for Harry” front pages dropped. “It’s pretty disgusting that they would pull out the mental health card for this . . . None of them care for his health,” the aide said. As Harry later shared, “They were happy to lie to protect my brother. They were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.”
This wasn’t Christian Jones’s first rodeo, and he was just one of many at Kensington Palace who engaged in these tactics. William’s private secretary Simon Case and communications secretary–turned-senior-advisor Jason Knauf also shared details with preferred reporters to quell rumors about the broken relationship between the Cambridges and the Sussexes. When William and Kate went to see Harry and Meghan after the birth of Archie, Jones made calls to a Mirror reporter and me to share an exclusive—the couple had just minutes ago stopped by for a special visit. “It’s a great story that shows that the relationship isn’t as bad as everyone makes out,” he said. “It was really sweet.” What he failed to mention, as I later found out from Sussex sources, was that the couple’s lukewarm drive-by lasted less than twenty minutes.
There are also times when certain false information is purposefully given out just to give the institution a proper whitewash. For Finding Freedom—which initially started life in 2018 when Harry and Meghan were excited about their years ahead as royals—two Kensington Palace aides working for the Sussexes at the time told my coauthor Carolyn Durand and me that Meghan had received SAS-style security training ahead of her marriage to Harry. Perfectly believable, given the fact that Kate and other senior royals went through the exact same taxing instruction course. But the Sussexes were surprised to read this when the book came out in August 2020. “Meghan wishes that was true,” her new U.S. representative admitted to me after publication. Harry called the story “nonsense,” adding, “On the contrary, the Palace floated the idea of not giving her any security at all because I was now sixth in line to the throne.”
