We were told, around September 23, that Prince William had quietly traveled to Scotland to spend some time one-on-one with his father. The briefings felt like they were coming from Kensington Palace, in an attempt to make it sound like William and King Charles are perfectly aligned and super-close, especially after William spent weeks screaming, crying and throwing up over Charles’s brief meeting with Prince Harry. Well, the storyline fell apart quickly, as it was revealed that William had actually gone up to Balmoral for a shooting party with some friends, and he had barely spoken to his father, who was staying at Birkhall at the time. Tom Sykes revealed as much in his Royalist Substack, and other outlets eventually followed suit. Well, Sykes is taking a victory lap over his reporting, and he’s spilling some interesting behind-the-scenes tea.
Readers of this Substack have known since last week that Prince William’s visit to Scotland, pitched by the palace as an intensive strategy retreat with the king, was nothing of the sort. In fact, as I revealed on The Royalist, the Prince of Wales didn’t even stay at his father’s home, Birkhall, instead being lodged at Balmoral, and spent far more time shooting grouse with his friends on the moors of Balmoral than he did hunkered down with his dad.
This weekend, the London Times confirmed a crucial part of my story. In an article about the Eugene Levy interview on AppleTV+, the paper noted, “Last month William travelled to Scotland without his wife and children to visit the King and catch up with friends, staying at Balmoral while Charles was at Birkhall.”
The palace has been aggressively trying to discredit my detailed and accurate reporting, which reveals significant differences of opinion and tensions between Prince William and his father in recent weeks.
This follows a spat I had with the king’s communications secretary, Tobyn Andreae, after describing King Charles’ cancer as “incurable.” Andreae objected to this on grounds of taste, not accuracy, and kicked me out of the palace’s WhatsApp group (it had long since degenerated into naked propaganda, so it was not a huge loss). I believe I was used as an example to threaten other journalists not to report on “demise planning” for the King’s death (predictably, given the craven British press’s access-at-any-price attitude, this has been entirely effective. You won’t read a sausage about it anywhere else.)
The king’s staff are, of course, entitled to manage the media however they like, but my sources are not and have never been, by and large, press officers. I’m a few years older than William, but I went to Eton and know many of the people and their wider families who William and Harry went to school with. Tobyn should be well aware of this, as he went there too. It is through these contacts, not palace flunkies, that I put together my work, including my account of the conflicts between Charles and William. These include their profound disagreement on fundamental policy issues, their diametrically opposite attitudes to pomp and ceremony, a variance of opinion on the importance of attending Aston Villa games, and William’s despair over his father’s cataclysmically awful handling of the Prince Andrew affair—and his concerns that his father was going to indulge in the same weakness, as he sees it, towards Harry….
By choosing to “punish” me by no longer communicating with me, the palace scored a spectacular own goal by losing any means to even try to influence me, just as I was about to launch into this major story.
Instead, as far as I can tell, they went around briefing other newspapers; the story I had been faithfully reporting was complete nonsense, William and Charles are so close you couldn’t fit a cigarette paper between them and then, to prove it all, they leaked that William was headed to Scotland for a three day summit with his father, at which father and son would bond over brave ideas for the future (and PTSD flashbacks to the Way Ahead Group be damned).
I love a royal process story, actually. I love knowing how the royal-reporting sausage is made, because we can see the sad, bland royalist propaganda sausages everywhere. The product of the palace-rota WhatsApp, the palace talking points sent out to their most loyal stenographers, the enforcement of the palace’s party line. What’s interesting is that the Times went out of their way to confirm Sykes’ reporting on Charles and William, that they were not having a sit-down summit whatsoever. It’s also interesting that Sykes was kicked out of the rota WhatsApp, and that his sources are seemingly all Etonians… with more connections to William, more than anyone else.
Photos and screengrabs courtesy of AppleTV+.
