bitchy | Tina Brown: King Charles is ‘less irritated’ with Harry than he is with lazy William

It’s somewhat funny to me that all of the supposed royalists can’t actually say what they’re thinking in regular interviews or newspaper columns, they have to save it all for their Substacks. I’m shocked by Tom Sykes’ admissions in his Substack column, and Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell Substack seems to be breaking some news this week. Brown is the only one who will say what all of them know but can’t admit openly: that Prince Harry’s mini-tour of the UK completely overshadowed the work-shy Waleses and that King Charles likely met with Harry to send Prince William a message in particular. Some highlights from Fresh Hell:

Harry got it right: At last, Prince Harry has got it right, which is bad news for the Prince of Wales. After five years of exuding choler and wrath and spouting therapeutic gibberish, the ginger whinger finally realized that all the royals have to do to win public enthusiasm is zip around the UK and smile…As Harry’s buoyant photo ops dueled with Prince William and Kate’s engagements for press coverage this week, you had to ask: Who would you rather hang with? The Tigger-like Duke of Sussex or sober, appropriate William and infinitely perfect Kate, taking tea and cake with a cooing chapter of one of Queen Elizabeth’s most beloved but groaningly square charities, The Women’s Institute.

Harry’s donations: Harry’s own reset, a positivity campaign he hopes will endear him to his still estranged father and a negative British public (those cheers in Nottingham were a good start), came with a new unexpected gambit—a contribution from his own bank account of £1.1 million to the Children in Need project. It cannily unleashed for William the uneasy question of what exactly the 43-year-old Prince of Wales is doing with the £23 million a year he gets from the Duchy of Cornwall. Back when Charles was Prince of Wales, he was a powerhouse of philanthropy, starting at age 27, when he used his £7,400 severance pay from the Royal Navy to seed The Prince’s Trust, which has gone on to raise more than £100 million a year. Without wishing to be churlish, I can’t help pointing out that William’s annual Earthshot Prize of £1 million (covered by sponsors) to five promising innovators in the climate change space is a little underwhelming.

Charles is irritated with William’s lazy ass: While the British press obsesses over the question of a Harry/Charles reunion (getting warmer) or a Harry/William rapprochement (not gonna happen), the king is, I am told, currently less irritated with the prodigal Harry than he is with his elder son and heir. Somehow, William’s parenting dedication always seems couched as a tacit criticism of the king’s own paternal deficiencies. And after five confirmed family vacations in the past seven months, William’s first-week-back diary pulsated with two outings: a father-daughter excursion to a Women’s Rugby World Cup pool match and a stroll through the Natural History Museum’s new gardens. Charles, despite his battle with cancer, has carried out official engagements on 175 days during the past 12 months.

[From Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell]

That hit on Earthshot is gonna hurt. But she’s right: once you see how Earthshot is structured – prize winners don’t even get their £1 million all at once, but parceled out over five years – it’s extremely underwhelming. That’s William and Kate’s tagline too: “extremely underwhelming.” I don’t think William and Kate are focusing so much on their parenting duties as some kind of criticism of Charles though. I mean, maybe that’s part of it for William, but I think W&K simply use their kids as deflection from work entirely. They act like they’re simply incapable of working part-time because of the damn school run and their kids’ school holidays. They literally refuse to work whenever their kids have a school break. It’s insane. Anyway, Tina Brown always has a lot of sh-t to say about Harry and Meghan, but she’s like most well-connected royalists: she knows, deep down, that the Sussexit profoundly damaged the monarchy.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.