Endgame, p.35
Endgame, page 35
Looking back on that period, a current senior Kensington Palace staffer called the “briefing wars” that took place during the Sussexes’ fallout a “dark time.” They claim the Prince and Princess of Wales are now keen to move on and operate differently. After I exposed the details behind the “fears for Harry” stories leaked by Kensington Palace, William had me excluded from access to engagements and even press releases for almost ten months. A former aide in the prince’s circle revealed that it was the last straw. “There was a frustration that control of the narrative was slipping away when Finding Freedom came out, then Oprah . . . [William and Kate] were exhausted and angered by it all.” But in the summer of 2022, I was told by a senior aide that the household wanted to “wipe the slate clean.” The arrival of Lee Thompson, NBC’s former vice president of global communications and strategic partnerships, as William and Kate’s new head of press has certainly resulted in new, more transparent strategies. There’s a sense that under his watch at least, the past might not repeat itself. “That’s not how I operate,” Thompson told me shortly after taking on his new role. He vowed to staff at the start of his role that he doesn’t have favorites and doesn’t have plans to get involved in any games. A supposed new era.
But the lasting damage of many years of deceit and cynical tactics still lingers. The impact on family relations seems as raw as ever when you consider Harry’s tormented odyssey. There were times, the Duke of Sussex says, that even brother William had been a victim of manipulation and trickery in an effort to boost his father’s and Camilla’s images. Charles’s former press secretary Sandy Henney revealed that William was “furious” when, at sixteen, The Sun published details of his first proper meeting with Camilla. The author of the story later revealed that the source was, once again, Mark Bolland, Charles’s deputy private secretary and public relations advisor. Henney described the briefings as “transactional,” adding, “When I joined his office in ’93 [Charles] was going through some pretty virulent criticism—‘Bad father, unloving husband.’ I think he was pretty hurt.”
Bolland worked hard to change Charles’s image, leaking all sorts of details in the process and helping journalists shine an extremely positive light on his boss, even if it meant bringing others down along the way. “[Mark] had a meeting with me at the publisher’s office, at the very beginning of [my biography Charles: Victim or Villain],” revealed journalist Penny Junor. Details provided to the author included the claim that Charles’s marriage to Princess Diana was a lost cause because she had multiple personality disorder. This was a low point in Charles’s desperate attempts to reconstruct his image, and the public took notice. The Palace disassociated itself from the book, but Junor still claims Bolland was behind much of the reporting in the tome, a huge share of which glorified Camilla as the woman who “saved” a forlorn prince.
Bolland was also accused of approving a News of the World scoop claiming a sixteen-year-old Harry was “taking drugs,” in exchange for spinning the story into one that praised Charles as a caring, involved father who took time out of his busy royal schedule to take his pot-smoking son to a “heroin rehab clinic.” To complete the fabrication, misleading photographs from an unrelated royal engagement Harry and his father carried out at an entirely different rehabilitation facility were used to illustrate the article. While Harry has admitted to spending many nights at Highgrove getting high and drunkenly falling into trouble at a local pub in Wiltshire, the story failed to mention that this rebellious time in his life was partly the result of Charles leaving him alone at his country mansion for a majority of the summer in 2002. “This was a child that needed guidance, that needed a parent, and [Charles] was too busy and involved with other things to notice,” said a family friend. In Spare, Harry writes that the front-page tabloid story, which went on for an additional six pages, left him feeling “sickened” and “horrified.” Bolland later admitted that the sequence of events in the now-defunct newspaper was “distorted” to make Charles look good.
When rumors about Prince William and gossip about Kate’s “fallout” with Rose Hanbury flooded social media feeds and American tabloid magazines in 2019, Kensington Palace press secretary Christian Jones took a leaf out of Bolland’s book and pulled out all the stops to get The Sun—the first outlet to allude to the gossip—to stop poking around in the detritus of the rumor and back off. Crises such as these require more than just strategic briefing, which drops us right into the third media relationship: tactics that teeter on the edge of ethical boundaries, and in some cases run right past them.
While there was no proof that there was any truth to the Rose gossip, the tale’s trip along the grapevine was damaging enough. “Christian was desperate to stop [the rumor] and made it his mission to do so,” a former courtier told me. Jones even tried to include me in his attempts. While the tabloid continued to dig around on the story, even sending a reporter to canvass Hanbury’s home in Norfolk, Jones—who had already admitted to me that the paper’s persistence was stressing him out—suggested that I connect with the journalist behind the initial reports—The Sun’s “showbiz” editor Dan Wootton. Christian clearly wanted to give Wootton something in exchange for standing down on the rumors. If he promised Wootton scoops from elsewhere, maybe The Sun would do him a solid. As for my supposed gain from this, Jones claimed, it would be a “great move” to help promote Finding Freedom before it was launched in August. “He would be helpful,” Jones wrote in a late-night text. “I reckon a story [from your book] to Dan that goes in The Sun, and then he goes on [morning TV show] Lorraine [to talk about it].”
At this point I was already aware and dubious of the triad relationship between Jones, Callum Stephens (his partner and PR executive), and Wootton. I had zero interest in collaborating with the tabloid and Wootton, let alone with a notorious hack best known for bullying and hounding celebrities, including the late Love Island UK host Caroline Flack (who Prince Harry was romantically linked to in 2009), as well as a long list of worrying allegations, including blackmail, coercion and other repulsive acts. (In July 2023, Wootton responded to the publication of some of the allegations, calling it a “witch hunt” by “dark forces,” and admitted that, while he has “made errors of judgement in the past [the] criminal allegations . . . are simply untrue.”) But Jones continued to push the idea—at least three other times.
It was soon clear my book was not the only carrot Jones would dangle in front of his pal at The Sun. In late June the paper suddenly pulled reporters off the hunt and then dropped digs into the story entirely. “Christian helped make it end,” one high-level courtier told me. Curiously, Wootton and the paper—which does not have a reputation for giving up on potential scoops—shifted their focus to a series of revealing stories about the Sussexes.
For Prince Harry and some other Palace staff, including one who was confiding in me at the time, the timing of this shift was dubious. And those suspicions reached fever pitch when, a year later, a report was published by a grassroots news outlet run by a team of media lawyers and former Fleet Street journalists that focuses on the activities of Britain’s newspapers. Strict U.K. laws prevent me from repeating the details contained within it.
At this point, the Sussexes and two of their aides were on high alert. It didn’t go unnoticed that just months prior to the report, Wootton let slip to Talk Radio listeners that most of the negative stories about the Sussexes are “coming from within the royal family.”
For this book, several separate sources—including two Sun staffers—confirmed that Jones helped provide details to The Sun about the Sussexes’ move to Canada and their decision to step back from royal life. “Leaks got really obvious toward the end,” a senior ranking courtier confided to me. When Harry and Meghan’s head of communications Sara Latham sat down with Jones and Prince Charles’s press secretary Julian Payne in January 2020 to prepare a joint statement from Buckingham Palace confirming the couple’s official departure, details about it leaked to the newspaper while they were still working on the draft. “They hadn’t even spoken to anyone at that point and Dan [Wootton] was already calling her to ask for comment about details in the statement . . . It felt like Christian had literally been texting him under the table.”
The steady stream of information to The Sun appeared to have had an upshot. The paper that once dubbed William “Workshy Wills” and called him the “cringey” heir went on to write mostly enthusiastic, positive pieces about the Prince of Wales. Since 2020, The Sun’s coverage has called Prince William a “hero,” labeled him a “man of the people,” and—after years of negative commentary—declared that the future of the monarchy now rests in his “safe hands.” A “proud” Kate even joined forces with the tabloid in the summer of 2023 to launch a drive for baby bank donations. Quite the reversal.
As for Prince Harry, he attempted to sound the alarm on Jones’s movements with Wootton early on but, to his frustration, found himself up against resistance from all fronts in the institution. At the infamous Sandringham Summit in January 2020, the duke brought up the matter to his brother for the first time, a conversation to which William was surprisingly receptive. A source said he was willing to hear Harry out. “Yeah, we’ve also got our suspicions,” William responded. They both agreed to do “something” about it—but three months went by, and nothing was done. Instead, William promoted Jones from press secretary to personal private secretary, a station much closer to the future king.
But the Duke of Sussex wasn’t relying on his brother’s cooperation anymore because, by this point, he had all the evidence he needed: relevant documents, intel from Scotland Yard, and information from other journalists (including sources at the paper itself) who had passed details along to his team. Armed with a dossier, Harry went to the very top of the institution with a formal complaint and a suggestion that they take appropriate action against The Sun. The response Harry received, however, was far from what he expected. There, on Buckingham Palace–headed paper, was a reply from the Lord Chamberlain at the time, Earl William Peel, who had a particularly close relationship with Charles. The letter, a source said, included “some of the most strong” language seen on official household stationery, aimed at Harry, not Jones. “It was a threat,” said a source close to the situation, who added that the Queen wasn’t consulted before the Palace issued it. “[The Lord Chamberlain] said either drop the charges or face severe consequences in twenty-four hours.” A message from a lawyer for Jones, arranged by the Palace, soon followed. The decree: stand down from legal action against Prince William’s aide.
An exasperated Harry pointed out to Palace aides that he was not suing the aide or anyone on this matter—he simply had a desire for the situation, a public official with deep connections to private information about a senior royal being shared with a national newspaper, to be properly dealt with. For the duke, enough was enough. The Sun had a long and controversial history of inappopriate relationships with public officials, and the Palace, at one point, was also keen to put an end to these practices. “The Palace basically accused Harry of wanting to sue his brother’s [private secretary] and causing great distress to Christian,” the source continued. When they asked him to provide more evidence, Harry refused. “At this point he already had plenty and, given how defensive they were being of Christian, it was clearly going to be used to help him and not Harry.”
Within weeks, it was clear to all involved that the Lord Chamberlain’s threat of “severe consequences” was no bluff. Harry received two further letters in July 2020, one from Charles’s private secretary Clive Alderton and the other from the Queen’s, Edward Young, both stating the same thing: he was to be officially and immediately cut off from all financial support, including official security, which Charles had been privately covering with his Duchy of Cornwall income.
“I have never seen the Palace circle the wagons like they did with Christian,” a source later reflected. “In my experience, anyone who puts a risk to the survival of the monarchy is out.” It seems, however, that the actions of Christian Jones, who continued to work for Prince William until April 2021, were seen as a help, not a hindrance. As it turns out, William knew about Jones’s friendship with Dan Wootton since day one. Multiple sources confirm that during an early 2018 interview with Simon Case for his job at the Kensington Palace press office, Jones, in the interest of transparency, shared that he has a “working relationship” with Wootton.
Joining The Sun in the collusion club with the royal family is the Daily Mail. Often the go-to when it comes to setting the record straight or controlling certain narratives, the consistently favorable coverage of the royal family in the country’s most read daily newspaper has greatly benefited the monarchy in the last fifteen years.
Queen Camilla’s mutually advantageous friendship with Mail editor Geordie Greig now orbits the Independent, a once left-leaning paper where Greig landed in January 2023 as editor in chief. Since the Eton College alum’s arrival, the Independent has gone from a paper that went out of its way to avoid covering the royal family to routinely publishing insidery reports that have at times quoted a mysterious “senior royal family source.” And her ongoing relationship with the Mail’s publisher, Lord Rothermere, arguably the most powerful man in the British media, has helped matters, too. “Camilla has been canny,” said former BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt. “She’s kept the media close and the Daily Mail even closer.”
So it’s no surprise that when the Duchess of Sussex announced in October 2019 that she was suing Associated Newspapers and the Mail on Sunday on the grounds of copyright infringement and invasion of privacy after they published a private letter she wrote to her estranged father, Thomas Markle, both Clarence House and Kensington Palace aides became “very worried” about how it might affect their ties with the Mail. “Even aides on [the Sussex] team were saying it would be best to stand down,” admitted a source, who added that once Harry and Meghan made the legal action public, Charles, Camilla, and William were “furious.” “So much work had gone into getting the Mail in their corner . . . The paper had pretty much become an extension of the Palace communications team, and to lose that would have had detrimental impact on the monarchy as a whole. It sounds extreme, but the Mail’s positive coverage and its huge audience do a huge part in helping prop up the popularity of the royal family.”
A number of sources confirmed that in an effort to make it clear to Lord Rothermere and his executives that the Palace was against the duchess’s legal move, Palace officials furtively told the Mail’s lawyers that they would “get the help they need [from the institution]” to defend themselves in the trial. Evidence of this support arrived in December 2020 when the publisher’s lawyers filed a witness statement from the Mail on Sunday’s editor in chief Ted Verity. In the statement, he shared information received from a “senior member of the royal household” referred to only as “Source U.” Verity wrote, “They were fully aware of the matters in dispute in these proceedings and how important they were to me and the company I work for.” This Source U, an anonymous high-ranking courtier, informed Verity that William and Kate’s head of communications at the time, Jason Knauf, worked on drafts of Meghan’s letter to her father. In their eyes, this legally ensured that Meghan was not the sole copyright owner.
With this one source statement, the Daily Mail—with Palace assistance—tried to submarine one of Meghan’s copyright claims and paved the way for Knauf to step forward with evidence. The kicker: Source U also claimed that I was given a copy of the letter for a “big reveal” in Finding Freedom. A ludicrous claim that I hardly feel the need to correct, but, as the pages of the book itself confirmed, this is untrue.
Still, none of this mattered by February 2021. After more than a year of hearings, the judge decreed that because the case was so clear-cut, there was no need for a full trial. The court awarded Meghan a victory over the newspaper group for both invasion of privacy and copyright infringement. For the publisher and a number of individuals at the Palace, it was a crushing blow, as both parties hoped the trial would result in a victory for the paper and a timely opportunity to traduce Meghan’s character yet again.
The legal drama was far from over, though. Claiming they had new evidence and that it was essential for their witnesses to be heard (including Knauf and Thomas Markle, who bizarrely sided with the same paper that famously screwed him over days before Harry and Meghan’s wedding), the Mail’s lawyers appealed the ruling. With Prince William’s blessing to circumvent an employment NDA concerning emails and text messages, Jason Knauf provided a statement of his own to prove he was a legitimate coauthor of the letter (having helped Meghan go over every draft), and that the two of them had meticulously worded it in the event that the press got hold of it. In other words, could it have really been that private then?
The emails that Knauf provided to the Mail’s lawyers and the court also showed that he and Meghan repeatedly discussed Finding Freedom after my coauthor and I asked him for input on some topics in our biography. During a fall 2018 lunch at Nobu (a spot we had taken Knauf on a number of occasions), Durand and I gave him an overview of what was needed for the book. He was keen to help us in his role as Harry, Meghan, William, and Kate’s joint communications secretary, so I followed this up with the first wish list of topics and queries (mostly regarding Meghan’s family and upbringing) with which we thought he could help—all standard practice for most journalists writing a book on the royal family.
Knauf’s emails showed that Meghan had provided him with answers to some of the questions on this list, and the press raced to turn this into some sort of gotcha moment—supposed “proof” that she had invaded her own privacy by helping us with the book (which is exactly the point Associated was hoping to make). And also “proof” that I had lied about the couple not cooperating. It was incredibly frustrating, as I was clear in hundreds of media interviews—and even two witness statements for this very case—that the couple did not cooperate with us on the book.
