Speaker 1: Ah Calorogus Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Palace Weekly.
I am your host, Mark Francis. It's been a week
in which the board finally moved. The King's most powerful adviser,
the man Prince Harry, once nicknamed the Wasp, announced he
is leaving. Britain acquired its fourth Prime Minister of the Rain,
Harry's long War where the Daily Mail was handed at
number and the number has eight figures in it, and
King Charles opened the Commonwealth Games by stepping out of
a doctor who tardis, because if you're going to reassert
control over your own rain, you may as well do
it with a time machine. For weeks, this story has
been all weather and no movement, everyone perpetually furious, nothing
actually changing. This week things changed. So the question to
hold on to is a simple one. When the pieces
finally move, which way are they going? Let's get into it.
We begin with the single most consequential thing that happened
all week, and almost nobody outside royal circles will have
heard his name. Sir Clive Orderton is stepping down. He
has been Principal Private Secretary to the King and Queen
and for practical purposes, the most influential official of the
entire reign, and he will leave the role next year
around his sixtieth birthday, staying on afterward in what he
called a less formal capacity for the rest of his life.
Read his CV and you understand the weight of it.
He first worked for Charles's Prince of Wales, became Principal
Private Secretary in twenty fifteen, and stood at the King's
side through the death of Queen Elizabeth, the accession, the coronation,
the cancer diagnosis, the Sussex departure, and the long Andrew saga.
If a difficult decision was made at the Palace in
the last decade, Orderton was usually in the room. You
may also know him by another name, and Spare Harry
appeared to christen him the Wasp, describing a courtier who
was charming, arrogant, a ball of the jazzy energy, outwardly deferential,
but capable if crossed, of delivering such a sting that
you'd cry in confusion. Sir Clive has never responded to
the nickname, which is rather the point of being good
at his job. The Palace called it a planned retirement
with a long, tidy handover in twenty twenty seven. Others
read the tea leaves differently. Dan Wooton on The Megan
Kelly Show called the retirement line rubbish. There A reason,
he argued, is that Alderton was trying to stop Harry
and Meghan returning and was doing his damnedness to try
and save King Charles from himself. The Royalist offered the
mirror image from the Harry friendly camp. Charles is reasserting
his authority and reclaiming the throne, and that lines up
rather neatly with the theory we sat with last week.
The recovered king gifted time by a medicine, taking back
control of his own family. Whether Alderton is a casualty
of that shift or simply a fifty nine year old
who would like his weekends back, The most powerful hawk
in the King's court is on his way out, and
the timing writes its own story. Meanwhile, the constitutional furniture
rearranged itself with almost no fuss. Andrew Burnham kissed hands
as Charles's fourth Prime minister in barely three years. Photographed
with the King in the rarely seen Chinese dining room,
all white dragons and dragon legged tables, the faces rotate,
the monarch remains the fixed point, and in a much
sharper reminder that a world exists beyond the soap opera,
Iran's Revolutionary Guard named the British monarchy directly. In a
warning tied to reports that American bombers had flown from
the array of Fairford. Buckingham Palace declaimed to comment, which
was the correct and only response. The King himself cancer
and all kept up a genuinely full diary. The Palace
confirmed a steep visit to Spain as being planned for
twenty twenty seven, the first since Queen Elizabeth was hosted
by King Juan Carlos back in nineteen eighty eight, and
in Glasgow, Charles and Camilla opened the twenty third Commonwealth
Games by emerging, I promise I'm not making this up
from the doctor who tardis to cheers inside the hydro
arena as part of his sequence that whisked viewers passed
Edinburgh Castle, locke Ness an inevitably bow Moral. He then
delivered a rather lovely speech about the baton relay, carrying
a message to clear plastic from the oceans, and declared
the Games open. The Daleks mercifully stay at home. It
is a strange and slightly wonderful thing that the most
reliably dignified figure in this entire story is also the
one most willing to climb out of a police box
on live television. More palace in just a moment. Now
on to money, because this week money was the water
everyone was swimming in. Harry's crusade finally got its price tag.
Lawyers for Associated Newspapers say their bill has climbed past
thirty four million pounds, and they're asking the judge to
award costs on an indemnity basis, which recovers more than
the standard approach. The claimant's insurance runs to roughly sixteen
point two million. If the judge goes on the indemnity route,
that cover could fall short by million, leaving Harry and
his fellow claimants personally on the hook. Closer put Harry's
own share somewhere around twenty five million dollars, and all
that talk of Elton John riding to the rescue dismissed
by his own camp as ungrounded. Harry, a source said,
is far too proud to ask friends for handouts, and
they simply have to take out a loan, A prince
applying for a loan. The sentence alone tells you the
direction of travel. And it wasn't only Harry counting pennies
beggins as Ever, Brand saw its website traffic for roughly
forty six percent between January and June. A CBC investigation
found Harry's visits to Canada generated the highest security costs
of any internationally protected visitor over five years, and the
Royal Collection's trust income collapsed from nearly fourteen million pounds
to three and a half as the post coronation tourism
boom finally exhaled. Everyone King and Duke alike is watching
the meter, which brings us to the week's most enjoyable reversal.
Last week, deed Crown mocked the tabloids for their one
permitted adjective, William forever and always furious. This week, the
irritation appears to be running the other way entirely. Tina
Brown reports that Charles is currently less annoyed with the
prodigal Harry than with his elder son. The arithmetic is unkind.
Charles carried out engagements on one hundred and seventy five
days this past year, while managing cancer treatment, whereas William
took five confirmed family holidays in seven months and returned
to a first week back consisting of a rugby mansion,
a walk through a museum garden, and Harry's donation of
one point one million pounds to children in need cannily
raised the question of what exactly the Prince of Wales
is doing with twenty three million a year. The furious
air it turns out maybe one his father is quietly
furious with Harry himself spent the week being of all
things liked. He turned up at the time one hundred
sports gala in New York, told the room his father
is doing great and called sport medicine. He bickered with
James Cordon about whether it's footballs, and the reconciliation drumbeat
kept steady time. Charles's once again offered him a room
at Buckingham Palace, this time for September's Well Child Awards,
and Harry dithered too long to accept. Last time, Ingrid
Seward framed it as a chance for Harry to show
his father he knows how to behave. There was even
a trial balloon floated and promptly popped about an overseas
roll possibly Australia, possibly Governor General in the spirit of
the Duke of Windsor decamping to the Bahamas. The Palace
gently noted that the King does not actually get to
hand out that job and is not about to reinvent
the monarchy for one family member. Not everyone in the
family is charmed, and the caution is worth logging. Camilla,
by several accounts, supports the King's reunion with Harry because
she loves the King, but hasn't forgotten a word of
what was said about her, and reportedly suspects Harry could
turn on the family the moment things don't go his way.
Her priority, one source put it, is not letting Charles
be blindsided twice, and William, we are assured, remains immovable,
reportedly telling Keith that under no circumstance answers should she
extend so much as an olive branch to his brother.
So the door Charles's holding open is being watched warily
from both sides of it more palatine. The moment, now
to the soap opera, which ran at its usual volume,
began's guest turn on Masterchefstrada arrived trailing in tiny tempest
her team and reportedly asked producers not to use the
word royalty, and a judge duly used it in the introduction.
The episode then drew one point six million viewers, the
show's best Sunday and weeks, so the threatened boycott went
the way of most threatened boycotts. Along the way, we
learned that Archie and Lilabet eat Brussels sprouts, that Meghan
considers food a love language, that Harry phoned in a
FaceTime cameo which some viewers found charming and others found staged.
Both camps, as ever, were catered to. Meghan also made
her first public appearance in Munths at a LA screening
of Cookie Queen's, a documentary she and Harry produced about
girl Scouts in their Cookie season. She used it to
share a lion. Harry apparently tells her on hard days
that he flew helicopters for ten years and even in
the storm above the storm, the sun is always shining.
So genuinely nice sentiment and a reminder that underneath the brand,
traffic and the boycott arithmetica two people trying to talk
each other through a rough patch. The louder row was
an Instagram post, Megan shared a set of summer holiday photographs,
among them Archie and Lilibet at Althorpe, the Spencer Estate
where Diana is buried, the family walking an avenue of
lime trees carrying bouquets. Even sympathizers winced. Tom Sykes captured
the genre precisely. Some kissed holiday content that pauses briefly
for then we went to a grave. Piers Morgan made
the sharper version of the point, asking why a couple
who left to the world about children's online privacy would
post their own children to millions. Whether the post was
ten or attack, He is a taste question and tastes
questions of the tabloid's favorite cane precisely because they never resolve.
When broadcast to Mark Donlan went further and speculated that
the Sussex children would one day make life a misery
for their cousins. The Sussex's spokesperson broke along silence to
call it disgusting to cast two small children as future antagonists,
and on that narrow point, they are hard to argue with.
The quieter degradations continued for Andrew. He was not invited
to the family's Bowmorl gathering. The City of London is
now drafting the legislation specifically to allow it to strip
his freedom of the city, and a new Disney documentary
revisited the murder conviction of his ex wife's former dresser
under the cheerful title The Duchess and the Killer. Sarah,
for her part, is reportedly chopping a tell all documentary
of her own, one production source predicting it could be
as sensational and as embarrassing to the family as the
Sussex's own opera Sit Down The Yorks Endure Downward. The
King in between all the pieces moving had a couple
of small human moments worth keeping. At the Sandringham Flower Show,
he was pestered by a persistent fly, Camilla was handed
citronella repellent for her trouble, and when a well wisher
his own age told him he was looking good, Charles
laughed and replied, it gets much harder, doesn't it. And
in Cambridge he padded into Europe's first purpose built eco
mosque in a pair of grain knitted socks, joking to
a group of school children that he hoped he hadn't
ruined their holidays by dragging them in before praising the
building as a remarkable example of integrated faith activity. A
monarch in his socks blessing a mosque is a quietly
radical image and a direct continuation of the faith story
we've been tracking these last few weeks. And then quietly
came the realist thing anyone said all week. Visiting a
cancer hospital in Manchester, Kate spoke about her own treatment,
how she lost the ability to read or focus and
turned instead to coloring, which she described as a way
of playing and losing yourself, something that didn't require a
finished product. You have to support yourself, she told the patients,
Alongside all the things you can't control. Your body changes
physically and emotionally, and it puts everything in perspective and
you hold onto what's important. No unnamed source, no spin,
no frame, just a woman who was it's been through it,
telling other people going through it that there is a
way through, which is in the end, what all this
movement is actually about. Strip Away the courtier and the
loan and the Instagram grief and the tartis and the
story is an old man with cancer working one hundred
and seventy five days a year moving the pieces while
he still can't. The advisor eased out, the sun offered
a room. The door held open a careful inch, because
the only clock in this whole songa that genuinely ticks,
is his. Everything else, as always is weather. And there
you have it. If you'd like to email us or
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We really appreciate your support. By Mark Francis my thanks
to John McDermott. This is Pallace Weekly. Good terms