Tina Brown agreed to the New York Times’ feature “The Interview,” which is (you guessed it) just an in-depth interview with someone famous or noteworthy. Tina still has a lot of fans and friends in the media world, even if her last book (The Palace Papers) read like she outsourced much of it to royalist interns. Her Substack, Fresh Hell, makes news when she writes about the British royals (and never about anything else), and she also contributes to the NY Times as a columnist occasionally. By now, I think most Sussex fans understand that Tina is a huge hater, but what’s interesting is when she occasionally tells the truth or spills some genuine tea. Every so often, she admits that, actually, the monarchy needs Prince Harry, and that Harry has more charisma than his brother. But she just brackets those truths with a mountain of ragebait bullsh-t. Speaking of, she spoke about the Sussexes and the left-behinds in this interview. Some highlights:

Whether Harry & Meghan have “anything to offer” the world anymore: “It’s very sad what’s happened to them. I have never seen anybody in professional life make as many mistakes as Meghan has, and unfortunately Harry is not the brightest bulb, either. He thought that Meghan would be his guide in the big wide world beyond Buckingham Palace, and it turns out that Meghan makes one terrible professional decision after another. And now they’re pariahs everywhere, it seems, which is a very difficult situation for them because America was supposed to be the place that paid the bills.”

Harry should go back to England: “What is sad is that Harry’s very good at being a prince. He’s charming, he’s upbeat, he’s attractive, he makes people happy when he walks into a room, he’s very good with young people. You could send him around the world and he’s always going to be welcomed and appealing. And I think he has realized too late that he was born to be a prince. And now he’s essentially just some guy doing P.R. gigs while Meghan tries out her latest cooking idea or whatever. It looks more and more as if Harry’s best decision would be to find a way to come back to England. I’d like to see a way for him to make amends with his family, but it gets harder and harder as the years go by. I think that William is going to be the decider of that, and I think William has a very tough view of the whole situation, which is that the betrayal of Harry is not something that can be remedied.

The most odious person in the media right now: “Oh, God, so many. I’m so disappointed in Jeff Bezos. I saw him as a big savior of The Washington Post, and it seems like he’s just totally flipped. Tucker Carlson really mystifies me. He worked for me at Talk Magazine.

QEII enabled Andrew Mountbatten Windsor: “The fact is that she has quite a lot to answer for with Andrew, is the truth. Because the Queen enabled Andrew in a really terrible way. He was her favorite. She protected him and mummy was his only client, essentially. She was the one who protected him so, unfortunately, it made him worse…he Queen was there for 70 years, right? The hagiography around the Queen is intense, you know? I mean, you’re not allowed to ever criticize the queen.”

Scooter King is dying to clean house: “I think he’s just dying to clean house, actually. Some of the palaces probably have to be turned over to the public. I mean, how much over housing do you need in that family?”

[From The NY Times and The Daily Beast]

Even though they don’t care for each other, it feels like Tina Brown and Graydon Carter are reading from the same talking points about the Sussexes, and they’re both equally furious that they can’t set the narratives about Harry and Meghan. Tina is especially desperate to portray H&M as unsuccessful, broke, careening from one career to the next, and in desperate need of royal management. I always have to sort of step back and ask myself: is this really how other people see the Sussexes? Because from where I sit, it feels like they’ve got a lot of people rooting for them, they have powerful friends and allies and they’ve done a good job at figuring out their post-UK lives. Has it been all sunshine & roses? Of course not, but Brown’s continuous rants about how they’re doing everything wrong just sound so… out of touch? Delusional, even.

As for what she says about QEII… lmao. I mean, she’s right, but what she’s saying is also beneficial to King Charles, who has been trying to blame his mother for Andrew for years. Charles acts as if he didn’t spend the first three years of HIS reign trying to help Andrew and cover up his crimes.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.