You know what I don’t have the patience for today? “Royals’ Meghan ‘bully’ crisis: As Buckingham Palace launches an unprecedented investigation into sensational bullying claims against Meghan, make no mistake this is a crisis that echoes the Abdication, writes RICHARD KAY.” Yes, the Duchess of Sussex making white women shake with fear because she asked them to work is truly the abdication crisis of the 21st century. Kay will at times work as a mouthpiece for Prince Charles or Prince William, and it becomes clear – very quickly – in this piece that Kay has been tasked with spinning Team Willileaks’ perspective. You can read the whole messy article here. Some highlights:

Curated victimhood? “Never before has the Palace held a member of the Royal Family to account, and its move represents a serious blow to the Duchess’s carefully curated status of victimhood. It also shows that the Queen’s deep reserve of patience for her grandson, Harry, has reached a tipping point….I also understand that individuals who fear their reputations will be damaged in the Sussexes’ upcoming Oprah Winfrey TV interview have demanded the protection of the Palace. ‘The Palace is taking the gravity of the situation extremely seriously,’ I am told.

It’s reminiscent of the abdication crisis because the Windsors are saying outright that they’ll blame the Sussexes whenever anyone dies: [The current crisis] has echoes, too, of the dramas that followed the Abdication of Edward VIII in 1936, when the Queen’s father reluctantly took the throne as George VI, triggering years of hostility between the brothers and, crucially, their wives. The Queen Mother blamed, and never forgave, the Duchess of Windsor — the former Wallis Simpson — for the premature death of her husband.

It scarcely matters that Prince William is leaking like a sieve: Just who leaked Mr Knauf’s 2018 email to The Times scarcely matters. Its very existence suggests an escalation in the fraught relationship between William and Harry.

The palace communications office is made up of amateurs: Yesterday, royal officials were insisting that the complaints about Meghan, which began to surface within weeks of her and Harry’s starry Windsor wedding, were not being orchestrated by Buckingham Palace or by members of the Queen’s family. Their focus, they said, was on 99-year-old Prince Philip, who remains a patient at Barts Hospital in London. All the same, some courtiers are privately describing developments as ‘the Crown getting its revenge in first’.

Kay has heard from some of Meghan’s “bullying victims” too: By now stories of Meghan’s behaviour were circulating openly. One story that reached my ears was of a very junior assistant who had gone from being Meghan’s favourite to being told that she had become ‘over familiar’. Another was how morning staff meetings over coffee, which Harry himself made, had stopped when Meghan apparently engaged a butler, ending the informality at a stroke. Harmless enough, you may think, but there were other accounts, too. One figure, working in a different part of the royal estate, was alleged to have been reprimanded for giving Harry a present to mark his engagement. And there have been claims that behind the glowing headlines of the couple’s first big overseas tour, in October 2018, all was not well at Admiralty House, Australia’s governor general’s residence which hosted Harry and Meghan.

Prince William to the rescue: Prince William was appalled by the reports that reached his ears, and many now wonder whether it was this that ultimately led to the split between the brothers. Initially, I understand, Harry acknowledged that something was not right, but he swiftly backed his wife. At the time William and Harry shared their staff, but the issue of their treatment became so acute that William and his aides accelerated the process of splitting the household in two. ‘What was a long-term plan became an immediate plan,’ said a source. Suddenly the ‘Fab Four’, as the two couples had been dubbed, were no longer quite so fabulous.

William fears WHAT?? William’s hope that Harry, who more than anyone else knows the burdens William faces as the future king, would be at his side has vanished to be replaced by a fear that his disgruntled brother and sister-in-law are morphing ever more into a modern-day version of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

[From The Daily Mail]

The thing is, if Prince William wasn’t so lazy, racist and stupid, this smear campaign would have been less obvious and perhaps more successful. If the palace aides weren’t complete amateurs stepping on their own dumb narratives constantly, perhaps some of the mud they were slinging would stick. This has been the case since 2017, honestly – there was always the possibility to have an open conversation about some good-faith criticisms of Harry and Meghan. But no one – not the Firm, not the courtiers, not the British media clown show – has ever been interested in a critical assessment in good faith. Instead, we get Prince William panicking and throwing together this completely nasty and bad-faith smear campaign and dragging Buckingham Palace along for the ride. William is as stupid as he is hateful and pathetic.

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