Here we go again. Three years after the fawning Finding Freedom about Harry and Meghan, along comes Omid Scobie with more royal guff. Endgame is ostensibly about the whole royal family. From what I can gather, though, the Sussex circus is back in book form, and the Montecito worldwide privacy tour, lampooned in South Park, is in headlong pursuit of a quiet life once again.
Sit down when I tell you this, but did you know that the royal family are beastly and doomed? Are you as astonished as I am that Harry and Meghan emerge glowing with goodness, like extras from a Ready Brek ad? How lovely to know that Meghan doesn’t want to set foot in England again, not because she might be booed, or bored, or rained on, although those are all legitimate concerns, but because she doesn’t want to get caught up in the soap opera of the royal family, which is quite something coming from someone who made their name as an actress in a soap opera.
It’s worth recalling here that Scobie and the Sussexes routinely deny that they’re in cahoots, until they are compelled to admit the opposite in court. During one of their interminable bouts of litigation it transpired that Meghan wrote briefing notes for an aide who was meeting Scobie while he was writing Finding Freedom. Harry discussed the importance of, on the one hand, making sure Scobie knew their innermost thoughts, and on the other not telling him themselves.
It’s the briefing equivalent of “look, no hands!”. And I’m almost certain, from memory, that Scobie was one of very few close friends and aides who gathered at Buckingham Palace to wish Meghan farewell after her last turn as a working royal on Commonwealth Day in 2020. But to be clear, he barely knows them. He has only concluded that they are wonderful and everyone else is horrid after careful, impartial examination of their notes. Sorry, his notes.
In Endgame we learn, for the umpteenth time, that William has a temper and might not always see eye to eye with Charles. Courtiers practise dark arts and try to spin the media to make their “principal” look good. Sources close to Harry wang on yet again about how unfair it is that the News of the World exposed his drug-taking 20 years ago. We are told that William wasn’t mad about Meghan from the start, even though everything since kind of proves his point.
Meghan wrote briefing notes for an aide who was meeting Scobie while he was writing Finding Freedom.
The subtitle of the book could be Kate Gets a Kicking. According to Meghan, sorry, my mistake, Scobie, Kate spent more time talking about Meghan than to her, and is terrified of doing anything except smiling for photographers. This is an odd charge to level at someone whose job is to smile for photographers. Apparently we — you? Me? Him over there? — “infantilise” Kate and she is “cold” to people she doesn’t like, and I expect in California they’re warm and friendly to people they don’t like.
The general gist seems to be, still, however many long years after Megxit, that everyone in the royal family was jealous of H&M’s popularity before they embarked on a master class in how to squander it. Charles is dissed for not mending fences after Megxit and Oprah, but what was the man to do? He’d been trashed on global TV. Scobie concludes that this means Charles won’t be able to handle constitutional crises, an intellectual leap that I am confident makes perfect sense in California.
We could test Scobie’s partialities with a quick quiz: who in the royal family is he writing about when he talks about “deceptions, malice and defensive posturing”? Harry and Meghan, right? Wrong. Everyone else. Or: “I saw just how far they would go to save their own skin.” H&M? Wrong! Everyone else. “I’ve witnessed the human damage done because of it”? Poor, poor H&M.
We are told that William wasn’t mad about Meghan from the start.
We revisit the fractious run-up to the Sussex wedding, when Meghan was just too damn lovely and amenable for her own good. We dwell fondly on how H&M are uniquely normal and wonderful in doing the school run themselves, something William and Kate might like to ponder when they do the school run tomorrow. Scobie writes disapprovingly about how Kate has “successfully sublimated her authentic self, becoming an enigma to the public and perhaps even herself”, even though that could be a glowing description of Queen Elizabeth.
Speaking of the Queen, her death wasn’t a family issue, or a national issue, or even a constitutional issue. It was all about Harry. My heart would bleed for him having to charter his own private jet at such a distressing time, were it not for the fact that chartering private jets is one of Harry’s great strengths. I don’t believe for a moment that Charles had “tearful”, sleepless nights worrying about Prince Andrew’s mental health, not least because I doubt Prince Andrew ever suffered from anything more than an excess of self-pity. Scobie almost has a point about the monarchy being in trouble if young people aren’t interested in it, but the thing about young people is that they tend to grow up.
Having said all of which, remember the Duchess Difficult jibes levelled at Meghan? The stories about high staff turnover during her blink-and-you-miss-it tenure in the royal family? Apparently, Kate has quietly gone through five private secretaries in six years. And remember Harry’s accusations of unconscious bias and William’s “we are very much not a racist family”? Well, when Will and Kate welcomed the Obamas to Kensington Palace there was an oil painting on the drawing room wall called The Negro Page. Wowzers. Someone plonked a lamp and a plant pot in front of it and the photo the next day was of the president and First Lady meeting a toddler Prince George in his dressing gown. Endgame? I doubt it. I think the royal family will be with us for a while yet. And I think the residents of Montecito who style their children prince and princess are banking on it.
Hilary Rose is a longtime columnist and features writer at The Times of London