Larry Bernstein
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, finance, politics, and sports.
The today’s topic is Prince Harry - the Spare.
Our speaker is Tina Brown who will discuss her new book The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor – The Truth and the Turmoil. Tina is the former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Tina has written several other books including the Diana Chronicles as well as The Vanity Fair Diaries.
Tina will explain why the public is so fascinated with the Royal Family, the continuing deterioration of Prince Harry’s relationship with his brother William, the next in line to be king. Why Harry decided to give up his royal responsibilities. And Tina will explain why she believes that the monarchy will survive and prosper. There is much to cover so buckle up.
I make this podcast to learn, and I offer it free of charge. If you enjoy today’s podcast, please subscribe from our website for weekly emails so that you can continue to enjoy this content.
Let’s begin.
Tina Brown
Topic: The Royal Family and Prince Harry
Bio: Author and former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair
Book: The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor – The Truth and the Turmoil is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Why did you write your book The Palace Papers about the Royal family?
Because the monarchy was at an absolute pivot point. When I started writing this book in 2020, Queen Elizabeth II, who'd been on the throne for 70 years, was approaching her platinum jubilee. We all realized it was her last jubilee. It was a valedictory to her reign. We're about to enter the transition into the new reign of Charles II. Yet, it also marked 25 years since the death of Princess Diana, who I wrote a biography about in 2007. So, it seemed an incredibly great moment to examine what had happened in that 25 years when the scorched earth of the Diana dramas had razed the monarchy and left it spinning and bleeding after her death.
How they managed to regroup, to get their mojo back and reestablish the monarchy largely due to the efforts of Elizabeth II. Everything they went through to win acceptance for Camilla, who at that time was loathed after the death of Diana. Then the rise of William and Kate and Harry, and ending with the great drama of the death of the Queen. So, it was an extraordinary canvas for me to paint my observations, research historical thoughts, all added up to The Palace Papers.
Larry Bernstein:
Your book is a spectacular page turner. You are an incredible writer with a very sharp pen. Tell me about your writing style and your use of literary allusions. It is fantastic.
Tina Brown:
Thank you. I was a writer before I became an editor. I had my own magazine at 25, I was writing quite widely and had got something of a reputation as a young journalist. When I took on editing, it was like a huge lacuna that went on for about 30 years, <laugh>. I became less known as a writer, but it's always been my deepest love. I've written The Diana Chronicles. I wrote the Vanity Fair Diaries, which was the diary I kept during my time as editor of Vanity Fair, which was very well received.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you prefer to write books or long articles? I mean you were the leading editor of the long article format at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.
Tina Brown:
I do find it a very absorbing thing to take refuge in the pages of something that engages you so completely. It's the only media you control completely anymore. Media today is so bifurcated, so shattered, so unrewarding in many ways, <laugh>, that actually being a writer means you control every bit of the process. From the moment you sit down to the moment you ship it out, it's your project. Even though you are then at the lap of the gods with the actual publishing experience.
Larry Bernstein:
I watched Charles and Diana's Royal Wedding live and there are estimates that over a billion people watched the Queen’s funeral. Why is the world so drawn to the British Monarchy?
Tina Brown:
It's the most amazing, ongoing, deep passion romance novel that you could possibly imagine, because you have the fascinating tension between a thousand-year-old institution with all of its resonances of splendor and policies, and Henry VIII and his wives, and the actual institution itself is so rich in historical illusion and reference. Inside that cage of monarchy, you have these very fallible human beings who are trying to live inside it. And in today's multimedia world that is even more of a challenge for these poor, frail mortals than it ever was in the past. The miseries of previous monarchs were largely unknown by the public. It really wasn't until the era of Edward VIII, who abdicated for Mrs. Simpson, that you began to see these personal dramas and human miseries come out into the public sphere. And then became irresistible for the media consumer.
Larry Bernstein:
I read Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, and I thought it was superb. I sympathized with Harry when he described his Truman Show existence, except that he was aware that he was being watched.
Tina Brown:
I feel very sympathetic to Harry also. In fact, in The Palace Papers, I do a whole chapter called Snoopers about the fact that he was living in the Truman show. The press baited and harassed and hacked and stalked. All the terrible things that they did to the poor adolescent Harry and his girlfriends, driving one girlfriend after another away from the sheer stress of it all. You do ask yourself, is this cage too hard to live in, in the modern world? It was different in eras past, before the media treated them like creatures in a zoo. The Queen began her reign in a great media deference.
Larry Bernstein:
How was Queen Elizabeth and her husband treated by the press when she became the monarch?
Tina Brown:
Their lives were pretty private on the whole. Philip, her husband, had affairs, but nobody was going to write about them. Today they would be written about it. So, the pressure on them is way more intense than it ever was in the past. Obviously, it was pretty harsh for the women, for queens, because they had no rights, but that was the eras that they lived in. But living inside that cage, with the media scrutiny 24/7 is a pretty unbearable challenge. William and Kate, they're really quite extraordinary.
They've been willing to take it on. And it's interesting whether their children will. If Prince Georgie says, “you know what? I'm out, I'm not going to do it. I want to go and live in Australia <laugh>, where your face is no longer going to be on the bank notes.” And that the other two say the same, it could all end. Because it is a bit like taking holy orders, essentially.
Larry Bernstein:
In the United States the President is both the Head of State and Head of Government, but not in the UK the Head of State is the Monarch, and the Head of Government is the Prime Minister. What do you make of the occupational split?
Tina Brown:
I think people feel more and more that there is a benefit. Would people in England have preferred a President Boris? President Rishi? I don't think so. The monarchy has proved because of its deep roots in the country's history, it represents unity where people from every party, ethnicity, persuasion, will unite under that flag. It's proved very potent. As we saw in the Jubilee and the Queen's funeral, the incredible crowds that came out for the Queen's Jubilee, there is a no politician in the world that could have commanded a voluntary crowd like that. Not one that had been a dictator ordering them to come.
This was a voluntary joy of the British nation expressing national unity. That was expressed by their feelings for the monarchy. When the Queen died, the lines stretched for five miles. What I thought was astonishing and touching about those lines, they were every conceivable kind of person. Some people say, “oh, well, of course it was all just sort of white middle-aged people.” No, it wasn't. The lines for the Queen's funeral were multiethnic, every age group, young families, incredible show of love and loyalty.
The Monarchy's popular in the UK. It doesn't show signs of fraying at all. The outrages towards Harry has been very big in the UK. They're considered beyond the pale traitors <laugh> who have no right to trash the institution or the family in the way that they have.
Larry Bernstein:
One of my favorite chapters from your book was about Queen Elizabeth’s trip to Ireland when she apologized for England’s sins when Ireland was a colony. Do you think that we should expect more apology tours from the royals?
Tina Brown:
Well, the Queen was never going to really do that. She saw that as a political act. She did a very good job in Ireland of acknowledging the errors of the past. She did it very elegantly. She came closest to admitting some of the brutalities that had happened in England's conquest, but that's really going to be Charles's and even more so William's task.
Charles was in the Caribbean where he did talk about the appalling horrors of slavery. It's hard because once people start to really go deep, as they are the ultimate symbol of colonial imperialism was the monarchy.
Larry Bernstein:
Australia recently announced that it will not put Charles on its currency to replace the Queen. This caused a rift between the pro-monarchy and the anti-monarchy politicians there. What do you make of that?
They've decided to put an indigenous person's face on the bank note. That's a very big statement, really, from the Commonwealth realm of Australia. Charles is absolutely expecting to no longer be sovereign of those commonwealth realms that still have a sovereign head. I think he understands that this is a transition and he's going to be essentially okay with that. Whether it happens with grace, dignity and goodwill is an interesting question.
Larry Bernstein:
25 years ago, Australia voted on a referendum to abandon the monarchy and become a republic and surprisingly the monarchy won by a significant 55-45 majority. Do you think that reflected a love for Elizabeth and that maybe their feelings for Charles might be different?
Tina Brown:
I think the reason that they kept the monarchy last time around was that a sheer respect for the queen. The queen was so beloved and so respected that I think nobody really wanted to do anything to jostle that. But, Charles is a different issue, and it gives them a chance to examine why they're doing it. There seems no modern reason in the world why Charles' face should be on their back note. The fact that it's an indigenous person is part of their statement about reconciliation with the past and their own issues of colonial brutalities. I'll be very surprised if Australia and Canada are still part of the sovereign realms five years from now.
Larry Bernstein:
Prince Harry’s memoir Spare is number one on the best sellers list? What do you think of Harry and his new book?
Tina Brown:
The Palace Papers is very sympathetic to Harry. A lot of what he wrote about, I write about it from the third person point of view of his tremendous suffering that he went through from the press scrutiny, from his mother's death, and his feeling of absolute chaos when he left the Army.
When reporting, I found that as a soldier he was very well regarded in the Army. There's no doubt that Harry was an extremely effective and a well-loved officer, and obviously should have stayed in the army. Coming out was the biggest mistake of his life. Unfortunately, it was a mistake that he had to make, because the one thing about Harry is he has courage.
He is a tremendous soldier, he's a great shot. People love him. However, he's not the brightest bulb <laugh> as we know. And to really ascend in the modern military, you have to have more intellectual ability to keep taking those exams and moving to the next stage. He wasn't going to be able to do that at all. He had neither the temperament nor the interest. So, coming out of the Army was inevitable.
Larry Bernstein:
What I found very surprising from Spare was how bad Harry’s relationship was with his brother William. I thought they were incredibly close, but Harry explains that William would not give him the time of day since Diana died. And your description in your book of the brother’s relationship is very different.
Tina Brown:
His book about how his relationship with William had begun to disintegrate out of rivalry, he paints it in a much darker way.
It was obvious that the relationship had gone sour before Meghan came along, but he seems to depict great hostility that's very deep for a long time. And the question is, is he rewriting the past through the prism of therapy and bitterness now, or is it objectively true? I was told by people very close to him that those brothers were enormously close and chose to hang out together all the time for a long time. But I was also told that they started to have fierce rows about jealousy over the fact that William was getting what Harry regarded as the better, juicier, more exciting royal assignments than he was, not surprisingly.
What Harry's writing about is something that the royals couldn't really do much about, which is the cruelty of primogeniture. That cruelty of primogeniture is a story in every aristocratic family in England. I know many aristocratic sons of those families whose elder brother got everything, and they got nothing. Literally. I knew someone whose brother got a stately home and the title and everything, and he's running a bread and breakfast. It's a cruel system. And it's even crueler in the monarchy because the contrast is very sharp between getting all or nothing. Now the nothing that Harry got, you could argue was also a life of great privilege.
But it was a real difference in his mind. The major difference is that Harry really is the more charismatic brother. That's the issue that essentially is at the core of this book. William and Kate are beloved, and they do have their own great glamor, but they don't have the charisma and the star power of Harry and Meghan. A small island <laugh>, is there room for two of you taking the spotlight? It was a very similar problem to the one suffered by George VI when his brother abdicated. Edward VIII then left the British Isles and went to live abroad because Edward had a lot of charisma.
He was much more charming, much more entertaining, had a great EQ with the public. George VI very shy, he had a stammer, he was not attractive. Gradually, the great jealousy took hold–he had to keep Edward in exile because he couldn't be allowed to come back and overshadow. Now, I don't think we're quite in that place with William and Kate. William is very attractive, and people love him, and Kate is a superstar. But what would happen if Harry and Meghan now came back? I mean, how can you keep star power in a bottle? It's difficult. And I can see that that was never going to work. Having all this jostling in one family with limited rewards.
Larry Bernstein:
Harry describes in Spare that William was never there for him. At boarding school at Eton soon after Diana’s death, William does not spend time with him. In preparation for Harry’s wedding to Meghan, William and Kate are both disagreeable. Harry feels he never gets the love and support that he so desires from William. What do you make of that?
Tina Brown:
I'm very surprised to hear that, I never had heard it. During all my reporting of Diana, those two boys were very close. One of the people who was with them for a long time said to me that those two brothers were just so close that no one could break that bond. They were each other's ally. They had each other's back. They were the only two who knew what it was like to be Diana's sons.
This was long before Harry wrote his book. I don't believe that was untrue. Now, obviously, we don’t know what it was like to be inside Harry's skin, but one does wonder whether the kind of the darkness of what followed colored his whole reading of his fraternal relationship. You've only got to look at the videos of them doing their joint interviews early.
They're not actors. There's obviously a real warmth there. There's a wonderful documentary on Diana's anniversary of her death where together they're going through the photo album of their mother and it's filmed and there's a delightful kind of rapport between them. It seems hard to believe that it was as dark and full of resentment as Harry portrays. There's no doubt that it did become dark and full of resentment. And that did start to happen before Meghan came on the scene. It really happened when Harry left the Army and realized that he was spare, and he hadn't seemed to absorb that fact before in its harsh reality. While he was in the Army, William had begun to ascend to be on the guild path to be King.
There's also the problem that the Queen's living so long created quite a lot of problems because you had a pile up of heirs, quite honestly. <laugh>. Charles had a lot of dark times resenting his mother, feeling that he wasn't being given the right assignments. He was desperately keen for his parents to give him more. It seems to be a kind of predicament that these heirs feel inevitably caged, denied what they should have. There's only one spot to be king, and everything accrues to the sovereign, the Queen. It all accrues and everything else, frankly, is leftovers.
Charles had to live with that until just the other day. To be king at 75, he has wanted that job for 50 years. And the Queen was ill for quite a time. When Charles had to step in an open parliament for the Queen, because she was ailing, the crown was put in front of him on a velvet cushion to signify the monarch who was absent. You saw Charles standing there, looking mournfully at this crown. The thought bubble would've been, “when am I going to be allowed?”
There are many who thought the Queen should have stepped aside if not abdicated, and made him the King Regent for the last five years. But she didn't, and she wouldn't. Charles, he's also gone through quite a lot of resentment. He talks about his darling mother, but the fact is that for many years, the relationship was very toxic. There were years when they hardly spoke. So the dynamics of that family are complicated and by no means only Harry has had his difficulties with it.
Larry Bernstein:
I understand that there is only one monarch but there is a lot of work to do. There are new bridges to be opened, people to be honored, military personnel to be promoted, organizations and charities that need love and support. I would think that there is plenty of work in the UK and the commonwealth for the royals.
Tina Brown:
There's no doubt about it. There's a huge amount to do. Charles, who's constantly talked about slimming down the monarchy, I think he better be careful because the Monarchy's looking pretty anorexic without Harry and Andrew, neither of whom were supposed to leave. You've got a shortage of senior players to do these things. Now obviously, the rewards for doing those things are far less for those minor royals. There's no doubt about it. They don't have much cash, and that that's one of their major beefs. It was certainly Harry's beef. One of the things that's completely absent from Spare and from the documentary is by the time he married, they didn't feel there was enough.
They were going to have to live on about 350,000 a year and they were given Frogmore, which was a lovely house. But that wasn't really what Meghan had in mind. The palaces, the castles, the massive royal trips, those are the prerogative of the sovereign. Everybody else just gets the things that sovereign doesn't really want to do. Harry and Meghan were given by the Queen a fantastic assignment.
That was the idea that they were going to travel the world on behalf of the Crown in the Commonwealth. And I that that was very well chosen. Particularly, the only woman of color in the monarchy to be able to be the ambassador to a part of the world where there are so many millions of people of color was actually an inspired patronage. But they didn't feel that it was being rolled out with the kind of stature that they wanted. And they hated the press and felt that the crown was not supporting them. And there was something to be said for that.
Larry Bernstein:
The hacking of the Royals’ phones was simply outrageous.
Tina Brown:
Outrageous. Yeah.
Larry Bernstein:
What were the consequences of that?
Tina Brown:
Well, some of it was quite draconian. Rupert Murdoch had to close the News of the World. So, a whole massive newspaper was closed. News International, Rupert Murdoch’s Media Company, has had to pay between 2 and 3 billion pounds in legal settlements to the phone hacking victims who kept coming out of the woodworks. Literally thousands of people have brought litigation.
It's been a financial disaster for Murdoch's Empire, and it still isn't entirely settled. Harry has not settled nor has Hugh Grant. Harry, I actually rather admire, he's done very well. The palace cautious lawyers advised them not to sue the Mail on Sunday when they published the letter of Meghan to her father, Tom Markle, while begging him to cease and desist his attacks.
Without any permission from the person who wrote it, namely Meghan, they published this letter, and it was a huge violation of her copyright. The Sussexes sued for that and also for privacy, and they got both. That was a big victory for them. One that went against the Palace advice who said, “don't sue. It's more trouble than it's worth.” So, one has to hand it to Harry. He toughed that one out, and he was proven correct. He's quite formidable antagonist when it comes to the press.
Larry Bernstein:
Next topic is educating a prince or princess. Elizabeth was not formally educated but clearly a very bright woman and highly capable as a sovereign. Harry went to a military college Sandhurst to be trained as an officer.
The Royal family used tutors to supplement their education. Rory Stewart who spoke on this podcast What Happens Next told us that he tutored William and Harry.
Tina Brown:
Yeah, he was their teacher.
Larry Bernstein:
Rory is fantastic. I get the sense that there were many wonderful people involved in the prince’s life. Harry had a very unique experiential education that distinguished itself from an academic one and probably fit Harry's persona and skillset. In Spare, Harry comes across as bright, articulate and empathetic. But he's treated as a dope in the press. Who is right?
Tina Brown:
I don't think Harry's a dope at all. I think he has a different kind of intelligence. I think he has emotional intelligence galore, and I think he has a certain intuitive smartness. I don't think he's book smart, but I think he is like his mother. Diana was not book smart either, she left school at 16 and became a nanny and was always considered thick, which is how we used that term in England. But she was also in her own way, incredibly intuitive and brilliant.
I think that Harry's slightly undervalued, frankly, the life experiences that you're talking about. It's interesting you should say that. I think that Charles did a very good job of trying desperately to fill the gap that had been left by his mother.
He came up with some really wonderful male mentors for Harry, who Harry forged enormous bonds with. Tiggy Legge-Bourke was the young woman that Charles brought in from a country squire family, who was their nanny. They adored Tiggy, and she really was a big sister, loving figure to them.
Also, when he reached kind of his teenage years and his whole military career, the hiring of his excellent private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, and Paddy Harverson, who was their communications director, these two guys were really superb. I would argue that the time when the young princes’ lives went best is when these two very smart, very savvy, very kind, media-understanding men were in charge of their careers. Harry talks a lot about how awful the palace is, which I don't doubt, it is the deep state, but it's also full of smart people too, who actually understand how to strategize a royal life.
There was some great help that came to Harry from the Palace. His military career was wonderfully planned for him. He excelled in it, which was great. When Harry came out of the military and said, “I want to start these games for Wounded Warriors, and the Invictus Games,” the Palace then put together the most amazing team to produce the Invictus Games with enormous success. So they were great enablers of Harry's success, as well as it seems destroyers of his personal happiness as he sees it. So it's a more mixed and nuanced picture than he's willing to give in Spare.
Larry Bernstein:
You just mentioned that the elite’s perception of Diana was that she was thick. But in your book, you describe your first meeting with her, and that you were awed by her intelligence and beauty. I suspect that she became the most famous person in the world because of these wonderful qualities.
Tina Brown:
Diana was extraordinary in terms of her absolute ability to understand a room. She had this feeling for people's needs and wants that were so connective in the most wonderful way. When you align it to her extraordinary beauty, and she had a lot of charm and a lovely sense of humor, all of those things together. Being, not educated, in terms of learning, was something that she always regretted. It was the upper-class education of that time treated women as airheads, the fact that this incredibly well-born woman, Diana, would be actually leaving school at 16.
I went to one of those schools myself. I was the only girl in my class who went to college. I went to Oxford, but nobody else did. They all left and immediately, at the age of 17, went to do things like work in an art gallery or cooking in a chalet with upper class people or <laugh> these kind of idiot jobs, which is what was the fate of upper class women until the next generation from her.
Her upper-class education was very similar to everyone she knew actually. But it certainly didn't prepare her for entering the monarchy where she was going to be sat next to the President of France and expected to make conversation. People assume that because she came from such a high pedigree family, that she would somehow be able to cope. She only did cope by being as charming and as beautiful as she was. But she found it absolutely daunting.
Larry Bernstein:
In your book, you describe a meeting where William acts as Diana’s personal advisor at a young age. What do you think of their mutually supportive relationship?
Tina Brown:
William is a very sensitive, mature and decent man. That's what everyone I know who knows William says about him. He went through a lot of tragedy, of course, as Harry did. It was William who was his mother's favorite because Diana was in such an emotional distraught state. She turned a lot to her son, as women who were divorced sometimes make their son almost a surrogate husband. She really made William her confidant. She used to call him my little wise old man. But there was a toll, I'm sure, for William in that too, to listen to his mother's unhappiness a lot.
For William, it was extraordinarily upsetting when she did, for instance, the Martin Bashir interview, cuz he'd been at Eton a year and he was of an age when he knew that these very sophisticated boys all read the media, they all watched it, they were all talking about it. And he had to sit in his headmaster’s study with him and watch this mortifying interview in which his mother talked about her affair with James Hewitt, her riding instructor.
It was traumatic for him to watch all that. Harry was very young at the time, and he didn't watch it until he was older. We've yet to hear anything from William about what he was feeling at this time. I think that William has been very damaged by it all as well. The difference is that William found Kate very early at college, and she became the rock in his life that enabled him to cope.
Larry Bernstein:
In the book, you show a photograph of William observing as Kate walks down the fashion runway while there in college at St. Andrews. You can see William’s facial expression of shock and awe as he observes Kate’s sexy outfit. And in your book, you describe his surprise to be like what Vronsky must have felt when he first saw Anna Karenina’s beauty when she walked next to him at the railway station. That was well done Tina.
Tina Brown:
Thank you.
Larry Bernstein:
Back to the fishbowl. Here is a photograph of William in one of his most intimate moments, caught directly on camera.
Tina Brown:
William has always been good at protecting his privacy. His personality is more contained and he hates the press every bit as much as Harry does. But he's figured out a way to build himself a moat between him and the world. He's done that through Kate and having that family and living in Norfolk and being very private. One of the issues with Diana was that she was outside the Royal Circle. She was mixing in the world of media and cafe society and fashion designers and celebrity, the fun people, if you like.
Those people are not discreet, they talk. William has protected his privacy largely by keeping a very small circle of people, which of course is less interesting. It's not necessarily going to give you the intellectual richness that you get from mixing with the other people, but I can understand why he feels so wary. One of the things he used to do when he was at college was to say things around people he wasn't sure about, waiting to see if it got into the press. He was wary of people who might betray him because frankly everyone did. What he was used to was everyone around his mother always sold them out: butlers, valets and friends.
Larry Bernstein:
And that was compounded by the hacking problem, I imagine, as well.
Tina Brown:
That was what freaked them out, when they realized that things, they were saying to one another were being written about before the person concerned had even picked up the message <laugh>. It was unbelievable. They called in the cops, the private secretary's communication secretary. They found it was a very complicated thread, which look took them right into the heart of Murdoch's newspapers and to Scotland Yard where bribes were being paid by journalists who wanted their information. It was a very seedy situation.
Larry Bernstein:
Next topic is the memoir as an art form. Spare is a fabulous example of it. You wrote your own memoir The Vanity Fair Diaries. What do you think of the memoir?
Tina Brown:
Spare is a very good memoir. I reviewed it for The Guardian, and people were surprised that I gave it a very good review. J.R. Moehringer, his ghost writer, has done a terrific job of both capturing his voice and paring it back to the high intensity moments.
I think that a memoir, you have to have a voice that people trust and sounds like you, which guides the reader through the experience of the writer's life. And you need candor and admission of weaknesses without which it's all fake. How many books have we read about, my God, those terrible business memoirs, which should all just be banned as a form. A huge bonfire should be made of all of them because we don't care and they're never going to admit nothing real. So that genre I think has definitely <laugh> become redundant.
Larry Bernstein:
Agassi's autobiography, Open, was also ghost written by Moehringer and it is a tour de force. Amazing job.
Tina Brown:
Yeah, that is why he was selected for this.
Larry Bernstein:
In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan comments that in the book Spare that Prince Harry complains about the public meddling in his life but then Harry goes out and publishes a best seller that describes his intimate feelings. How do you explain that contradiction a desire for privacy and then writing about personal matters for public consumption?
Tina Brown:
A conflict between what Harry says he wants and what he's actually done. I think that he would say, “look, this is my story for once I'm telling it. I've had to read for the last 20 years or more everybody else's version of what I'm supposed to think and feel, so I'm going to just tell you what I was thinking and feeling and make what you will of it.”
That would be, I'm sure his defense of what he's done. Diana wanted to get her story out too, and her case, she talked to Andrew Morton. I think there must be something about being wrapped in this terrible cotton war cave of monarchy that makes you want to just scream and say who you are.
So, I understand his desire to do so. I do think it's going to lead to exactly the life he doesn't want, because now he's a global celebrity who is just out there to the wolves. He's declared open season on himself, and I cannot see how it'll lead for to a better, more peaceful life, which is what I thought he wanted when he left. I think maybe he's decided that he's never going to achieve that, and this is the way he's going to find himself some solace.
Where I think he's unrealistic is, he's said a number of times in interviews he's had that he wants to reconcile with his family. I think that he is too wrapped up in his own point of view, because he's let loose, all of these bombs and they landed <laugh> on his family.
It's very hard for William to get beyond that. Honestly, he'd have to be an extraordinarily person, almost a kind of Jesus-like figure, to forgive him for that. He was very careful in the book not to unload too much on Charles. There must have been multiple lawyers from the palace all over this book the whole time. In his interviews Harry has said, “there was a lot more about Charles and my brother, but if I'd published that they wouldn't speak to me ever again.” Which was in some ways a bit of a veiled threat, but also gives an indication of those lawyers.
Larry Bernstein:
In your book and in Spare, you both went easy on Camilla. Why is that?
Tina Brown:
I like Camilla. I don't think he did. Harry called her a villain. He called her someone who's left bodies in the street. If you think Meghan Markle has been trashed, it is nothing to what Camilla has been.
Camilla has been so trashed to the point that she signed her letters to Charles, her love letters, “your devoted old bag,” <laugh>, because she's been called an old bag so many times. There was a column saying the columnists would rather sleep with a goat than sleep with Fergie. She universally known as the Duchess of Pork because she’s overweight. The misogyny of the press is beyond belief and it has been terrible for the women. Harry doesn't deal with either, so there's quite a lot left out of Spare. But there are plenty of other books for them all to write or not write. I suspect not, but I wonder whether some of them are sitting there thinking, I wish I could write my book.
Larry Bernstein:
Given the spectacular sales for Spare and the growing public interest, there is going to be enormous sums offered to the other members of the family and their staff.
Tina Brown:
That's the great danger, but I don't think any of the existing members of the family will. I can't see William ever doing that, and I can't see Kate or Camilla, I don't see any of them doing it, but who knows? We don't know what the future holds.
Larry Bernstein:
Meghan seems to be stunned by the job offered to her as the spare’s wife. Some members of the public are angry with her because she voluntarily signed up to be a member of the Royal family and then after not liking the job, denigrates the institution and cuts and runs. Why was she so surprised, unprepared, and unaware of the role that she was signing up for?
Tina Brown:
It's a mystery given that she was 36 and had always studied hard for her roles. I said this in my book review of Spare, I think that they were both essentially partners in magical thinking. Harry didn't lay it out to Meghan, I suspect, how unimportant he was to the monarchy. Meghan looked at him and thought, second son of the king, I'm going to be living in Windsor Castle and having this extraordinary life, like Princess Diana. But Harry's role in the hierarchy was not that. He was number six in line by the time he married Meghan because of the three children of William.
He wasn't going to have the financing, the salary, the house, any of the things that she expected. I think there was a little bit of Harry not wishing to tell her perhaps quite how their life was going to be, and Meghan being completely delusional, essentially, about what it was to be married to the second son of the King.
I think she also didn't understand England, she'd only been there for 10 minutes when she got married. I think she was taken aback, as many Americans are, by the sort of complicity of understatement that is so annoying. The stifled responses and the lack of demonstrativeness, that was absolutely defining of her personality. She felt a lot of rejection. I think that wasn't necessarily personal, but really was about Americans versus upper-class Brits.
Larry Bernstein:
I think the primary reason for Harry and Meghan’s split has to do with the royal’s ban on working for profit. Remember that hot mic scene where Harry is chatting with the President of Disney Bob Iger about working together. The deal is that you must choose between a commercial life or being a public servant as a member of the royal family, and Harry seems oblivious to that. I find Harry’s ignorance of this matter baffling.
Tina Brown:
That in a nutshell is was what it was about, which doesn't really figure in Spare and all the documentaries. The Queen's point was public service means you are not paid. That's the end of it. It's a very hard thing to be half in, half out, any more than it would be for the President of the United States to say, “I'm going to be part-time.” Where you are half the time doing public service as a member of the royal family and the other half leveraging being in the royal family and being paid, it just can't be pulled off.
Even if the Queen and the monarchy had agreed, the press would just kill you. So it wasn't viable. The only way that Harry and Meghan could leave was if they said, “we're completely out. We don't want any official things or patrons or titles. We're going to be private citizens.” And I think there would've been a lot of support for that in the family. Regret and sadness, but a lot of support. Unfortunately, Harry wanted to go on doing all of his patronages, and so did she, and they wanted to go on with the Commonwealth. And they wanted, above all, to have the private protection that goes with being a member of the royal family.
But the government is the entity that pays that private protection not the royals themselves. There's no way that that government would've funded Harry and Meghan to go and live in California and not be in the UK doing their royal work. That was a complete non-starter. It's a kind of puzzling to me that Harry ever thought that could be true. What it seems like he wanted was Charles to step in and pay it instead. But, that was a negotiation his father didn't want to have. And it's very expensive. There's 5 or 6 million a year, to have private protection for the Sussexes in California.
Personally, I think he should have paid it, because I think it would've been far less aggravation than what he's gone through <laugh>. But that's not the way the royals think. They're very unimaginative when it comes to different ways of doing things. And no one would ever accuse the royal family of being generous. It's just not part of their DNA. They have that sort of upper-class tightness with money and cheapness. It's just the way they are.
Larry Bernstein:
I don’t understand why Harry was blindsided by the ban on his commercial enterprise. It seems painfully obvious to me.
Tina Brown:
That's a good question, Larry. It's actually a very good question. As I write in my book, his uncle Prince Edward, 20 years before, had tried to go and have his own movie company and Prince Philip basically said, “look, you're in, or you are out. You can be a filmmaker and do your own thing, but you can't be also a member of the royal family doing public service.” So, it's not like Harry was the first person to suggest it. There's plenty of precedent. Actually, the Palace were busy telling him, “look, these are the options. You could do all the films you like for Netflix, it's just that the money has to go to charity.”
Nobody was stopping them do their own projects. It's just the financial part couldn't be a commercial enterprise, and they wanted to be a commercial enterprise because there was a huge amount of money to be made. Certainly, Meghan felt that this was something that should be leveraged, and they should be able to get these rewards, but it was never going to be compatible with being a member of the royal family.
I think that hasn't been properly explained to people, because the attitude is, why were they so mean about making them go, et cetera? If they wanted make huge entertainment deals with Netflix and Spotify, that was not compatible with being in a life of public service.
Larry Bernstein:
Next topic is new media. I work in investments specializing in the bond business. I produce this podcast, but I am not a professional journalist.
Tina Brown:
You have curiosity, unlike quite a few other people who actually are journalists.
Larry Bernstein:
How did you get to be the editor of the Tatler magazine at such a young age?
Tina Brown:
I was 25, I was given the Tatler magazine in London, a 270-year-old Coffee House magazine of the 18th century that became the society magazine in the twenties. It was on the table of every Downton Abbey at the time. It just fell into disrepair. Gary Bogard bought the magazine and thought he would like to try to turn it into a proper magazine again, because at that point it was like a little shiny sheet with staples through it. He asked every journalist in London to do it, and none of them said yes cuz it was such a ridiculous proposition.
I was 25 and I had been writing a lot of lively stuff after Oxford. Somebody told him about me, and he came to me. I'd never edited anything <laugh>, but I did have a flare for it. My father was a film producer and I think that producing and editing are quite similar activities. It's about wrangling together stories. It's about having a visual sense. It's about persuading people to do things. I did have a very good nose for a story. Taking over Tatler at the age of 25 was a great boon. I mean, <laugh> it took time for it to come together. This is where the Royals have once again, played a role in my career.
The story that really brought us to the top of our game was the rise of Diana Spencer and her romances with Prince Charles. I was 25 and many of my staff were younger, like 23, 22. Diana was only 19 or 20. Some of them knew her. So, we sort of owned the Diana story, Diana was to the Tatler, what OJ Simpson was to CNN, <laugh> We rode the hell out of that baby, we really did. We covered that story so well. I became then the commentator for the story, when American networks wanted someone to talk about Diana, I would inevitably be tapped to do that. So, I ended up covering the wedding for NBC, which was a really great moment. That's how I got my feet under the desk, if you like.
Larry Bernstein:
There's been much fiction written about British tabloids. Did you ever read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop?
Tina Brown:
Of course. Absolutely, Scoop. When I started The Daily Beast, the digital news site in 2008, I called it the Daily Beast after the newspaper in Scoop. That's where that name comes from.
Larry Bernstein:
I found the book incredibly funny and well done.
Tina Brown:
It's hysterical.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you think Scoop gave an accurate portrayal of the British Tabloid from a century ago?
Tina Brown:
Well, that era is very different to now. That was an extremely male sort of misogynistic, wine-saturated harem. Now it's nothing like that. Everybody's working from home. It's all very antiseptic and it's just about cranking out five aggregated pieces a day most of the time. Journalism has lost a lot of its excitement. My husband, when he was editor of the Sunday Times, it was a wildly exciting profession. I still find media very exciting, but, it's certainly much less colorful, rich and risky than it used to be.
Larry Bernstein:
Where do you see the future of media?
Tina Brown:
I'm concerned about this new AI chat bot because if you can use AI to pull together a publishable piece, that is going to be the final blow in the coffin of the middle level journalists. There's very few places for a young journalist to work as it is, which is one of the reasons I began the fellowship in investigative journalism in my husband's name, Harry Evans. Because I can see how desperately they need supporting, but where are these journalists going to work? It's a huge problem. So, I'm very worried about how journalists are going to be able to continue and be paid.
When I started this fellowship, I was incredibly enchanted to receive 120 applicants who were superb. Some of these reporters that sent their material in, they're so good and enterprising and remarkable in what they're writing about. But they're scrabbling by on a few non-profit dollars or self-supporting bootstrapping. And you just think in the past they would've been in the newsroom of some enterprise where they were being apprenticed and taught. They're all trying to teach themselves how to be journalists. And it's a very sad thing because mentors are so important in journalism. I have no particular time for journalism schools, frankly, but I do have a lot of time for somebody who's number nine on the crime desk. Of course, that doesn't happen now because those desks no longer really exist. If you're lucky, there's one person.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about?
Tina Brown:
I'm optimistic that the monarchy will survive, unlike what many people think. I think that there will always be the miscreants, the miseries, the successes, the people who were down to their credit, but it is a family. So, in the same way that all families have their prodigal offspring, <laugh> and issues of drama and divorce and death and fertility, that is also true of the House of Windsor. I actually think the monarchy will survive.
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