As part of the advance promotion for Finding Freedom, the new book about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, excerpts were released to the Sunday Times and the Times in the UK last weekend and in the United States, PEOPLE Magazine is the American outlet chosen to help market the book in its new issue.
As I’ve been saying all week, the difference in the coverage has been a story in and of itself. Presumably the British and the American promotional media partners were given access to the same content and for some reason, the British media missed out on so much tea! I wrote yesterday about Prince Harry’s texts to Meghan and his use of emojis and how Meghan’s “M&H” necklace became a point of contention with Kensington Palace courtiers. And also PEOPLE’s tantalising drop that it was the Queen’s personal dresser, Angela Kelly, who got involved in some pre-wedding drama. Now we have more details.
You’ll recall, following the wedding, around the time Robert Jobson published his biography of Prince Charles to celebrate his 70th birthday, ahem, which his when all this royal in-fighting came to the surface, there was all kinds of rumouring about Meghan’s wedding tiara and Harry’s alleged demands that “What Meghan wants, Meghan gets!” At the time, it was suggested that Harry had a fit because the Queen refused Meghan the tiara of her choice and that Harry and Meghan were out here behaving like groomzilla and bridezilla while all the other people in the royal households were totally innocent. Finding Freedom, however, is claiming that the Queen wasn’t necessarily part of this at all. It was instead Angela Kelly who evidently clashed with Prince Harry. Per PEOPLE:
“Among the behind-the-scenes insights in the book is Harry's frustration in dealing with the Queen's longtime dresser, Angela Kelly. Scobie and Durand write that Harry felt Kelly was dragging her feet in helping Meghan obtain access to her chosen tiara for a hair trial in advance of the big day on May 19, 2018.”
Angela Kelly is always around, and her intimate access to the Queen puts her in situations where she is privy to so much information. Not only that, since her job is to manage the Queen’s wardrobe, she’s often alone with the Queen or at least in the Queen’s most private quarters, so you can imagine, if she wanted to whisper some sh-t, well, she has plenty of opportunity to do. And the whispering can go in multiple directions. How far do those whispers travel? Who does she whisper to and with?
It has already been established that Harry and Meghan stopped trusting the viper courtiers at the palaces because they kept getting sold out, with personal information and private decisions being leaked to the British tabloids, often the very tabloids they’re suing. The best example of this is how The Sun managed to report that Harry and Meghan were moving to Canada before all that was even official. That could only have come from deep inside the royal institution. So there were backstabbers up and down the halls of the castle with grudges to keep and ulterior motives to advance. Not surprisingly, the British media hasn’t given that part of the story as much attention as it should. Conveniently, after reviewing the excerpts from Finding Freedom, this detail about Angela Kelly did NOT make it into the British media’s coverage of the book. It’s only now that PEOPLE Magazine is putting it out there that they’re talking about and twisting it. But what’s obvious is that there was clearly more to the story than initially reported and even if all parties played a part in the tiara skirmish, we now have additional context that can provide further insight not just into what happened with the tiara but how things work behind the palace gates – the court can be a complicated, nasty place, as various stakeholders become rivals, take sides, and pit certain members against each other. It’s not like we didn’t know this from history, from The Crown, even, and why would it be any different now? They may eat at the finest tables and demand the best service but their personal politics are as dirty as they come. This is an aristocrat soap opera wrapped inside a rom-com. Or the other way around?
