Lovely to see you!
Harry and Meghan look set to come face to face with William and Kate at the national Remembrance Day service for veterans next Sunday.
It will be the first meeting of the feuding four since Meghan and Harry chucked a bomb into royal relations by admitting to a rift with the Cambridges in an ITV documentary, and then following it up with an extraordinary briefing to CNN in which an adviser claimed they had “single-handedly” modernized the monarchy.
The comments were initially attributed to a “senior royal source,” but this was changed 90 minutes later to “a source.”
Harry and Meghan’s PR supremo Sara Latham has denied being the source, but many senior royal journalists continue to suspect she is.
The Queen herself has now got involved, with courtiers telling the Mail on Sunday: “There’s enough experience here, despite what was said, to know that people who jump in with comments from the sanctity of being unnamed and unidentifiable might think they are helping. But the family is clear that if there are issues to be discussed they will be discussed behind closed doors.”
Ahead of next week’s joyous reunion, The Sun quotes a source saying: “Palace staff are keen to ensure that the family come together to pay their respects and that the focus is on the brave souls who lost their lives for their country.
“Remembrance Day is an especially poignant event for all of the members of the royal family, but especially for Prince Harry who served in Afghanistan.
“There is a general sense of hope that this day will put things in perspective and allow senior family members time to reflect on what the important things in life really are.”
Translation: perhaps the sombre austerity of the occasion means they can resist the temptation for a smack-down row in Westminster Abbey.
Slender evidence
Prince Andrew, his friends have been keen to tell the media, has “chubby fingers” and have used this questionable piece of physiological evidence to cast doubt on the authenticity of photographs showing the prince with his arm around Epstein trafficking victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre, taken in his friend Ghislaine Maxwell’s London mews house.
Although the FBI have apparently accepted the image as genuine, Andrew’s team continue to try to show, via “forensic analysis” (by which we assume they mean a bloke with a magnifying glass) that the picture is fake.
Now, according to The Sunday Times, friends of Andrew have also ordered investigations into the photograph of him and Epstein strolling through Central Park in 2010 that was published on the front page of the New York Post with the headline, “The Prince and the Pervert.” Publication of the photograph set in motion a train of events that led to Andrew being relieved of his duties as British trade ambassador.
Andrew’s suspicion, according to The Sunday Times, is that Epstein, who committed suicide in a New York prison cell in August as he awaited trial on new sex trafficking charges, orchestrated the picture.
A human described by The Sunday Times as “one of Andrew’s closest associates” told the paper that they suspected Epstein had hired a photographer to capture the stroll to boost his image, adding: “The protection team never saw a photo being taken. The only way that it could have been taken is from a height. It is taken from an apartment looking down on the park. They were waiting. It was pre-planned. Only Epstein knew where they were going to walk. The duke had no idea where he was going.”
That Epstein had a photographer waiting at a window seems far from improbable, and the image is oddly crystal clear.
But what is truly mystifying is why Andrew’s people think this matters.
Are we expected to feel sorry for Andrew? Surely Andrew, who lived high on the hog on Epstein’s dollar, is not trying to claim he is a victim of Epstein too?
Dress up
The Queen’s trusted dressmaker Angela Kelly (whose nickname AK47 says it all) is publishing a book full “charming anecdotes” about her life working for the Queen next week.
Even though it has been fully authorized and vetted, it promises to be a fascinating read.
Of particular interest to betting types will be the complicated parlor game Kelly and Her Majesty engage in on the eve of Royal Ascot to make sure no information about the color of her dress leaks out.
This game, according to The Telegraph, includes leaving three hats of different colors outside her rooms as decoys in case avaricious workmen decide to take advantage of their position to lay a bet.
Royal fashion watch
After a week of headlines that span ever more out of control, on Friday, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sought to re-establish a tone of business-as-usual at a roundtable discussion on gender equality with the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust and One Young World at Windsor Castle. Harry wore a beautiful blue suit, and Meghan revealed how to power dress and color block at the same time in a red sweater with lambskin skirt (by Hugo Boss) and matching pumps.
This week in royal history
If you have watched The Crown, you know this week’s entry all too well—painfully so. On October 31, 1955, Princess Margaret announced that she would not marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.
They were both in love, but Townsend was a divorcee and, at the time, divorcees could not remarry within the Church of England if their former spouse was alive. Plus, as monarch, the queen was, and is, the head of the Church of England. The relationship ended, and—as The Crown sketched so well (with Vanessa Kirby’s amazing performance)—Margaret’s journey to the wild side began in earnest.
Helena Bonham Carter makes her debut as Margaret in season three of the show, set to debut on Netflix on November 17.
Unanswered questions
After the dramas of the last week, in the wake of that explosive ITV documentary, what will Harry and Meghan do now? And will the various palace briefings and counter-briefings cease? Can the Royal Family just get along?
