Omid Scobie is promoting his novel, Royal Spin, which was coauthored with Robin Benway. I read the book last year and I enjoyed it – it’s a breezy, entertaining read set in a familiar milieu: a royal palace’s ecosystem. The lead character is a fish-out-of-water American who gets hired to do PR for the British royal family. Hijinks ensue, including having to spin one royal woman’s racism, and trying to soft-launch a handsome duke as a working royal. The American also has to deal with stuffy British people, her own family drama, a recent breakup and a lot more. Well, British people only heard “American woman” and they decided that Scobie wrote a novel completely based on Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. He did not. He mostly pulled from his own experiences as a royal reporter though, and the book shows a great deal of sympathy for the palace courtiers and the royal press pack. Well, Scobie recently chatted with the Times of London. He talked about the novel, how he got burnt out on royal-reporting, and the mess with his last book, Endgame.

Burning bridges with Endgame: “I didn’t want to be on the royal beat for the rest of my life. Staying on the same story about the same group of people for multiple years… It gets boring…You lose sight of what matters. When you’re covering the same four people every day, you’re really limited on what you can do.”

Being described as Duchess Meghan’s friend and confidant. “I’ll never escape the ‘Meghan’s mouthpiece’ thing,” he says with an eye roll.

‘Royal Spin’ is fiction: “When dealing with a fictional royal family, you’re going to be able to draw some parallels to real royals because there are certain aspects of that life that are just a shared experience,” he says coolly when I point out the similarities. “Obviously there’s a lot of Meghan’s experience as an outsider, but I didn’t want anyone to think this is Meghan. We tried so hard to make sure that there was nothing in common other than, you know, being American.”

The claims that Meghan practically has a direct line to Scobie: “Any reports that suggest that I am their friend, that I have a direct line to them, that I’ve received notes or calls from Meghan, are false,” Scobie says. But he has previously mentioned mutual friends, “less so now because their circle is different, a lot of their team has changed… People that have been by their side for a long time are no longer by their side. My life changed too.”

Scobie feels he deserves more credit for his work. “I hustled and worked so hard when Harry and Meghan were the big story… It’s always frustrated me that I am ‘the mouthpiece’,” he says. He puts much of the frosty reception he received down to snobbery: “If it was someone else, I would tip my hat to them for managing to get so far into the middle of the biggest royal story of this century. But I’ll never get that credit, the narrative has always been different for me. I was the outsider in the royal press pack. I worked for an American magazine, I dressed differently, I was younger.”

The Endgame mess with the “royal racists”: The Dutch translation of Endgame named the King and Princess of Wales as the individuals involved. The Dutch book was swiftly pulled from shelves and thousands of copies were destroyed. Scobie said he had never included the names in the manuscript. Buckingham Palace declined to respond to the book’s claims. It was “a disaster, an absolute nightmare,” he recalls. He “hated everything” about the experience, especially the accusations that the whole thing had been a publicity stunt.

How Endgame was the end of his royal reporter days: Scobie says he knew the book would end his days as a royal reporter, and claims he didn’t receive any dramatic pushback from his Palace sources but was gradually phased out. “Suddenly you stop receiving the palace briefing notes and months later, you open your phone and realise you’ve been removed from the royal press WhatsApp group. There’s some things I removed myself from as well,” he adds. Did it bother him? “You expect all of that stuff to happen. None of the fallout came as a shock.” Death threats from the public did though. “I think people assume that if you criticise the British royal family, you are therefore anti-monarchy,” he says. “Personally I just think that we should live in a world where we can scrutinise publicly funded figures.”

His empathy for the royal communications team: “People that are working in a not very glamorous space, just trying to get the job done and dealing with the biggest stuff. They’ve got so much weight on their shoulders.” However he is critical of their strategies. “The Palace does have a habit of burying its head under the sand until it gets really bad, we’re seeing that right now. One could argue that, perhaps if more was done to stop the Andrew situation from spiraling, we’d be in a different position today.”

How the Sussexes might feel about the Andrew situation: From what he knew of the Sussexes, he “would imagine they’re horrified” by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s links to Jeffrey Epstein. “I would imagine that they’re quite relieved that they are 5,000 miles away. Certainly in the past, there was frustration from both Harry and Meghan that the way they were treated was much worse than the way people spoke and thought about Andrew.”

[From The Times]

I actually think that the British royalists are embarrassing themselves by claiming that Royal Spin is some kind of barely-fictionalized version of Meghan’s story. All they heard was “the character is American” and that’s the only thing they actually know about Meghan, I guess. That’s what Omid is saying too – that’s literally the only similarity. What he says about the Endgame fallout is interesting, that he was phased out of briefings… but I thought he basically quit the rota already, at that point? And the Endgame/royal racist stuff was chaotic and not his fault. I’m still not sure what the hell happened though.

My last thought is about “Staying on the same story about the same group of people for multiple years… It gets boring.” The thing is, it’s not just that “covering the same four people” is boring, it’s having to toe the palace line – that’s what gets tedious. And that’s what royal reporters have to do to protect their access in the Rota WhatsApp. As Scobie has shown though, there’s a lot of money and interest in covering the monarchy’s death rattle.

Photos courtesy of Omid Scobie’s Instagram.