The Windsors are obsessed with teddy bears. Prince Andrew, officially the worst Windsor after being accused of having sex with a minor, has 72 of them.
Unlike his brother’s disturbing teddy love, Britain's king-in-waiting's bear obsession brings images of his childhood. “Charles’s childhood teddy bear, which is still patched whenever necessary by the Prince’s former nanny Mabel Anderson…, went everywhere with him,” writes Tina Brown about the Prince of Wales in The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil, the most delightful book of the season.
Brexit forgotten, Megxit not so much, and with the Platinum Jubilee celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II over, realisation looms large that the end of her reign is near. “It is actually a very perilous time for the monarchy,” says Brown, in a Zoom interview. “Seventy years, she has been there. Now we are at a moment when things are very fragile, but we will not have her to keep calm and carry on.”
Coming 15 years after her Diana Chronicles, a sensitive portrayal of the beloved princess, The Palace Papers is deeply researched and filled with delicious anecdotes. Brown is observant, wry and riveting. She breaks new ground even in a scandal that has littered papers across the world. “The Oprah interview [with Prince Harry's wife, Meghan Markle] made it very hard to patch things up with his family,” says Brown.
With a $20-million tell-all memoir by Harry on the cards, there is more hurt in store for the family. “I don't see how the family can really deal with yet another round of toxic revelations from Harry... They are very anxious about it,” says Brown.
Brown's story of the family is insightful. She paints them as real, relatable and human. “I'm told that many of them did expect Harry to bail out of the royal family,” says Brown. “They knew he was fragile. But nobody thought that he would go off and live a life of a celebrity, a sort of instagrammer. ”
“The queen,” says Brown, "presided over the Megxit.” In one of the most telling anecdotes—littered like gems across the book—the queen in her Christmas broadcast in 2019 asks for the picture of Prince Harry, Meghan and baby Archie to be removed. “The previous Christmas, a family portrait of Charles, Camilla, the five Cambridges and Harry and Meghan was exhibited at Her Majesty’s elbow,” she writes. “...the Queen told the director of the broadcast that all the displayed photographs were fine except one.”
Brown penetrates the privileged bubble to offer a glimpse of the family with the palaces, tiaras, princes and princesses. The stories are juicy but never salacious, and her portraits show the palace life pageantry-free.
It is also nuanced. There is the fragility of Diana, but also her ability to be manipulative; Prince William's ringside view of his mother's infidelity; Camilla and her loneliness,; and even Charles with his teddy bear. There is something desperately sad, and deeply lonely—offering just a peek at the little boy trapped inside the rather ruddy-faced organic farming advocate, the future king.
There is more than the nostalgia-tinted image of Diana. “I have tried to talk about the impact she had as a mother, on her boys, and how it wasn't all good,” says Brown. “She was a wonderful, beautiful, loving, caring mother. But she also caused them a lot of pain.” The story is much more complicated, as Brown writes. “Time and again, as we have seen, Diana chose to invade her own privacy, often for the capricious reason of making the men in her life jealous.”
In a buffet-array of delicious details, Brown writes about a party in 1980. “Camilla and Charles’s behaviour on the dance floor was overtly demonstrative,” writes Brown. Even Camilla’s parents “were discomforted by such a blatant display of intimacy in front of Camilla’s husband.” Her husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, didn’t flinch. He “opined to a guest, ‘HRH is very fond of my wife. And she appears to be very fond of him'.” Fidelity was never Parker Bowles's strong suit. “I think Charles’s tragedy is that nobody really cares about it,” says Brown. “But it is a great love affair that somehow people don't feel romantic about. He fell in love with Camilla in his early 30s. And he stayed in love. And he is now 75.”
If Charles has waited for years as the future king—“a transitional monarch”—Camilla has spent a lifetime in the shadows to finally be acceptable. “He just wanted to be married to this woman,” says Brown. “And he couldn't. There is something very appealing about the fact that he really wanted to be with this age-appropriate, country-loving, not particularly svelte, certainly not glamorous woman who shared his interests.”
Brown creates a vivid image of Charles with his complaining, his fussiness and his odd ideas of environment—now very much spot on. But it is Camilla who is, in many ways, the heroine of the book. “I became very fond of Camilla, in the course of this book,” she says. “She is humorous, gracious, strong, salty, robust. She just simply gets on with it. I mean, in a way she resembles the queen. She doesn't complain. She doesn't explain.”
The Palace Papers is a tribute to the woman who has been the monarch for a lifetime—the “still-centre of the storm”. “The queen is very tough,” says Brown, who has brought out her toughness as well as her softer side in the book. For instance, her relationship with her mother—they spoke every day—and her sister Margaret.
The Palace Papers is ultimately a love story. The most important decision for the royals is who they choose to marry, writes Brown. There is the love story that was never to be, of Charles and Diana. Then the real love story sans glamorous princess but plenty of romance—Charles and Camilla. The steady marriage of William and Kate—essential for the future of the monarchy. Harry and Meghan, very much a love story of the times lived in a social media bubble. But what started it all was the most enduring love, the queen’s. “It was one of the few times that the queen decided that she wasn't going to listen to anybody,” says Brown. In love with Prince Philip since she was a child, it was only during the pandemic that the two got to live their lives alone, far from the limelight, the longest they ever spent together.
The disapproval of the Queen Mother ran strong. She referred to Prince Philip as 'the Hun' and thought he was “dangerously progressive”. Yet, it was a marriage that was strong. “He was absolutely devoted to serving her to being the consort and the spouse that she required,” says Brown. “He kept her real. And that was the best thing he did for the queen.”
The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil
By Tina Brown
Published by Penguin RandomHouse UK,
Price Rs799; pages 571