Another week, another round of royal revelations. Following swiftly on from the publication of Andrew Lownie\u2019s bestselling denigration of the Duke and Duchess of York \u2013\u00a0Entitled, there is now another tell-all account of the royal family: Valentine Low\u2019s\u00a0Power and the Palace.\u00a0It has recently been serialised in the\u00a0Times\u00a0(appropriately enough, given that Low is that newspaper\u2019s royal correspondent) and purports to offer a well-sourced and factually accurate account of the relationship between politics and the royal family over the past few years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nWe can expect a steady stream of such volumes for some time to come<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Low is a serious writer, whose excellent 2022 book\u00a0Courtiers\u00a0was a particular standout in an often tawdry genre, and so the stories within\u00a0Power and the Palace\u00a0should be taken seriously. Thanks to recent published excerpts,\u00a0readers have learnt, amongst other things, that the late Queen supported a Remain vote in Brexit on the grounds that \u2018it\u2019s better to stick with the devil you know\u2019. They will also have read that the so-called \u2018sovereign grant\u2019, agreed by the coalition government in the early 2010s, ended up being considerably more generous than originally planned, and that after Boris Johnson illegally prorogued parliament in 2019 in\u00a0what his critics alleged was\u00a0an attempt to enable a no-deal Brexit, he failed to apologise to the Queen\u00a0despite the expectation that he would. (I remember\u00a0Private Eye\u00a0going a step further at the time and noting that the palace was surprised that Johnson didn\u2019t resign altogether as a matter of honour; clearly they had forgotten who they were dealing with.)<\/p>\n
Some of the revelations are largely light-hearted, such as the Queen\u2019s penchant for doing the washing up at Balmoral (albeit slightly ineffectively \u2013 a dishwasher was pressed into service afterwards) and her sending Barack Obama to bed when he was enjoying himself too much at a banquet at Buckingham Palace. Others, such as today\u2019s story that Camilla\u2019s personal support for rape crisis centres stems from an incident as a teenager when she narrowly avoided serious sexual assault on a train and ensured that her attacker was arrested, are more sombre in nature and all the more revelatory as a result.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Still, for all the front-page headlines, both the Low and Lownie books suffer from the same problem. Firstly, although both offer detail that few, if any, readers would have previously been aware of, the stories are really just offering well-researched anecdotes rather than anything genuinely revelatory for the most part. And when a truly interesting detail emerges \u2013 such as the Queen\u2019s apparent rejection of Brexit\u00a0\u2013 the question immediately is raised of where the information came from. It is no surprise to find that the source in this case was George Osborne, former Chancellor and Remainer-in-chief.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are a huge number of books about the royals, historic and contemporary, published every year. Many are laudatory, a smaller number condemnatory, and all have their own reserved place on the bookshelves of your average bookshop. Commentators and biographers know that, unlike other public figures, the royals are unlikely to sue or comment on the specific veracity, or otherwise, of the stories contained within their pages, meaning that it is possible \u2013 should they wish \u2013 to get away with single-sourced accounts from dubious and often partisan quarters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Given that the best-selling non-fiction book of all time in this country, Prince Harry\u2019s\u00a0Spare,\u00a0was chock-full of similarly incredible claims, we can expect a steady stream of such volumes for some time to come.\u00a0Still, as a great woman once said, \u2018recollections may vary\u2019, and it is important to retain an element of detachment while reading some of these stories: just because you might wish to believe something to be true doesn\u2019t necessarily mean it is, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another week, another round of royal revelations. Following swiftly on from the publication of Andrew Lownie\u2019s bestselling denigration…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7708],"tags":[5105,7710,519,448],"class_list":{"0":"post-389259","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-royals","8":"tag-royal","9":"tag-royal-families","10":"tag-royal-family","11":"tag-royals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115129190103393545","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}