The Palace Papers

Tina Brown's chronicle of the British Royal Family covers the 25 years since Princess Diana's death in 1997 through early 2022. Brown structures her account around the individuals who shaped the monarchy's recent history and describes the book as the one she wishes Meghan had read before marrying into the Royal Family. The narrative is framed by the March 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview in which Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, leveled a damning charge sheet against the institution, including allegations of racism, institutional indifference to Meghan's mental health, and family jealousy.

Brown opens by establishing the atmosphere of melancholy that settled over the Royal Family after Diana's death. The Queen resolved that no member should ever again acquire celebrity powerful enough to overshadow the Crown. Diana's global fame had destabilized Buckingham Palace, making every other royal feel irrelevant. Her explosive 1995 BBC interview with journalist Martin Bashir, in which she cast herself as a rival queen of public affection and alluded to a third party in her marriage, had posed a direct challenge to the sovereign's authority. Her death in a Paris car crash triggered a tsunami of public grief that forced the Queen into an unprecedented live television broadcast and a public walkabout among mourning crowds, experiences that shook the monarchy.

Brown then turns to the long saga of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. Their relationship, which began in 1971, was rooted in Camilla's warmth, earthy humor, and utter absence of sycophancy. Brown draws parallels between Camilla and her great-grandmother Alice Keppel, who served for 12 years as mistress to King Edward VII: Both women soothed, amused, and managed their royal partners without challenging the status quo. Camilla married the dashing but chronically unfaithful Andrew Parker Bowles and served as Charles's emotional anchor throughout his troubled marriage to Diana, but the brutal public exposure of the affair through Andrew Morton's 1992 tell-all Diana: Her True Story and the leaked recordings of an intimate 1993 phone call between the lovers devastated Camilla. After Diana's death made her untouchable as the other woman, Camilla endured years of exile before being gradually rehabilitated and edged toward acceptance by the Queen. A pivotal incident occurred in November 2004 when Camilla was relegated to the back of a cathedral at a friend's wedding, prompting her elderly father, Major Bruce Shand, to tell Charles he wanted to meet his maker knowing his daughter was taken care of. Charles proposed, the Queen consented, and a wedding plagued by mishaps took place in April 2005 at Windsor, where the Queen delivered an inspired toast comparing the couple to racehorses who had cleared every obstacle and were now in the winners' enclosure.

The Queen occupies the book's moral center. Brown portrays Elizabeth II as a woman of inflexible duty whose emotional remoteness, shaped by the cautionary example of Edward VIII's 1936 abdication and her parents' wartime stoicism, made her both an exemplary sovereign and an inadequate mother. Her marriage to Prince Philip endured through the Queen's savvy in harnessing her husband's energies without diminishing him, and through Philip's loyalty despite the frustrations of his role. The deaths of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother in quick succession in early 2002 freed the Queen to emerge as the uneclipsed sovereign in her Golden Jubilee year. The jubilee proved a resounding success, and the Queen's transformation into a pop culture phenomenon accelerated through the 2012 London Olympics, where she secretly filmed a James Bond spoof.

The book's second half pivots to the next generation. William and Harry's contrasting paths are traced from childhood: Duty and responsibility subdued William's boisterousness, while Harry, the younger son not expected to inherit the throne, embraced his comparative freedom. Brown complicates the widely held belief that Diana was simply martyred by the paparazzi, documenting her complicity with the press and her use of the young William as a confidant and emotional stand-in. Both brothers were scarred by their parents' public war and the unprocessed trauma of their mother's death.

Catherine "Kate" Middleton's eight-year courtship with William, from their meeting at the University of St. Andrews to breakups and media harassment to their 2011 wedding at Westminster Abbey, is presented as a story of middle-class resilience. Brown credits Kate's mother, the entrepreneurial Carole Middleton, as the invisible engine of her daughter's rise and positions Kate as the opposite of Diana: a woman whose constancy and healing instincts provide the emotional stability William craves.

Harry's trajectory is more turbulent. The army provided the structure, purpose, and anonymity he needed; his deployment to Afghanistan and the founding of the Invictus Games, a competition for wounded veterans, represented his finest achievements. But leaving the military in 2015 stripped him of his refuge and exposed deep emotional vulnerability. His relationship with Cressida Bonas collapsed under his explosive temperament and press paranoia. Bonas first persuaded him to see a therapist, leading to a breakthrough in processing his mother's death. Brown traces the tabloid press's illegal surveillance operations, particularly the phone-hacking scandal centered on Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, which targeted Harry, his girlfriend Chelsy Davy, William, and Kate for years. The exposure of this industrial-scale invasion of privacy provides essential context for Harry's later fury toward the media.

Meghan Markle enters the narrative as a woman whose ambition contrasts with Harry's confusion. Brown details her years as a struggling actress, her experience navigating identity as a biracial woman, her strategic networking through Soho House, an exclusive international members' club, in Toronto, and her lifestyle website The Tig. Despite her efforts, Meghan remained on the celebrity B-list. When she and Harry met in July 2016, each filled a void in the other. William's concerns about the speed of the romance went unheeded.

Their May 2018 wedding at Windsor Castle is described as a day of enchantment that transformed the monarchy's image, with Bishop Michael Curry's rousing sermon injecting unprecedented energy into British royal tradition. But the fairy tale unraveled swiftly. Brown documents the turmoil surrounding Meghan's father, Tom Markle, a successful lighting director who was entrapped by a paparazzi agency, suffered a heart attack, and watched his daughter's wedding alone on television. The clash between Meghan's expectations and Palace culture produced escalating friction. Meghan's successes, including the Grenfell Tower cookbook and a triumphant Commonwealth tour of Australia, were offset by her growing alienation, postpartum depression, and suicidal thoughts. Tensions with William and Kate escalated over media coverage and competing priorities.

Prince Andrew's catastrophic November 2019 BBC interview about his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in which he offered implausible alibis and no sympathy for Epstein's victims, forced the Queen to strip him of public duties. The Sussexes, watching the Queen's 2019 Christmas broadcast and noticing that photographs on the Queen's desk conspicuously excluded them, interpreted the omission as a definitive signal of their marginalization.

The Sandringham Summit in January 2020 delivered what Brown characterizes as an edict rather than a deal: The Sussexes retained their His/Her Royal Highness (HRH) titles but could not use them, lost all military titles and royal patronages, and had to repay the cost of renovating Frogmore Cottage. The COVID-19 pandemic then transformed the landscape, giving the Queen an unexpected year of seclusion with Philip while the Sussexes, in California, secured lucrative Netflix and Spotify deals but confronted irrelevance in Britain. Prince Philip died in April 2021 at 99, and the image of the Queen grieving alone in her chapel pew became the pandemic's most poignant royal image.

Brown closes by meditating on the monarchy's future. Charles will ascend as an environmental champion at a moment suited to his passions. The Queen's February 2022 announcement that Camilla should become Queen Consort, the title given to the wife of a reigning king, acknowledges that duty and loyalty to the Crown have become more defining than bloodlines. Kate's transformation into a dynastic strategist who embraces the monarchy's mission offers hope for reinvention under a future King William. But the jubilee marking the Queen's 70 years, Brown argues, stands as a valediction to an antiquated version of monarchy that must now pass into history.