When you think of two lads bro-ing it up in the wilderness of the far northern reaches of Scotland, your mind immediately goes to those hulky exemplars of masculinity, King Charles and Prince William, The Prince of Wales.
And that’s where our King and his son have been this week on a man-to-man, chap-only retreat to supposedly bond up a storm and to conduct what sounds like a demi summit with a side order of tartan. Och ai.
Around midweek, the prince reportedly flew to the family’s 50,000-acre Scottish bolthole Balmoral to spend time with his father, the third year in a row that the duo have had one of these informal minibreaks. (How’s the serenity?)
Unlike other the royal family’s usual on-the-books-sit-down meetings managed via private secretaries, these father-and-son confabs are “not diarised with senior staff, but set aside to chat as sovereign and heir,” according to the Telegraph.
Charles and William won’t be wanting for something to talk or have a spare minute to get out that still-in-its-plastic Parchesi set with two thorns poking painfully in the palace’s side and blighting Charles’ reign.
Pain one – the ever more toxic Duke and Duchess of York who are back in the news. This week it was revealed that in 2011 Sarah Ferguson had penned a grovelling email to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein only weeks after having promised she had cut ties with him. In the fawning message she calls him “my dear, dear friend Jeffrey” and says he had “always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and family”.
Seven charities have since dumped the duchess and this email scandal could do what no end of toe-sucking and influence-peddling over the years have done and finally make her fatally malignant.
It was also alleged this week that the Duchess of York, who still has every legal right to use the title, accepted millions of dollars from Epstein even after he was on the sex offenders register. Officially Fergie was given £15,000 ($30,000) from Epstein to help stave off bankruptcy; however biographer Andrew Lownie, whose recent bombshell Entitled chronicled the seamy Yorks, has alleged that the figure was “more like £2 million”.($AUD4 million).
In a case of perfect timing, this latest York/Epstein crisis came when images of Andrew and Fergie front and centre of the royal family were fresh in the news, with the duke and duchess having been allowed to take their place next to King Charles at the Duchess of Kent’s funeral last week, the Yorks looking like a guffawing Cat In the Hat and his cheery missus.
At one point during the sombre event the duke appeared to make a joke to a stony-faced William who seemed to blank his uncle.
Then, after the Fergie/Epstein email was released and every organisation that had let her across their threshold was racing to distance themselves the King did something incomprehensible. Charles is reportedly standing by his brother and former sister-in-law, a beggaring of belief that defies logic and sense and wholly fails the pub sniff test.
On this he and William are said to be painfully split.
William, reportedly, is keenly aware of the damage that the noxious Yorks being plum in the centre of public view is doing to the monarchy.
The Prince of Wales think the duke and duchess “are an embarrassment and will be urging his father to act,” an insider told the Daily Mail this week.
However, His Majesty has other ideas and “doesn’t want to cut ties” with the Yorks, a royal source told the Mail. “Andrew’s friends say that even in private they’ve never heard [Charles] say a bad word about his brother”.
If that’s item one on the Charles/William Scottish minibreak agenda, then a close second would have to be the other troublesome spare, Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex whom the King met with only a couple of ago.
Earlier this month Harry got 54 minutes inside Clarence House and tea with his father, though how much sympathy might have been on offer is unknown. (There was, according to The Daily Beast and The Royalist writer Tom Sykes, chocolate cake.)
It was Charles and Harry’s first face-to-face meeting in the better part of two years and hot on its heels the Mail on Sunday was briefed that “high level talks are underway to gradually bring King Charles and Prince Harry together in a public show of unity”.
Buckingham Palace wasted no time quashing this rose-tinted talk. A royal insider subsequently told the Mail of the briefings, “Whoever is behind them seems to have mistaken a brief tea and a slice of cake for the Treaty of Versailles”.
A royal source told the Sunday Times that the King had no plans to let his son have a go at being half-in, half-out of the monarchy.
Again, on Harry, Charles and William are reportedly divided, the prince’s hardline stance versus the tender-hearted King’s.
It has been repeatedly stressed in a number of well-sourced reports in the UK press that the King still loves his younger son and longs to patch things up while William has essentially deleted his brother’s number and spent painstaking hours cutting his siblings’s face out of childhood snaps.
“It’s no secret that Charles desperately misses [Harry]”, biographer Tina Brown recently wrote in the New York Times. “It’s understandably enraging for William to see his treacherous younger brother, who spent the last five years trashing his family on TV and promoting a back-stabbing, best-selling book, bounding around the British charity circuit, doing a well-received side-dash to Ukraine and upstaging the photo ops of William’s own diligent engagements.”
According to Brown, the King “is tiring of his elder son’s self-righteous intractability in the family feud, and wants to re-embrace Harry — if only he can keep his mouth shut.”
The Duke of Sussex’s recent four-day trip back to the UK seems like it might have just been a taste of what is to come with the Telegraph reporting that the 41-year-old “is determined to rebuild some sort of role in Britain” and “intends to make more regular trips home and may even bring Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet”.
Talk about a tough pill for William to swallow.
Any decisions about how to handle the ongoing, perpetually vexatious and news-making Yorks and Sussexes technically falls to Charles but whatever he decrees will have implications down the track for William when he, one day, gets to the throne.
Their divisions over managing these festering PR-crises are not the only issue afflicting Charles and William, with a recent series of reports suggesting the two men are on the outs.
Earlier this month the highly connected Brown, the former Vanity Fair editor and trans-Atlantic power player, wrote in her Fresh Hell Substack that she had been told, “the king is … currently less irritated with the prodigal Harry than he is with his elder son and heir.”
This is the same line that another incredibly well-sourced royal correspondent, Sykes, has been reporting – that the King and the prince are increasingly at odds.
William reportedly feels his father’s monarchy is far too intent on playing dress ups in velvety robes for events like the 300-year-old Order of Bath ceremony and presiding over a palace still stuck in a sort of fossilised Edwardian pomp. Charles, reportedly is less than amused that his eldest son and heir has prioritised his family life over spending countless days trudging to Yorkshire mill towns to promote domestic nylon production.
The King is 76-years-old and is battling cancer and has done 366 official engagements this year, versus his son’s 109.
And of course there is that complicating factor, the great ‘C’ word.
The palace has largely been trying to maintain a keeping-calm-and-carrying-on-cutting-ribbons approach but Sykes suggests that behind the scenes there is movement afoot. Since the King revealed his diagnosis, Sykes reported, “insiders have quietly accepted that William’s reign has already begun in all but name. That makes every fracture more dangerous. William’s authority grows daily, while Charles’ ebbs away. Aligning against the heir would be folly.”
The Crown pales in soapy comparison to all this current wheeling, dealing, politicking and summiting. Seems like that Parchesi set will stay in its wrapper for another year yet
