Royal biographer Robert Hardman has a new book out this month called The Making of a King: King Charles III and the Modern Monarchy. If you’ve seen the rash of older royal stories being retold with some twists, that’s why – Hardman’s book is being excerpted and hyped by the Mail, People Magazine, the Telegraph and other outlets. What I’ve seen from it is a whole lotta old news, especially the stuff about Queen Elizabeth II’s death and everything that happened in those hours and days in September 2022. Still, I guess people want to talk about *why* Kate didn’t go to Balmoral on QEII’s final day, or how Prince Harry and his father argued on the phone because Charles called Harry specifically to tell him that Balmoral was for whites only.

On the day QEII passed away, Kate had decided herself to remain at Adelaide Cottage in Windsor with her three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. They were starting their new school, Lambrook, on September 8 and the Duchess of Cambridge she felt they needed one parent with them. Her husband, Prince William, was understandably racing up to Scotland to see his grandmother with the then Earl and Countess of Wessex and Duke of York.

‘It was by luck rather than judgement, but it made it a lot easier to tell Harry that he was coming alone,’ a royal aide says. The book also notes that, ‘like the late Duke of Edinburgh, she [Queen Elizabeth] did not like a queue of family well-wishers flocking to her bedside when ill’.

Prince Harry was in the UK with his wife Meghan when his father personally called him to break the news her health on was failing on September 8. In his memoir, Spare, he claims he then texted his elder brother to ask about travel arrangements but William didn’t reply.

‘Clearly, Prince William did not regard this as the appropriate moment for the intensely difficult conversation he needed to have with his brother,’ Daily Mail royal expert Robert Hardman writes dryly. There was wariness, he says, about Harry’s forthcoming biography and many in the family were still sore over the Sussexes’ ‘reckless betrayal’ as regards their Oprah Winfrey interview.

‘Some of the family were probably ready to give him a piece of their mind,’ Hardman quotes a source saying. In normal circumstances senior royals wouldn’t even discuss such logistics themselves. That would be left to their staff. Kensington Palace say Harry’s team – ‘the Sussex camp’ – ‘had all the numbers’ but no such call came.

Charles called Harry again. It is in this call, the prince later claimed, he was told to come without Meghan.

‘We can easily image the dread with which the [then] Prince of Wales approached that call. The Sussexes’ capacity for taking offence was well known and as everyone was conscious that any conversation could end up in the public domain – as, indeed, this one did three months later,’ Hardman says dryly. Harry raged at his father over Meghan, he later admitted, describing him in Spare as ‘nonsensical and disrespectful’.

‘I wasn’t having it. Don’t ever speak about my wife that way,’ he wrote. But Charles explained that he didn’t want lots of people in the house and, besides, Harry’s sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge wasn’t coming either. ‘Then that’s all you needed to say,’ the prince wrote, apparently mollified by this.

But what he didn’t know, Hardman reveals, is that the king hadn’t asked Kate to stay away at all. ‘She had certainly not been asked to stay away,’ he writes. ‘Rather, it was the start of a new term at a new school for George, Charlotte and Louis, and she had decided that one parent should be with them on such an important day.’

Harry also claimed in Spare that no-one that told him his grandmother had died and that he had to learn the news from a BBC breaking news alert on his phone as he touched down in Scotland that evening on a commercial flight. ‘Not exactly,’ write Hardman. ‘A member of Palace staff says that the King had been urgently trying to make contact with his younger son. ‘There were repeated attempts to get through to him but no calls were going through because Harry was airborne,’ says the official.

[From The Daily Mail]

Actually, in the hours after QEII passed, Kensington Palace openly briefed the Mail that Kate had decided to not fly to Balmoral because she “instinctively knew this was an occasion for the Queen’s blood family.” It was explicitly a dig at Meghan, that Meghan “invited herself” to Balmoral, and that everyone in the royal family was apparently incandescent with rage at the very idea that Harry would want his wife with him on a difficult and sad day. I always said that Kate’s excuse should have been simple – it was the first day of school, of course she wanted to be with her children. But that wasn’t what the royal aides said at the time, as they made everything about how openly they were punishing and snubbing the Sussexes and how Kate was better than Meghan. The rest of it… Hardman is blocked because Harry (correctly) told his side of things in Spare, so Hardman can’t blatantly lie about what was said and done to Harry. Instead, Hardman is just putting a royalist spin on things, like of course William and Charles couldn’t be expected to put aside their differences with Harry for a couple of hours on the day QEII died.

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