There’s another new book coming out about the royal family, this one about all of the legendary shenanigans taking place at Kensington Palace. The book is Kensington Palace: An Intimate Memoir From Queen Mary To Meghan Markle by Tom Quinn. Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon moved there shortly after their wedding and Margaret did extensive renovations to several of the palace apartments. Then Princess Diana and Charles lived there, until they separated and just Diana lived there. The current occupants of Apartment 1 are the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, but for several years, Prince Harry (and then Meghan) lived in Nottingham Cottage, part of the larger KP complex. This is where Tom Quinn’s book takes off – they claim that Meghan was terrible to poor Kate and not only that, Meghan was so awful that Kensington Palace staffers were left with only one option: to disrespect her and call her names behind her back constantly. The Daily Mail was of course eager to excerpt from the book – you can read the full excerpt here. Here’s some of the stuff about the Cambridges & Sussexes:

The Sussexes refused to move in beside Will & Kate? What William and Kate will not have, however, is the company of the couple who should have been their nearest neighbours: Harry and Meghan. The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester had already vacated the next-door apartment, and — as always — it had been expensively refurbished. But living so close to William and Kate was clearly a step too far for Meghan: the apartment remains empty and unused — a taxpayer-funded embarrassment. Nor did Meghan find much solace at Frogmore Cottage in Windsor: once she’d settled in, says a Kensington insider, ‘Meghan realised that living there would be like living in the Russian steppes.’ Indeed, the remoteness of Windsor was the final straw — and the couple are now forging a new life for themselves in North America.

Kate was nice to Meghan when Meghan first came around: ‘Kate is actually one of the nicest royals, and she hasn’t let life in her extremely grand apartment at Kensington go to her head — or at least not too much,’ said a palace insider. ‘She is nice to her staff, in the main, and she was very warm towards Meghan when she arrived. But tensions were bound to arise because Meghan inevitably had to accept that, although she is a duchess, she is not married to the next king. I think she has found that difficult to deal with. And although Harry loved their cottage in the grounds, Meghan was conscious that it was tiny in comparison to the vast apartment complex where Kate and William live.’

Meghan yelled at staff? ‘Being a royal goes to everyone’s head eventually — and after a while, William and Harry would meet without their wives in tow to avoid rows and stony silences.’ But what exactly triggered Harry and Meghan’s move to Windsor? ‘Kate was horrified when Meghan shouted at a member of Kate’s staff — that was definitely the beginning of discussions about leaving Kensington Palace,’ the former servant continues. ‘Like many people not used to dealing with servants, Meghan overdoes the imperiousness; so on the one hand she wants to be like Diana, a people’s princess, and on the other she wants people to stand to attention when she clicks her fingers.’

Jesus, these people: From the viewpoint of many of the palace staff, she was the dominant partner in the marriage. As Harry has said himself: ‘What Meghan wants, Meghan gets’. This cut no ice with the staff who, according to reliable reports, began using rather unflattering nicknames for her within weeks of her arrival: ‘Me-Gain’, the ‘Duchess of Difficult’ and even ‘Di 2’ or ‘Di Lite’.

Meghan was upset that people were racist, basically? Meghan, meanwhile, worried that people would look down on her or treat her differently because she was a divorced, mixed-race American. ‘There are the more reactionary elements in the Royal Family who do look down on her, and she knows it,’ added a Kensington insider. ‘This makes her overreact sometimes — she doesn’t have Kate’s assured way of dealing with people.’

[From The Daily Mail]

Yeah, I always thought it was a “mistake” for Harry and Meghan to move to Frogmore Cottage in Windsor – I thought that they would need a full-time place in London, and I never really understood why they went to Frogmore and made that their “base.” Part of it was their choice, I have no doubt, but I also wonder about the options given to them by the Queen. Were they actually offered the Gloucesters’ old KP apartment or not? What was clear is that both Harry and Meghan wanted to get away from the toxicity of Kensington Palace in particular. And this is why – because the staffers had some kind of Stockholm Syndrome when it came to the Cambridges. Those staffers were so used to witnessing (or being the targets of) William’s screaming tantrums that when Meghan came into the family and she “had ideas” or “wanted to speak to staff,” they had some kind of racist, sexist, anti-American meltdown.

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