Yahoo News Omid Scobie’s Endgame is ludicrous propaganda for Team Sussex
Hell hath no fury like a royal reporter scorned. Omid Scobie’s Endgame is billed as the real story of what has been going on inside the Palace walls. But what runs through its 400-odd pages is Scobie’s sense of burning indignation that he was shut out.
Scobie is the journalist who co-wrote Finding Freedom, the unauthorised (ahem) tale of Harry and Meghan. The way he tells it, he was “a trusted confidante for many in and around the younger family – a true insider” until he decided to throw in his lot with Team Sussex. Perhaps understandably, Palace aides went a bit cool on him after that. With nothing left to lose, and a great deal of money to gain – Finding Freedom was a bestseller – he went off to write Endgame, a hit job that reads like a Mumsnet post about the world’s worst in-laws.
The King (we read) has spent his life as “an outspoken environmental activist, an occasional meddler in politics, a successful businessman, a flawed father and a philandering husband who destroyed the life of Princess Diana… Everyone already knows that King Charles might have preferred a life as Queen Camilla’s tampon.” We’re only on page six. He’s “a former pampered prince who is now an ageing king”; unpopular, peevish, jealous of his son and heir. Oh, and he demands that flunkeys iron his shoelaces. Charles becoming King and attempting to portray himself as a moderniser, says Scobie, is like Apple unveiling its new product as a malfunctioning flip-phone.
How about William? He’s bad-tempered, emotionally volatile and jealous (of Harry); his public support for mental-health awareness is mere “virtue signalling”. The digs at William’s “Stepford-like royal wife” are more sly: Kate “spent more time talking about Meghan than talking to her”.
As for the Queen, is that a tone of misogyny I detect in Scobie’s prose? “Camilla,” he writes, “might not have stood on the barricades in the ’60s, but she did enjoy the sexual freedoms ushered in by that radical generation.” “Some who knew Camilla” have described her as “the sort to throw her knickers on the table”; he quotes, from one of the tabloids he despises, a housekeeper saying that she knew when Camilla had been to stay with Charles because there would be knickers all over the place. “Camilla’s undergarments making yet another appearance,” Scobie adds.
And as this dastardly bunch scheme away in their castles like Disney villains, what of Meghan and Harry? Well: “As the morning sun rises over Santa Barbara, bathing the steep Santa Ynez Mountains, and the Pacific Ocean sparkles with California’s trademark glow… Meghan [is] already preparing a family breakfast in the kitchen.” Of course!
Scobie denies that he is the Sussexes’ mouthpiece, but when he writes that “House Montecito’s stance” is that the Palace is run by “overlords and buttoned-up Machiavellis in cahoots with a tabloid cabal who are all hell-bent on upholding the Crown no matter the human cost,” you can’t help but notice that this is exactly what his book is saying too. He is obsessed with the Palace’s relationship with the media, and clearly still annoyed that, as a writer for US magazines, he was not part of the official Royal Rota, which is limited to British national newspaper titles.
Endgame refers to the “briefing wars”, and the belief – as declared by Harry – that the Palace planted stories in the press. But many of the examples given are of royal sources reacting, on William’s behalf, to the public proclamations being made by Harry and Meghan in Netflix series or globally syndicated television interviews or bombshell memoirs. Is that briefing, or responding?
There is little gossip to be had here, unless you count Scobie regurgitating a rumour that one of Charles’s bodyguards found him with Camilla “doing what Lady Chatterley enjoyed best” in the garden at Camilla’s grandmother’s house. He caveats the story by saying it is “an old (but probably false) fable in royal circles”, just as he refers to an internet rumour about William’s private life but provides no evidence whatsoever to back it up.
The hero of the tale isn’t Meghan, as it was in Finding Freedom, but Scobie himself. He zips around like a character from The Morning Show, informing us of his outfit choices (preparations for Queen Elizabeth II’s death demanded “a simple black sweater” from M&S) and his work for ABC News. He considers himself a wise counsel to Palace staffers, and can’t believe they ignore his advice. There is a hilarious scene in which he is filming outside the gates of Kensington Palace and comes face-to-face with William driving out: “Standing inches from the front end of his Range Rover, there we were, virtually eye to eye.” William, he says, gave him “an unimpressed stare”.
There is a lot of petty detail, but Scobie’s target is bigger than any one individual. It is the monarchy itself, described here as “a desiccated system”, “a cratered Firm”, “an unstable family business” and “an institution in decline”. The family is “debilitatingly out-of-touch, even expendable” because it hails from “an incredibly shrinking, old-fashioned world of land barons, polo fields and posh formality”. “The rot has set in,” Scobie warns, “and it’s eating away at the monarchy’s undergirding.”
Race is discussed, and here it’s hard to argue with some of Scobie’s arguments: Princess Michael of Kent wearing a ‘blackamoor’ brooch to an event attended by Meghan was ghastly, whichever way you cut it. It appears that Scobie has written the book with the American market in mind, providing a handy explanation of the word “toffs” (“British slang for a group of upper-class types”), although I’m not sure how much Meghan’s fans want to read about Brexit.
He gets tied up in knots about flags. “To stay relevant, the system, in an almost Trumpian twist, leans on patriotism – even jingoism – to shore up its purpose. When in doubt, festoon the palace, unfurl the Union Jacks and enlist the tabloids.” He accuses the monarchy of “leveraging patriotism”, and describes events such as the Golden Jubilee as “homages to Merry England… increasingly wearisome and transparent”.
Endgame is an utterly one-sided affair, but royal biographers these days like to pick a side – this book is no more biased than Revenge, Tom Bower’s takedown of Meghan. Scobie knows his audience, and they will lap this up.
Endgame is published by HarperCollins at £22. To order your copy for £18.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
