Harry and Meghan’s final months as part of the working Royals

Previous instalments in my series on Harry and Meghan can be found here, here, here and here.

I left off at the end of 2019, with The Sun publishing a story on the Sussexes imminent extended visit to Canada, which enraged the Duke and Duchess:

Harry and Meghan spending six-week Christmas break in Canada https://t.co/iUP8WqBpdI

— Sky News (@SkyNews) December 21, 2019

On December 21 that year, Sky News reported:

Harry and Meghan’s spokeswoman ended speculation over their whereabouts by confirming the couple and their seven-month-old son Archie are spending their six-week Christmas break in the country Meghan called home for seven years.

“The decision to base themselves in Canada reflects the importance of this Commonwealth country to them both,” she said.

“The Duke of Sussex has been a frequent visitor to Canada over many years, and it was also home to The Duchess for seven years before she became a member of the Royal Family.

“They are enjoying sharing the warmth of the Canadian people and the beauty of the landscape with their young son.”

The duchess lived in Toronto before joining the Royal Family as the popular US drama Suits, in which she starred in, was filmed in the Canadian city.

Harry and Meghan were famously pictured in Toronto in 2017 at the Invictus Games.

The Sussexes are likely to have spent the US Thanksgiving celebrations on 28 November with the duchess’ mother Doria Ragland.

Prince Harry’s grandmother, the Queen, is said to be supportive of the Sussexes’ plan to take a long break and not join the rest of the Royal Family at Sandringham on Christmas Day.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have previously spent Christmas with Kate’s parents in Berkshire instead of with the Queen.

Harry’s grandfather, Prince Philip, 98, was taken to hospital in London on Friday from Sandringham for treatment for a pre-existing condition, Buckingham Palace said.

The Queen had just arrived at the Norfolk estate for her Christmas break after the State Opening of Parliament on Thursday …

By Christmas Eve, the Mail reported that the Royal Family wanted the couple to return home in light of Prince Philip’s stay in hospital:

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have been urged by Royal family members to return from abroad to spend Christmas in the UK, as Prince Philip spends a fourth night in hospital …

It comes after a family Christmas card of the royal couple smiling in front of a Christmas tree, with Archie’s adorable face staring down the camera lens, was revealed.

On December 28, news emerged in the UK that:

THE Duke and Duchess of Sussex have registered the trademarks for hundreds of products with their Sussex Royal brand.

That same day, Blind Gossip posted ‘The Big Plan’:

Think back to a few months ago when we talked about the baby.

Our married couple was oddly reluctant to let the public see the baby, citing concerns over safety and a desire to bond privately.

We told you that wasn’t true. Plenty of their family members have managed to keep their children safe and secure over many generations while meeting their obligations as public figures.

We told you that the couple was actually trying to keep sightings of the baby rare while they figured out how to monetize the situation… without the rest of the family finding out.

They bungled that scenario.

However, it’s now full steam ahead with The Big Plan!

What is The Big Plan?

To brand and monetize everything.

You are now seeing that plan being put into motion. And if you question what they are doing, you will be met with anger, misdirection, and insistence that their motives are pure.

We hid the baby because… Privacy! Motherhood!

We take private planes and stay in posh private digs because… Environment! Wellness!

We isolate ourselves from 99% of our family and surround ourselves with celebrities because… Family! Safety!

We are engaging our own outside lawyers and PR team because… Protection! Charity!

How dare you question our motives!

See how that works?

Fortunately, the Queen put paid to Sussex Royal on February 18, 2020, as the Mail reported:

"Prince" Harry and Meghan Markle to stop using Sussex Royal brand after being banned by the Queen https://t.co/9LeiKfwAgE via @MailOnline

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) February 21, 2020

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex must drop their ‘Sussex Royal’ label after deciding to step down as working royals.

Following lengthy and complex talks, the Queen and senior officials are believed to have agreed it is no longer tenable for the couple to keep the word ‘royal’ in their ‘branding’.

Harry and Meghan have spent tens of thousands of pounds on a new Sussex Royal website to complement their hugely popular Instagram feed.

They have also sought to register Sussex Royal as a global trademark for a range of items and activities, including clothing, stationery, books and teaching materials. 

In addition, they have taken steps to set up a new charitable organisation: Sussex Royal, The Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

It has now been made clear that they will need to ‘re-brand’.

Returning to December 2019 and January 2020, Harry was eager to work out some sort of arrangement for his and Meghan’s future with the then-Prince Charles. Charles told his son that such things had to be done in person, not via email. Prior to that, Harry had contacted the Queen, who said she would be happy to meet with him until it turned out her diary was full.

Various excerpts in this post come from investigative-turned-royal reporter Valentine Low and his 2022 best-seller, Courtiers. Royal insider Lady Colin Campbell said on GB News a few weeks ago that Low’s book must be the definitive one he had so much access to the people who run the Palace.

On a personal note, I read all of Valentine Low’s work when he wrote for the London Evening Standard around the Millennium. Low left no stone unturned in his lengthy exposés, and it is good to see that he continues to doggedly investigate his subject matter.

Another book I would recommend is Tom Bower’s 2022 best-seller Revenge, which concerns the Sussexes lives. It, too, is packed with detail. Again on a personal note, I read his biography of the late Robert ‘Bob’ Maxwell in the 1990s. Maxwell died an unresolved mysterious death on his yacht. Maxwell was larger than life, both physically and figuratively. Bower’s biography was a page-turner, from start to finish.

I sent both Courtiers and Revenge as Christmas gifts in 2022. I commend them to my readers.

‘Cornered, misunderstood, deeply unhappy‘

Valentine Low’s excerpt, which The Times published on September 25, 2022, explains what happened between December 2019 and January 2020 (emphases mine):

The current set-up was not working for them, and they wanted to go and live in North America. Harry seemed to be under the impression that they could just sort it out by email before he and Meghan got back to London on January 6. The reply they got, however, was that this would require a proper family conversation. They were also told that the first date that the family would be available was January 29. It is not clear if this inflexibility was on the part of Charles, who was due to be in Davos, or that this was the response of his long-time private secretary Clive Alderton, pulling the strings. Either way, from the Sussex point of view, this went down incredibly badly. It fed into the narrative that they were not being taken seriously by the palace machinery, or by the rest of the family.

Harry had tried to speed up matters by arranging to see his grandmother alone before he left Canada. However, the message was conveyed to him that the Queen had been confused about her diary, and was no longer available. Harry was incensed, because it was not true: the courtiers had got in the way, it seemed, because they saw the meeting with the Queen as an attempt to pick the Queen off before Harry started talks with the rest of the family. As one source put it, “There was a danger that a private conversation could be interpreted very differently by two people.”

And so it turned out with other conversations concerning the Sussexes, leaving the Queen to state that ‘some recollections may vary’.

Harry considered travelling directly to Sandringham to see his grandmother:

He eventually dropped the idea, but it was a sign of his frustration that he even contemplated such a move.

Royal diaries opened up early in January 2020:

Given that the couple announced their plans to stand down on January 8, and the royal family met to discuss it all five days later on January 13 — the so-called Sandringham summit — it seems that the family diary was rather more flexible than originally appeared.

Harry and Meghan could be maddening, of course; they had already infuriated the royal family by pushing out their Megxit announcement on January 8 with the minimum of notice when all the talks had been about issuing a joint statement. But the palace also showed the sort of initial inflexibility that was always guaranteed to infuriate them. Harry and Meghan felt cornered, misunderstood and deeply unhappy. If the rest of the institution failed to appreciate that, even if their demands were unreasonable, the departure negotiations were never going to end happily. It is uncontroversial to suggest that the Sussexes would regard the talks as a failure. They wanted to find a compromise whereby they could live part of the year abroad but carry out some royal duties at home. No such compromise was found. Instead, they lost their royal duties, their patronages, Harry’s military affiliations, their security, their income from the Prince of Wales and, for official purposes anyway, their HRH titles. They pretty much lost everything, except for the freedom to do exactly what they want.

This is what I meant yesterday by the mess of pottage.

The courtiers were busy:

In the immediate aftermath of the Sussex bombshell on January 8, when the Queen said she wanted all four households to “work together at pace” to find a workable solution, Edward Young, the Queen’s private secretary, was with the Queen at Sandringham. The first negotiations took place in Clarence House — Charles’s home ground — over the following four days, with the private secretaries and communications secretaries from the four households all trying to find a way to make the Sussexes’ dreams a reality. They gathered in Alderton’s office, a sunny first-floor room where paintings from the Royal Collection sit alongside photographs of Alderton’s own family. Young would join the talks on the phone from Norfolk, but for the first few days it was Alderton who was leading the discussions. (Later, they would all have talks at Buckingham Palace.) Simon Case, Prince William’s private secretary, who is now cabinet secretary, also played a pivotal role. “He was talking to both sides,” said a source.

The people sitting around the table went through five different scenarios, which ranged from Harry and Meghan spending most of their time being working members of the royal family, but having a month a year to do their own thing, to them spending most of their time privately, but doing a select number of royal activities. There was, according to more than one source, a positive atmosphere in the room: they wanted to find a solution. At one stage, Alderton made the point that if they could get this right, they would be solving a problem for future generations of the royal family who were not in the direct line of succession.

Ultimately, the Queen decided that the couple could not be both in and out of the Royal Family:

By the end of the week, the five scenarios had been worked through. The view from the palace establishment was that, however much time Harry and Meghan spent away from royal duties, anything they did would reflect on the institution. That meant that the normal rules about royal behaviour would apply. They should not act or take decisions in order to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves, their family, or their friends.

But the Sussexes wanted their freedom: freedom to make money, freedom to dip their toes into American politics. There was no way for the two sides to reach an agreement on that point. Crucially, it was the Queen who took the view that unless the couple were prepared to abide by the restrictions that applied to working members of the royal family, they could not be allowed to carry out official duties. One source said: “There was a very clear view: you can’t be in and out. And if you’ve got such clarity of view, it’s very difficult to say, ‘Why don’t we go 10 per cent this way instead of 20 per cent?’ ” Compromise was off the table, removed by the Queen.

Low wonders whether the courtiers could have handled the situation ‘differently’, but it seems the previous paragraph would say that they could not have done so. The Queen took the final decision — and the right one, in the estimation of most Britons.

Mismatched expectations

It would appear that Meghan thought she would be the star of the Royal Family, whereas the Palace, rightly, expected her to slot into her role as the Duchess of Sussex.

Low found empathisers with both sides then adds his view:

One former palace insider believes the way the developing crisis was handled was “incompetent beyond belief”. They said: “I think Meghan thought she was going to be the Beyoncé of the UK. Being part of the royal family would give her that kudos. Whereas what she discovered was that there were so many rules that were so ridiculous that she couldn’t even do the things that she could do as a private individual, which is tough . . . It just required the decision-makers to sit around a table and say, ‘OK, what are we going to do about this? What do you need to feel better? And what can we give?’ ”

There is, however, another view: that nothing could have ever saved the situation. The two sides were just too far apart. Another palace source, who has been critical of the Queen’s private secretary Edward Young in the past, said: “I think that it was an impossible task. I think in Meghan and the household, you had two worlds that had no experience of each other, had no way to relate to each other, had no way to comprehend each other. And Meghan was never going to fit in that model and that model was never going to tolerate the Meghan who Meghan wanted to be. So I think that it was inevitable that they would not be able to work together. I don’t think there’s anything Edward could have done about that that other members of the royal family would have accepted.”

Both things are probably true. There was a collective failure on the part of those who work for the royal family to recognise that there was a serious problem, to flag it up, and to try to do something about it. There were no high-level discussions any time in the first eight months of 2019 — when Meghan was later to say that she had suicidal thoughts and the first clues were emerging that the Sussexes were plotting an escape — about the nature of their unhappiness and what could be done about it.

But even if that had happened, I do not believe that it would have solved the problem. Their grievances were too deep-rooted, and the distance between what the Sussexes wanted and what the royal family felt able to give was just too great. Perhaps the best that could have happened is that the divorce could have been handled without all the acrimony that followed the events of January 2020. One thing is definitely true, however. If there were any failings, they were during the first year or so of Harry and Meghan’s marriage.

There is one final thought on this, and it comes from a surprising source, someone who knows Harry well but remains upset about what Harry and Meghan did. Their view is that perhaps the Sussexes’ departure was not the untrammelled disaster that so many think it was. “There is a part of me that thinks Meghan did Harry the greatest kindness anyone could do to him, which was to take him out of the royal family, because he was just desperately unhappy in the last couple of years in his working life. We knew he was unhappy, but we didn’t really know what the solution would be. She came along and found the solution.”

Dear, oh dear.

The Sussexes ignored staff advice

In an article from January 10, 2020 for The Times, written as the formal separation took place, Low tells us what was going on between the Sussexes and their staff before the couple sent out their statement:

Here's some inside detail from The Times about Harry's negotations with The Firm – and what made him so upset. https://t.co/agYegfj5ai

— Valentine Low (@valentinelow) January 10, 2020

This reveals how Harry has his own sense of the truth:

There was talk of putting out a statement — not the one that was eventually released but a blander version merely confirming that talks were taking place, and giving none of the detail about their plans to become financially independent and to split their time between Britain and North America.

Once more, Harry spoke to the Queen. Versions of how the conversation went differ. According to one narrative she made it clear that he should not go public with his plans. However, a source close to Harry told The Times: “He certainly thinks she said it was fine.”

His closest advisers did not think it was fine. Both Sara Latham, the couple’s communications secretary, and Fiona Mcilwham, their private secretary, argued strongly against putting out a bombshell statement without consulting the other members of the family. Harry and Meghan, however, were determined to press ahead.

The other royal households were given the statement shortly after 6pm on Wednesday. Ten minutes later it was sent out to the world.

It seems that the Duke and Duchess hadn’t listened to their staff on other occasions:

Harry and Meghan’s closest advisers are a devoted team who believe in the values, aims and ambitions espoused by the duke and duchess. But that does not mean that their advice is always listened to: and it also does not mean that some of them are not anxious about their future as the couple carve out their new role.

It also does not mean all of them have been involved in the plans. The Sussexes’ website, sussexroyal.com, was created by Made by Article, a Canadian company, without input from their Buckingham Palace press team. Instead much of the content, criticised for inaccuracies, was created by the couple with Sunshine Sachs, a PR company in New York.

The Sussexes’ most senior advisers are Sara Latham, their communications secretary, and Fiona Mcilwham, their private secretary, both appointed in the past year. Until last year the couple’s household was part of Kensington Palace, home of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and they were a closely knit team and funded by the Prince of Wales.

Then came the falling out and the decision for the Sussexes to set up on their own. In theory they are answerable to the Buckingham Palace team, but in reality they operate as a separate fiefdom. Most staff costs are paid for by the Duchy of Cornwall, but communications staff under Ms Latham are paid for by the sovereign grant.

Public unhappy

Low then explores the view of the general public in January 2020, which was quite negative, especially as their money went towards the refurbishment of Frogmore Cottage, where the Sussexes lived for only a short while:

… the announcement that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex aimed to be financially independent has raised questions about their future income. The duke has personal wealth — the money left to him by his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales — but is supported by money from his father and public cash.

In the narrow streets that surround Windsor Castle, locals grumbled at the cost of a recent renovation to the couple’s residence, Frogmore Cottage, which sits in the castle grounds. Taxpayers paid £2.4 million to renovate the grade II listed building, into which the pair moved nine months ago. Jess Hunter, 28, manager of the Queen Charlotte pub, said: “It seems a bit rich to then turn around and walk away from it all. I like Meghan but she knew what she was getting into when she married Harry. If you don’t want to be a princess, don’t marry a prince.”

About 32 per cent of people thought the decision would “damage” the royal family, while 49 per cent did not. “He’s a normal human being and he’s wanting to carve out a little bit of space for his new family to grow in,” added Michael Smith, 52, a prison officer. “It’s what his mother would have wanted.”

The Sussex Survivors’ Club

The Times featured another excerpt from Low’s book on September 24, 2023.

It gives examples of how unaccustomed courtiers are to incivility — and so should they be. It is hard to imagine what they went through from 2018 to early 2020.

Low takes us back to 2018, when he was part of the press pack on the couple’s South Pacific tour:

It is normally a standard part of a royal tour, the moment when the royals venture to the back of the plane, where the media sit, to say hello and have a chat. But the tour of the South Pacific by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in 2018 was different …

… Harry had looked out of sorts. His relations with the media pack had been prickly and strained. Where Meghan smiled, always putting on her best face whenever she was on show, Harry glowered. On the five-hour flight back from Tonga to Sydney, his press handlers promised that he would come and thank the media for being there. It was only after the plane had landed that the couple finally appeared.

I remember the scene well. Harry looked like a sulky teenager, Meghan stood behind him, smiling benignly. Her only contribution was a comment about how much everyone must be looking forward to Sunday lunch at home. Harry sounded rushed, as if he couldn’t wait to get back into the first-class cabin. “Thanks for coming,” he said, “even though you weren’t invited.”

This was spectacularly rude — and incorrect. The media had been invited to cover the tour. Later, Harry’s staff told him how badly his remarks had gone down. He replied: “Well, you shouldn’t have made me do it.” Harry’s petulant behaviour revealed much about the couple’s deteriorating relationship with their own staff.

So bad did things eventually become that Harry and Meghan’s team would later refer to themselves as the Sussex Survivors’ Club. The core members were Sam Cohen, whom the Queen had personally asked to step in as private secretary and who worked for the couple from after their wedding until the end of their South Africa tour in September 2019; Sara Latham, the former Freuds PR managing partner, hired in 2019 to be in charge of communications; and assistant press secretary Marnie Gaffney. Sources say the team came up with a damning epithet for Meghan: a “narcissistic sociopath”. They also reportedly said on repeated occasions: “We were played.”

Fast forward to the Oprah interview in March 2021, and all close advisers’ support was forgotten:

Meghan takes pains to highlight the difference between the Queen and those who surrounded her. In Meghan’s account, they were the people who refused to help when she was in her hour of greatest need. They were the ones who “perpetuate falsehoods” about her.

Watching Meghan describe how she considered ending her life in the year after her marriage was an uncomfortable experience. And yet a succession of perfectly decent people, all of whom believed in Meghan and wanted to make it work, came to be so disillusioned that they began to suspect that even her most heartfelt pleas for help were part of a deliberate strategy that had one end in sight: her departure from the royal family. They believe she wanted to be able to say ‘Look how they failed to support me’.

Sam Cohen, who had 17 years’ experience of working at the Palace, would frequently say to Edward Young, the Queen’s private secretary, and Clive Alderton, Charles’s private secretary, that if it all went wrong, the Palace needed evidence of the duty of care it had shown to Harry and Meghan. The duty of care was crucial. “[Sam] was a broken record with them on that,” said a source.

But by the time of the Oprah interview, everything the Palace had done to support the couple — including giving them a team that would have done anything to help them succeed — was forgotten.

Instead, Meghan was able to point out all the times the institution had failed her. One of them was when she says she went to the head of HR, where she was given a sympathetic hearing but sent on her way. This was inevitable: HR is there to deal with employee issues, not members of the royal family. Meghan would presumably have known that, so what was she doing there? Laying a trail of evidence, would be the cynical answer.

Another former staff member goes even further. “Everyone knew that the institution would be judged by her happiness,” they say. “The mistake they made was thinking that she wanted to be happy. She wanted to be rejected, because she was obsessed with that narrative from day one.”

Courtiers are unaccustomed to untoward behaviour:

Part of the problem, according to one source, was that everyone in the Palace was too genteel and civil: “When someone decides not to be civil, they have no idea what to do. They were run over by her, and then run over by Harry.”

The situation was not helped by Harry and Meghan’s deteriorating relationship with Alderton and Young. “As things started to go wrong,” a source told royal biographer Robert Lacey, “Meghan came to perceive Young as the inflexible, bureaucratic figure who summed up what was with the BP [Buckingham Palace] mentality, and the feeling was mutual. Young really came to dislike Meghan’s style.” Harry was just as dismissive of the two senior courtiers as Meghan. An insider said: “He used to send them horrible emails. So rude.”

Meghan’s secrecy

If Meghan criticised the courtiers, she was not exactly above criticism herself.

She used secrecy to her advantage:

When Harry and Meghan went to Canada for their six-week break in November 2019, their escape plans were already laid, amid the greatest secrecy. Meghan would not even tell their nanny, Lorren, where they were going. According to one source, she did not know where they were going until the plane — a private jet — was in the air.

Shortly before the end of the year, Meghan confided in a member of her staff that the couple were not coming back. The rest of the team did not find out until they held a meeting at Buckingham Palace at the beginning of January 2020. They found it hard to accept they were being dumped just like that. Some of them were in tears. “It was a very loyal team,” said one.

Money, money, money

By the end of March 2020, Meghan was allegedly panicking about money:

“A royal insider claimed Meghan is terrified because of the financial pressure they are now under and suggested the Duchess has ordered Prince Harry to find a job.” https://t.co/mkTzyOKq9G

— Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 (@ezralevant) April 1, 2020

On March 31, The Express reported:

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry agreed to pay back the money spent for the refurbishment of Frogmore Cottage into the Royal Purse as part of their deal with the Queen. As part of their bid for independence from the Royal Family, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said they want to become financially separate from the Queen and will be looking for new sources of income. Meghan last week was confirmed to have struck up a deal with Disney to narrate their latest documentary Elephant but the Duchess donated the money as the project was filmed before she and Harry announced their departure from the Royal Family.

A royal insider claimed Meghan is terrified because of the financial pressure they are now under and suggested the Duchess has ordered Prince Harry to find a job.

Speaking to US tabloid National Enquirer, the anonymous source said: “This debt is a blow to their ambitious plan to become freewheeling billionaires in the world.

“Meghan is terrified that her dreams of being a Hollywood queen will be destroyed by this financial nightmare and she is insisting that Harry make a move and resolve the crisis.”

The insider however noted the lack of previous working experience could make the search for a new job difficult for the Duke of Sussex.

That is too funny. On a serious note, we see again the mess of pottage looming large.

Harry’s lack of work experience led him to dish the dirt on the world’s most famous royals. I hope he’s happy.

Ending on the present day — January 2023 — it is rumoured that Harry might be offered a contract to be a television commentator in the US on his father’s May 6 coronation.

On January 25, The Express reported:

Prince Harry has been tipped to skip King Charles III’s coronation after two US broadcasters allegedly approached the Duke of Sussex to commentate on the ceremony. The Duke’s potential coronation role was first tipped in this weekend’s Sunday Express where TV companies were suggested to be attempting to lure him to join their media teams. Harry’s relationship with his father and the Royal Family has been frosty after a series of digs levelled at the institution in recent months. Royal correspondent Charles Rae said the couple may still be invited to attend the ceremony but suggested Prince Harry may instead opt to strike a deal with US TV channels to act as a commentator and stay in the US …

Speaking on behalf of Spin Genie, Rae added: “There are also rumours that Harry has been offered a lot of money by two broadcasters to commentate on the Coronation …

Networks CBS and NBC are believed to have approached the Duke to get him joining their reporting team in the lead-up to the coronation.

The Venn diagram: Diana

The intersection of the Venn diagram linking Harry and Meghan is clearly Princess Diana.

On August 4, 2021, at the time the Duchess turned 40, her half-sister Samantha told GB News’s Dan Wootton how obsessed Meghan was with the princess:

‘I think it was a little bit of an obsession, yeah, and a healthy one? In my opinion, no’

Meghan Markle’s half-sister Samantha Markle gives her opinion when asked if she thought ‘Meghan was obsessed with Princess Diana when she was younger’ pic.twitter.com/LDJMgCtQ9s

— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 4, 2021

Here’s the full video, just under 20 minutes long. In it, Samantha discusses how difficult it is to love someone who has caused so much hurt, her disappointment that Meghan has not contacted their ailing father and her book about the Duchess:

As for Harry, Prince Charles’s and Princess Diana’s chef at Kensington Palace, Darren McGrady, says that William and Harry had very different personalities (see at the 1:25 mark).

He says that one day Diana entered the kitchen after the boys had just been in — a favourite place for them to go — and said:

You know, the boys are so different. William’s deep, like his father, and Harry is just an airhead like me.

What more can I say? Nothing.

Cottage pie

In closing, Darren McGrady prepares cottage pie the authentic way. The recipe dates from the 1700s.

There is a note early on in the video that says shepherd’s pie is made with lamb and cottage pie is made with beef, something non-Brits do not realise.

It is also called cottage pie because it was for peasants. Peasants lived in cottages.

But I digress.

Cottage pie was a favourite of Wills and Harry. Perhaps one day, in the years to come, they might enjoy it again together.

End of series

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Harry, Meghan and the mess of pottage

Anyone who missed previous entries in this series can find them here, here and here.

Every time I read about Prince Harry, I cannot help but think of the story of Jacob and Esau.

Mess of pottage

Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage (Genesis 25:29-34). Harry, too, sold his place in the Royal Family for ephemeral media coverage. Who knows what will happen to him in future years?

Like Jacob and Esau (Genesis 27:41), Princes William and Harry are embroiled in a feud, one which the current Prince of Wales is handling with dignity. All being well, in time, perhaps they will mend fences, as Jacob and Esau did (Genesis 33).

The expression ‘mess of pottage‘ is still used today (emphases in purple mine):

A mess of pottage is something immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely more valuable. The phrase alludes to Esau‘s sale of his birthright for a meal (“mess“) of lentil stew (“pottage“) in Genesis 25:29–34 and connotes shortsightedness and misplaced priorities.

It seems pertinent because on January 20, 2023, The Telegraph featured an article, ‘Meghan stays in the shadows as Prince Harry flies solo on Spare publicity blitz’:

“We’re like salt and pepper,” Meghan opined in an interview. “We always move together” …

But, since Christmas, Prince Harry has been left to soak up the limelight alone.

As he embarked on an unprecedented publicity blitz to promote his memoir, Spare, this month, Meghan has remained below the radar – and sent a clear message: This is Harry’s project, not mine …

While the Duchess has backed her husband to the hilt over this deeply personal outpouring, she was not quite the driving force behind the project that many have assumed.

Sources suggest that media-savvy Meghan was slightly more circumspect about the concept of a memoir and may have raised gentle concerns about whether it was the right move.

A January 23 article in the New York Post reported on the article:

Prince Harry’s wife Meghan Markle had previously expressed worries that his recent bombshell memoir “Spare” could ruffle the wrong feathers.

The former actress, 41, had raised “gentle concerns” about the book, wondering if it was the “right move,” sources recently told the Telegraph.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, January 21, The Express reported ‘Royal Family news: Palace have “pulled a blinder” as Harry and Meghan “plan” destroyed’:

The Royal Family have “pulled a blinder” by not publicly responding to the recent bombshell claims from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, with an expert destroying the Sussex’s “ill-conceived game plan” …

More than a week after Harry’s book was released, both Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace have yet to make any comment on the claimes made by the prince.

Edward Coram-James, a PR, reputation and crisis management expert and CEO of Go Up, claimed this shows the Royal Family had a strong “game plan” in place and were prepared for any such accusations, while blasting Harry and Meghan’s strategy as “ill-conceived”.

He told Express.co.uk: “What should the Royal Family do in response to these claims? In a word: nothing. They have pulled a blinder.

“The biggest mistake that they could make would be to respond to any of the allegations. They are simply not serious enough allegations to warrant them breaching their long held code of silence.

“Breaching that silence will imply guilt. Remaining silent gives an air of maturity and remaining above the fray.

“The Royal family have had a game plan and, unlike the Sussexes, whose game plan has appeared ill-conceived and often strayed from, the royals have toed the line throughout.”

Mr Coram-James poured cold water over the accusations made by Harry in his book, adding the Royal Family have only taken a “mild bruising” and “never came close to being on the receiving end of any knock out blows”.

He continued: “The Royal Family know that it will all blow over soon enough, as the news cycle moves on and today’s news becomes old hat.

A scathing, painfully accurate Spare review

My reader Katherine sent in two articles from Dominic Green about Spare. Thank you, Katherine!

These are the best yet.

‘The Tragedy of Prince Harry’ is Dominic Green’s scathing, painfully accurate review of the book for The Washington Free Beacon. I cannot commend it more highly to my readers. It’s long and captivating from the start.

As such, I will excerpt it as briefly as possible:

This is not Prince Harry’s autobiography. It is a biography of a character called “Prince Harry,” assembled from conversations with the real Harry by a ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer. It is to autobiography as one of those Philip Roth novels where the main character is called “Philip Roth” are to fiction, only less tedious. It is fascinating in its way, though not in the way the real Harry intends. It is a collaboration between two unequal partners, one an accomplished ventriloquist, the other believing that he has finally found his voice.

Harry recorded the audiobook, so he knows exactly what is in Spare. He wants us to know that animals give him spirit messages from the beyond. These are usually sent by his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales, who died violently in 1996, when Harry was 12 and his older brother William was 15. The messages begin when Harry is 14. He and William are on safari in Botswana, eating dinner in their tent, when a leopard appears. “Everyone froze,” Harry says. “Except me.”

“I took a step towards it. … I was thinking about Mummy. That leopard was clearly a sign from her, a messenger she’d sent to say, ‘All is well. And all will be well.'”

The leopard lied. Harry is not well. He and William are traumatized by Diana’s death. Their father, now Charles III, struggles to comfort them, and sends them to boarding school. Harry refuses to believe that Diana is dead. He tells himself that she is hiding in a Swiss chalet, and she comes to him in his dreams. Soon, Harry is binge-drinking and smoking weed. Smoking a fat one with his mates in a bathroom at Eton, perhaps Britain’s top boarding school, Harry looks out on the moonlit grounds and meets his spirit animal …

Green provides the passage from Spare, which involves a fox. Harry sees it as a portent some years later:

In 2008, more than a decade later, Captain Harry Wales, now serving as a gunner on an Apache helicopter in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, is camped for the night, drinking hot chocolate and watching the radio. Around one in the morning, a flurry of messages about “Red Fox” come through …

Green gives us the relevant paragraphs then continues:

An Australian magazine had got hold of the story that Harry was in Helmand. He was a target for the Taliban, so his superiors decided to extract him, for his own safety and that of his fellow soldiers. At 24, his active military career was over. The Army made the “spare” a leader, and valued his talents. It gave him a purpose for the first time, and kept him busy enough to forget his sorrows.

The ensuing years see Harry floundering:

Nearly a decade will pass until he meets Meghan Markle in 2016. These are the lost years. The spirit animals fall silent, and Harry self-medicates. He drinks and smokes weed every day. He does coke, magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, and LSD in an effort to lift the veil of reality and stroke the lost leopard. He falls out of night clubs, too drunk to walk. He picks fights with photographers and his own bodyguard. He has panic attacks whenever he meets the public. He stays in Courteney Cox’s house when she is away, drinks loads of tequila, takes loads of mushrooms, and hallucinates that her toilet is speaking to him.

Harry does not explain why Courteney Cox’s talking toilet was a hallucination, but the spirit animals are real. At this point in his life, he cannot explain anything to himself. He is so overwhelmed with loss and grief that he cannot recall his mother. He is trapped in a “red mist,” a rage that he directs at his feeble father Charles, his scheming stepmother Camilla, his cold, conformist brother William, and above all at the British press, which he blames for his mother’s death.

Diana is a leopard, Harry is a fox. Charles is a cowardly lion. William has surrendered his “autonomy,” so he doesn’t get an animal at all. Kate is the bitch who takes William away from Harry. Alone, he unravels further. By 2013, he cannot control his panic attacks and agoraphobia.

Harry is tormented by the death of his mother, which seems to dictate his reality.

Green tells us the truth about Diana, a name that means ‘huntress’, yet the huntress turned into the hunted:

After divorcing Charles and leaving the royal security envelope, Diana fell in love with an Egyptian playboy, Dodi al-Fayed. It was a Fayed chauffeur who crashed that car in Paris, by speeding downhill into the underpass so fast that the Mercedes limo took off, hit one side of the underpass, then ricocheted across into a concrete pillar. Three of the four passengers died. The survivor was the bodyguard who, being a mere mortal, had worn his seatbelt.

Harry cannot name al-Fayed; he calls him “Mummy’s friend.” He does not mention that Diana dumped William and Harry in Scotland with the grandparents, so she could pursue her summer romance with Dodi. Nor does he mention Mummy’s earlier lover, Dr. Hasnat Khan, whom she smuggled into the Kensington Palace apartment she shared with William and Harry. Like Oedipus, Harry is blind to Mummy’s true nature. Diana manipulated the press, too. Before she was taken from Harry, she abandoned him.

Princess Diana was hunted by the jackals, but the Diana she was named for, the Greek goddess, was the huntress. She pursued fame in revenge for Charles’s faithlessness, staging teary confessionals for the cameras and driving the pack of paps at him and his family. Charles retaliated with his own staged confessions. Harry now retaliates with his. The Windsors survived Edward VIII’s dalliances with Wallis Simpson and Hitler. They survived Charles and Diana’s war for public sympathy. They will survive Harry’s assault, too. But will he?

Harry is sure that Meghan never ‘googled’ him and that it was just a sublime coincidence that she wore his mother’s favourite perfume, but Green reminds us of the facts:

Meghan’s childhood friend insists that Meghan was an avid reader of royal biographies, especially about Diana. Meghan was photographed outside Buckingham Palace when she visited London as a teenager. When William married Kate, Meghan blogged about the “pomp and circumstance surrounding the Royal Wedding,” and the “endless conversations about Princess Kate.”

A 2014 photo shows Meghan, sitting in an airport with her laptop, reading about Elizabeth II. In Tom Bower’s recent book Revenge, Meghan’s former business adviser Gina Nelthorpe-Cowne attests that Meghan told her, “I’ve googled Harry. I’ve gone deeply into his life.” Harry tells us that he googles Meghan as he falls in love, but he insists that she, like Diana, is entering the royal circus as a naif. His first “marathon” Instagram session with her happens to fall on what would have been Diana’s 55th birthday. Who is the naif here?

Harry has followed in his mother’s sad footsteps:

Harry and Meghan flee from Britain because they believe that his family is colluding with the press against them …

For the first time, Harry must fend for himself. Like Diana, he has left the royals’ state-funded and highly professional security envelope …

When their children are born, Diana is in the room too. At night, when Meghan and the kids are asleep, Harry slips out and gets high on his own. The clear night sky over Montecito reminds him of the stars over Africa. The Red Fox communes with the spirit of the leopard, but he is never safe. There is no clarity in this freedom. There is no real guidance, either. Meghan, his savior, is pushing him back into the limelight.

Harry must fund his family’s security or risk bringing Diana’s fate upon Meghan and his children. The only way to save them is to sacrifice himself: to sell his story, to seek out the hated camera, to sit with the hated journalists, to dissolve himself in the flashbulbs, to be lost forever in their refractions, and join his mother. “Keeping people tuned to the show, that was the thing.”

Like Hamlet, Harry has now hoist himself on his own petard, the hot wind of his rage and resentment. Like Hamlet, he will fall on his own poisoned sword. Harry, his father’s dim, damaged, delusional, doomed “darling boy,” has sold his family and his soul. Meghan and Moehringer have served him on a platter, like a roast swan at a royal banquet. There is no return after this, only the final act of the tragedy.

On January 19, the Wall Street Journal published Green’s article about Harry’s personal beliefs and how they tie in with those of his contemporaries with regard to Christianity: ‘Prince Harry’s Pagan Progress’.

This, too, is excellent. Excerpts follow:

Harry’s father, King Charles III, may be supreme governor of the Church of England, but when it comes to the inner life, Harry, who was born in 1984, is a typical millennial. Pew Research reported in 2010 that Americans 18 to 29 were “considerably less religious than older Americans.” Twenty-six percent of millennials said they had no religious affiliation, and they were also less likely to pray every day than members of Generation X (41% vs. 54%). Yet the percentage of millennials claiming “absolute certainty” in God’s existence (53%) wasn’t far off the figures for baby boomers (59%) and Generation X (55%) when they were young.

For Harry’s grandmother Elizabeth II, personal faith was indistinguishable from her constitutional duty. King Charles describes himself as a “committed Anglican Christian,” and Harry says he set a “deeply religious” example and “prayed every night.” Harry attended church regularly as a child, obligatory given the Windsor family’s alliance with the church.

Harry was 12 when his mother died in a car crash in Paris. The Christian rites at her funeral in Westminster Abbey couldn’t console him. His only regular contact with the Bible came when a teacher, punishing teenage misdemeanors, delivered “a tremendous clout, always with a copy of the New English Bible.” This, Harry writes, “made me feel bad about myself, bad about the teacher, and bad about the Bible.”

Instead, Harry turned to the animal world:

At around 15, Harry experienced a ritual induction into manhood. Guided by Sandy, a family retainer, he shot a stag. Sandy slit the dying animal’s throat and belly and told Harry to kneel. “I thought we were going to pray,” the prince writes. Instead, Sandy pushed Harry’s head inside the carcass and held it there. “After a minute I couldn’t smell anything, because I couldn’t breathe. My nose and mouth were full of blood, guts, and a deep, upsetting warmth.”

“So this,” Harry tells himself, “is death.” Yet he’s ecstatic. “I wasn’t religious,” Harry writes, “but this ‘blood facial’ was, to me, baptismal.” Finally, he has lived the “virtues” that had been “preached” to him since childhood. Culling the herd is being “good to Nature” and “good to the community.” Managing nature is “a form of worship,” and environmentalism is “a kind of religion” for his father. For the first time Harry feels “close to God.”

This pagan rebirth carries strong symbolic overtones for Harry. Monarchy is a survival from the earliest times. So is the hunt, with its symbolic echoes of religion’s roots in animal sacrifice and seasonal rites. The Windsors live in urban captivity, but their spiritual home is the Scottish Highlands, where the stag is the monarch of the glen. Diana shared her name with the Greek goddess of the hunt—and Harry writes that she was “hunted” to her death, the cameras still “shooting, shooting, shooting” as she lay trapped in the wreckage.

Green concludes:

Harry’s narrative of resurrection bears formal resemblance to the Gospels, but its content owes more to Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and the Californian gospel of self-care. His neopagan progress is that of many millennials—especially those who, like Harry, are white men with no college education. By 2017, Pew found that 38% of Americans 30 to 49 were “spiritual but not religious.” Sixty-seven percent of the unchurched were “absolutely certain” of God’s existence, and 24% “fairly certain.” Fifty-seven percent prayed “at least daily,” but 76% “never” participated in group study or prayer. Like Harry, they are solitary and syncretic, inward travelers with no direction home.

‘Faustian bargain’

On January 9, UnHerd posted an article about Spare: ‘Prince Harry’s Faustian Bargain’.

Its author, Darran Anderson, says:

… The most telling line, which reaches towards the heart of the matter, comes back to the Faustian nature of fame and particularly the media’s gaze and how that can distort, “After many, many years of lies being told about me and my family, there comes a point where, going back to the relationship between, certain members of the family and the tabloid press, those certain members have decided to get in the bed with the devil” … Again and again, in his recollections in interviews and writing, Prince Harry comes back to the media as a baleful destructive force in his life …

What is particularly illustrative and sympathetic about Prince Harry’s relationship with fame is that it was not chosen. In the traditional Faustian transaction, the would-be genius or celebrity sells their soul, knowing that the cost is damnation and believing that the gains will be worth it. With the royals, fame is hereditary, which is as much of a curse as a blessing. The transaction is one-sided. No deal is made and yet the individual assumes precisely the same debt. In a world, even a country, where children are born into horrendous poverty and deprivation, it’s difficult to have sympathy for someone born into immense privilege. Yet it is warranted, given that child we watched walking along forlorn at his mother’s funeral did not choose any of this.

The problem is that Prince Harry is now a man and no longer a lost boy. Though he has chosen an arguably noble route of walking away from an environment that had shunned him, and he has the right to speak his mind and tell his own story, he has not walked away from fame. Sympathy, like any resource, is finite …

It is even more understandable to wish to escape the glare of the lens that played a part in the death of a beloved parent. Having chosen Meghan and America, Prince Harry had the chance to transcend fame and to effectively defeat the presence that has seemingly haunted his life. He could go semi-privately into any number of ventures. Harry was not, after all, a signatory to the Faustian pact. One of the most tragic aspects to what has been unfolding is not just the painful reality of a family schism, but rather that at the brink of escape, Harry decided to return to the table to sign the contract.

… The point where sympathy dissipates is with this issue of fame, the courting of it rather than the walking away. This is where the public’s role in the Faustian bargain comes in. This is what differentiates celebrities from the rest of us, the point of departure, and the judgement can and may well be merciless. By aiming for the echo chamber of the terminally online and the patronage of the American establishment, the wider sympathy is lost. It is especially frustrating as the prince had a chance to get out.

Harry’s case is not helped by a mixed tone of grievance and sanctimony. One moment, he is referring to the killing of Afghan militants as a game of chess, the next he is engaging in flagellation about his previous lack of social consciousness. At its worst, it seems distasteful and condescending, the opposite of a spiritual confessional. It undoes the undoubtedly brave work of speaking about trauma, autonomy, or even his right to speak. As George Orwell put it, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful”, but here even the disgrace feels performative. It feels grubby and out of touch, both too intimate and too remote. It feels, in other words, like fame …

Summer of 2019: too much PDA

Returning to the summer of 2019, where I left off, articles were circulating about the inability of the couple to keep their hands off each other in public.

On August 11 that year, The Sun reported:

MEGHAN Markle and Prince Harry’s friends have “stopped inviting” the couple to dinner parties because they “frown upon their PDAs”, insiders have claimed.

According to the Mail on Sunday, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex make a point of sitting together at events – even if their host has seated them separately.

Meghan’s excuse was that she finds dinner party etiquette:

too “exclusive” and “traditional”.

Tough. You sit where your hosts seat you. In Britain, it often means splitting up couples at table to enliven conversation. No one with any manners minds that.

Harry’s friends found his wife’s American attitudes tiresome:

Along with ignoring the seating plans, insiders have also claimed that the Duchess is openly affectionate with her husband on these occasions which causes Harry’s friends to “roll their eyes” at her “American ways”.

What’s more, Harry’s inner circle has “stopped inviting her to dinner” over the “frowned upon” PDAs (public displays of affection) at the dinner table.

The Sun lays out dinner party etiquette for the uninitated. This would be useful for the Duchess:

While it might not seem like THAT big a deal to sit next to your partner at a party, the high society occasions Meghan and Harry have been attending ask guests to follow the three rules of “placement”.

To avoid sounding too “common” or American, the first rule is that “placement” must be pronounced the French way which involves emphasising each of the three syllables.

The second rule dictates that couples should NOT sit together in case any affectionate behaviour puts others off their meal.

And in order to truly grasp the rules of “placement”, guests must always sit where they have been asked to achieve the perfect, balanced high society table.

‘Snubbing protocol’

And there was more.

Meghan wanted to hold Harry’s hand when it was clearly not the done thing:

Shortly after she married into the Royal Family last year, Prince Harry refused to hold Meghan’s hand at a royal event out of respect for The Queen.

Because she wore jeans to Wimbledon in 2019, she could not enter the Royal Box:

An insider claimed Meghan was a “nightmare” during the visit when her security guards infamously BANNED guests from taking photos of her and her casual attire meant she wasn’t allowed to watch the action from the Royal Box.

They told The Times: “They couldn’t invite her into the Royal Box because she was wearing jeans.”

On August 19, the Mail reported on what the editor of Majesty, Ingrid Seward, had to say about the Sussexes’ protocol breaches:

Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty magazine, suggested that the Sussexes’ attempts to move away from tradition might ‘bother’ the Duke of Cambridge, 35.

Appearing on Saturday’s Channel 5’s documentary William & Harry: Princes At War?, Ingrid suggested that Harry and Meghan had ‘snubbed protocol’ in a way that was unexpected from royals. 

She said: ‘I would think it might bother William a little bit, because he might see the way that Harry and Meghan do things as being detrimental to the business of the monarchy as a whole.’

The couple have faced a growing backlash over the summer over their privacy demands, including holding a top secret christening for son Archie and refusing to tell the public who his godparents are … 

Critics have hit out at Meghan recently for ‘considering herself more of an A-lister than a member of the royal family’, after she selected a handful of celebrity friends for the cover of Vogue. 

Speaking about Harry and Meghan ‘snubbing protocol’, Ingrid said: ‘It wasn’t done in a very royal way, or the way we’d come to expect.’ 

The ‘eco-lecturers’ and their private jet flights

Between August and September 2019, the Sussexes took several trips on private jets.

There is nothing wrong with that other than Prince Harry used one of those flights to deliver a lecture in Italy on how everyone had to cut back on air travel in order to save the environment.

On August 15, The Sun reported on Piers Morgan’s disgust at the couple’s hypocrisy. At the time, he was still co-presenting Good Morning Britain. The British public were also disgusted:

PIERS Morgan has criticised Meghan Markle and Prince Harry after they took a private jet to Ibiza for a six day break – despite the Duke warning of the “terrifying” effects of climate change.

The GMB presenter, who has previously criticised the couple, took to Twitter following the news where he made a dig at the Sussexes.

Sharing an article about their trip, he wrote: “Saving the planet, one private jet at a time.”

Many were in agreement with Piers, dubbing the “eco-warrior” couple hypocrites following the holiday.

One wrote: “You’re absolutely correct, virtue signalling and full hypocrisy!!”

Another agreed adding: “Utterly ludicrous! If you’re going to take private jets, fine but then don’t preach about climate change. Hopeless!” …

According to local reports Harry and Meghan flew to Ibiza with their son Archie Harrison to celebrate her 38^th birthday on August 4.

The jet created seven times more C02 per person than any one of nine daily scheduled flights from London to the Spanish holiday isle.

Harry and Meghan, who took baby son Archie, landed in Ibiza on Tuesday last week – along with publicly-funded Met Police protection officers.

Five Spanish security officers then whisked them to their secluded luxury private villa.

The family returned to the UK on Monday.

It was the second time that the prince had used a private jet in two weeks after he flew to Sicily to attend the Google Camp to deliver a “barefoot speech” on saving the environment the week before.

But Harry has been accused of hypocrisy over his use of private jets following his speeches urging everyone to “take action” on climate change.

In a post on his SussexRoyal Instagram site in July, he wrote: “With nearly 7.7 billion people inhabiting this Earth, every choice, every footprint, every action makes a difference.”

… Buckingham Palace refused to comment on the Ibiza trip.

On August 19, the Mail reported on another private jet trip, to Nice:

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were embroiled in another hypocrisy row today after being pictured leaving the south of France over the weekend in a fourth trip by private jet in just 11 days.

Prince Harry and Meghan, who have been outspoken on environmental issues in recent months, generated an estimated seven times the emissions per person compared to a commercial flight when flying home from Nice.

Photographs of the royal couple and three-month-old Archie showed the family stepping on board the Cessna 680 Citation Sovereign jet on Saturday at about 3pm local time, having arrived in France three days earlier.

Royal experts said the British public do not want to be ‘lectured on climate change by those who don’t do follow their own advice’, while MPs said the trips do not ‘fit with their public image’ they project as eco-warriors. 

The couple are believed to have visited the £15million palatial home of Castel Mont-Alban owned by Sir Elton John and his husband David Furnish overlooking the Promenade des Anglais during their holiday to the French Riviera. 

The trip to Nice came shortly after Harry and Meghan, who married in May last year, had returned by private jet to the UK from Ibiza after a six-night break on the Spanish island to mark the Duchess’s 38th birthday. 

Veteran royal watcher Phil Dampier gave his views about the anger of Britons about the flights and the Sussexes’ behaviour as a whole:

They are not unique – other royals have taken private jets, but they have been criticised over the years as well.

I certainly don’t believe they are getting a bad press because the British public are racist.

It is simply that people don’t like to be lectured on climate change by those who don’t do follow their own advice.

Some families slave away all year to afford one nice holiday and they shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about harming the planet when Harry and Meghan are swanning about in luxury.

It’s really sad to see all the goodwill that people had towards this couple disappear in such a short space of time.

They really need to understand quickly the damage they are doing and take steps to turn it around.

They could start by taking on some of the 1500 patronages of the Queen and Prince Philip, and get out there and do some run-of-the-mill royal jobs and shake a few hands.

Meghan gives the impression she wants to live like a Hollywood star protected by publicists, agents and lawyers and that’s not how the royal family works.

It only survives because there is give and take and the public- who are paying for it – want it to succeed.

If they lose the public’s support they are in trouble.

Sir Elton John stepped in to stop the turbulence, as it were.

The Mail reported:

Sir Elton John today confirmed he had paid for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to fly to and from his £15million mansion in Nice by private jet for a holiday ‘inside the safety and tranquillity of our home’.

The 72-year-old singer claimed he had ensured Prince Harry and Meghan’s flights to and from the French Riviera last week were carbon neutral by making the ‘appropriate contribution’ to a carbon footprint fund.

That angered people all the more. Who among us can do that?

Lol rich people can fly in private jets and lecture people about climate change because they can afford to buy trees and have people plant them or something. What a joke

— Brandon Saario (@SaarioBrandon) August 21, 2019

Unfortunately Elton’s intervention was unhelpful. He should give children in care or those less fortunate than him this once in a life time jet setting experience. H&M can afford to holiday without begging for handouts let alone receiving them. This is not America or Hollywood.

— Pocohuntess (@pocohuntess) August 21, 2019

More flights followed until early September.

The Africa tour

That autumn, the Sussexes toured southern Africa, an official trip of goodwill towards the Commonwealth countries.

They left behind strained relations with their Palace staff.

Even Africa, a place the Queen thought the couple would enjoy, considering Harry’s Sentebale charity was there, could not bring them happiness or escape:

While there, they gave an interview to ITV’s Tom Bradby, who also interviewed Harry about Spare in January 2023. Where they are concerned, Bradby is more a friend than an objective reporter.

The interview with Bradby aired in October 2019, while the then-Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were touring Pakistan, another initiative to show goodwill towards the Commonwealth.

Valentine Low, author of 2022’s Courtiers, wrote:

The first real intimation the public had that all was not well in Meghan’s world came in October 2019, when ITV released a trailer for its documentary, Harry & Meghan: an African Journey. As Meghan spoke to Tom Bradby in a garden in Johannesburg, she spoke about how she had struggled with life in the spotlight as a newlywed and as a new mother. Almost as if she were trying to hold back tears, she said she had found it hard and added, “And also, thank you for asking, because not many people have asked if I’m OK. But it’s a very real thing to be going through behind the scenes.”

The trailer came out while William and Kate were on a tour of Pakistan. The resulting coverage inevitably overshadowed reporting of the last day of the Cambridges’ tour. The Cambridge team was not happy and saw it as a deliberate attempt to knock the Cambridges out of the headlines. Relations between the two households became quite tense.

When the documentary came out, it also showed how far Harry and William had drifted apart. Asked by Bradby about the rift between him and William, Harry chose not to deny it, but said instead, “We are certainly on different paths at the moment, but I will always be there for him, as I know he will always be there for me.”

William, back home after the Pakistan tour, appears to have been taken aback at such a stark portrayal of his brother and sister-in-law’s unhappiness. He realised they were in crisis. The day after the documentary aired, William whatsapped his brother to ask if he could come and see him. This put Harry and Meghan into a spin. What should they do? Initially, Harry was in favour. Then he spoke to his brother again and asked him who he would tell. William explained that he would have to clear his schedule, which would mean telling his private secretary. At that point, Harry said don’t come. He was so concerned that William’s team would leak the visit to the press that he would rather they did not come than risk it getting into the papers. It highlighted once again the dysfunction at the heart of so many royal relationships and that members of the royal family so rarely pick up the phone and speak to each other directly.

The final months

The Times featured several excerpts from Valentine Low’s Courtiers, one of which explained the time before the African tour through to the beginning of 2020:

As one senior source put it, when they gave an interview in the autumn to Tom Bradby of ITV News in South Africa “they had made it clear that they were finding it very difficult. They were anxious and excited to chart their own course, knowing that they had more flexibility as they were not in the line of succession.”

Moves were already afoot to create their own website with the help of the American PR company Sunshine Sachs. The site was originally intended to promote their charitable foundation, but later to explain — when the time came — how they planned to branch out on their own.

As they took an extended break with their son, Archie, now eight months, in Canada, the negotiations over their plans began to take shape. Harry originally contacted the Prince of Wales just before Christmas about spending more time in North America but was told he needed to come up with a thought-out plan, the London Evening Standard reported. When he sent a draft proposal to Prince Charles early in the new year he was told more time was needed to think through the complex implications, particularly over funding.

A source told The Times: “It reached an impasse where his father said, ‘We need to have these conversations in person. This is not something we can negotiate over email.’”

That much was agreed, but Harry also wanted to talk to his grandmother.

“He wanted to go and see the Queen,” a source said. “He has been communicating with her on the phone throughout. He wanted to see her, not to negotiate with her but to talk to her grandson to granny, to say, ‘This is how we have come to this.’” It was intended to be a gesture of respect, rather than an attempt to open negotiations with her.

He called her suggesting that he visit her at Sandringham when he returned home. “She says, ‘Yes, love to see you, come and see me,’” the source said.

Then came what has been described as a “classic” move from the Palace.

“A message was conveyed: ‘Oh, sorry, misunderstanding, she might have said she was available, but actually she is not available.’” Harry, it seemed, had fallen victim to family politics. The source said this was, in part, because the family were worried that he would use anything she said in their meeting as a negotiating tactic. Nothing, apparently, could have been further from the truth. But the result was that Harry was angry and upset at the rebuff.

By the time he and Meghan were back home, their press team was aware that The Sun was on to a story about their plans to spend more time in Canada. It prompted anxious negotiations between the Sussexes and the rest of the family about how to proceed. Should they sweat it out and say nothing, in the knowledge that such delicate negotiations are best conducted out of the public eye? Or should they release a statement and thereby try to set the agenda? The matter was taken out of their hands when the story appeared in Wednesday’s paper under the headline “We’re orf again”.

Never fans of the tabloid press, Harry and Meghan were incandescent. “They were so angry,” said the source.

The final instalment will come tomorrow.

What a sad story. It seems to get more desperate by the day and will not end well.

How people began to see Meghan and Harry in a different light

Last Friday’s post was about the friction between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the then-Duke and Duchess of Cambridge but also Palace staff. (You can read my first post on them here.)

There were other signs that the Sussexes were a rather unusual Royal couple, which might have tainted the public’s opinion of them.

Political ambitions

Just days after their wedding in May 2018, Sebastian Shakespeare wrote an article for the Mail, ‘Why Meghan Markle for President isn’t crazy’ (emphases mine):

Meghan Markle is said to have told a former close associate that her ultimate ambition is to be president of the U.S. The conversation apparently took place after Meghan began her romance with Prince Harry.

‘Meghan was quite clear that she wanted to be president one day,’ the source claims.

It may sound fanciful, but the new Duchess of Sussex has held the ambition since she was a little girl. In 2015, she reportedly told the journalist Piers Morgan that she had not always sought showbusiness success.

‘As a kid, I wanted to be either the president or a news broadcaster like you,’ she told him …

And the claim appears to have caused consternation at Kensington Palace yesterday, with the Duchess giving her official spokesman permission to take the unusual step of issuing a public denial.

‘This conversation you describe with an associate is fictitious,’ the spokesman insisted.

I am, though, not the only one to hear rumours that Meghan still holds political ambitions.

Former Times editor Sir Simon Jenkins says: ‘Her friends and associates affirm that she is a political animal.

‘Such is her fame, she could perfectly well follow a route taken by a certain Ronald Reagan. She might lead for the Democrats against a Republican Ivanka Trump. All I can say is, why not?’

On November 17, 2018, the Duchess practised interfaith outreach in an official visit to a mosque near Kensington Palace:

The Duchess of Sussex is supporting a new charity cookbook, 'Together: Our Community Cookbook', which celebrates the power of cooking to bring communities together. #CookTogether pic.twitter.com/XEclxgQjR4

— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) September 17, 2018

PJ Media reported on the visit a week later, taking their source from The Telegraph:

In yet another shocking failure in a long line of interfaith outreach by Western governments since 9/11, The Daily Telegraph reports today that the American-born Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, has been recently promoting a program associated with the notorious Al-Manaar mosque not far from Kensington Palace. The mosque has produced as many as nineteen terrorists — including “Jihadi John” and his Islamic State “Beatles” who tortured and beheaded Western captives in Syria.

The duchess has helped raise more than $250,000 for the Hubb Community Kitchen operated out of the mosque by promoting a cookbook that royal press agents have billed as celebrating “the power of cooking to bring communities together” …

The Grenfell Tower fire had taken place in June 2017, one of the worst blazes in London in decades. It is still spoken of today. Much community rebuilding had to be done, so one can understand that, but, according to The Telegraph, the Duchess had made earlier, ‘secret visits’ to the mosque:

In February it emerged the 37-year-old royal had made secret visits to the mosque in Westbourne Grove, which has also hosted Princes William and Harry, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn in recent months.

An investigation by the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), the anti-extremism think tank, has linked the mosque, opened by Prince Charles in 2001, to 19 jihadists, including Islamic State executioner Mohammed Emwazi, also known as Jihadi John.

Research by the HJS suggests the mosque was once attended by three of the four “Beatles”, the Isil terror cell charged with guarding, torturing and killing hostages in Syria and Iraq. As well as Emwazi, Choukri Ellekhlifi, Alexanda Kotey and Aine Davis, all from west London, also have links with Al Manaar.

PJ Media pointed out that ITV News had also picked up on the Duchess’s prior visits:

An ITV News report earlier this week reported that the duchess has made numerous unreported visits to the notorious mosque in recent months:

Meghan back in the kitchen in the heart of the Grenfell community, writes ITV News Royal Editor @chrisshipitv https://t.co/TcePknrCFJ pic.twitter.com/gDVyaLsSSA

— ITV News (@itvnews) November 21, 2018

Also:

The Sun reported last night that Kensington Palace was trying to distance Markle from the mosque, claiming that the community kitchen housed in the mosque is an independent project.

But this does raise questions about how royal officials decided to promote an effort so closely tied to the Al-Mannar mosque when reports going back to 2014 chronicled the role that the mosque played in the radicalization of “Jihadi John” and the ISIS “Beatles.”

The move to Frogmore Cottage: strain with the Cambridges

As my post from Friday says, by the time the wedding took place, many Palace staff as well as the Cambridges saw too much tension and outbursts involving the new Duke and Duchess of Sussex. It could no longer be contained.

On November 23, 2018, The Sun reported that the Sussexes were leaving Kensington Palace for the 10-bedroom Frogmore Cottage in the grounds of the Windsor estate:

The brothers have always been incredibly close, but Harry and Meghan are setting up their home in the grounds of Windsor Castle.

The Queen has given them Frogmore Cottage, which is having a multi-million pound refit paid for by the taxpayer.

It will provide ten bedrooms and a nursery for their baby, due in April. The couple are expected to move in next year.

A royal source said: “The initial plan was for Harry and Meghan to move out of their cottage in the grounds of Kensington Palace and into one of the main apartments.

“But there has been a bit of tension between the brothers.

“Now Harry and Meghan don’t want to live next to William and Kate and want to strike out on their own.”

The cosy cottage the pair currently live in as previously home to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge before the couple moved into a 20-room apartment inside the palace.

“They need more room and hope Frogmore Cottage will be ready in time for when they have the baby.”

Frogmore Cottage needs major building work to turn it back into a luxury family home, boasting 10 bedrooms & a new nursery plus space for a gym & yoga studio.

Currently it’s been chopped up into 5 units where palace staff have been living.

News of Meghan and Harry’s decision to leave Kensington Palace comes weeks after it was first reported that Harry and William would have separate courts in the future instead of using Kensington Palace as a joint office for them.

Nearly a year later, on August 27, 2019, The Sun reported that the Sussexes actually wanted to live in Windsor Castle, but the Queen said no:

MEGHAN Markle and Prince Harry wanted to move in with his grandparents and set up home in Windsor Castle, reports say.

It’s claimed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex asked the Queen if living quarters in the historic castle could be made available for them after they were married but the answer was a firm ‘no’, so they went on to renovate Frogmore Cottage in the grounds of the estate …

The original castle in Berkshire dates back to the 11th century when construction was started following the Norman invasion of England by William the Conqueror.

Since the time of Henry I it has been used by the reigning monarch.

Henry III built a luxurious royal palace within the castle during the middle of the 13th century which were later expanded upon by Edward III.

Frogmore Cottage, in the grounds of Frogmore House on the royal estate, was built in 1801.

On Christmas Day 2018, The Sun reported that all seemed to be well between the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex at Sandringham:

MEGHAN Markle placed a hand on Kate Middleton’s back in a show of unity as they today brushed aside rumours of a rift for a Christmas Day church service.

The sisters-in-law were all smiles as they joined the royal family at Sandringham for the annual service this morning.

And Meghan and Kate brushed off feud rumours as the former actress placed a hand on the Duchess of Cambridge’s back as they appeared to share a joke.

The pregnant Duchess of Sussex looked radiant in a navy £2,250 Victoria Beckham coat with £1,350 black boots as she held tightly to Prince Harry’s arm.

The Duchess of Cambridge, who wore a £3,000 red Catherine Walker coat and £650 burgundy “Halo Band” made by milliner Jane Taylor, walked apart from Prince William.

Kate teamed the festive look with matching gloves and a clutch bag, while the Queen was vibrant in a grey feathered hat and jacket with a bright pink trim.

Three weeks later, in January 2019, royal reporters were none the wiser about whether a feud was actually taking place.

On January 17 that year, The Daily Caller reported:

According to new reports by royal insiders Katie Nicholl and Leslie Carroll, the Duchesses may not be as at odds as we were previously led to believe.

Contrary to mainstream narratives pushed over the past several weeks, Markle and Middleton may not be feuding as much as  just feeling each other out.

“When [Prince] Harry met Meghan [as] the relationship was progressing, he was really keen to get Kate’s stamp of approval,” Nicholl tells ETOnline. “He wanted them to be close as sisters-in-law. I think they’re still in an early stage of their relationship.”

And while there very well could be some jealousy, that doesn’t necessarily equate hard feelings.

“Possibly, Kate does feel a little eclipsed by Meghan, who’s just come along to such huge media interests, public interests and being so successful from the start,” Nicholl added.

Of course, Harry and Meghan’s decision to move out of Kensington Palace this year — a rare decision for the Royal Family, who usually resides together at the palace during most of the year — fanned the flames of a rumored feud. It didn’t help that a report that Middleton left a meeting with Markle in tears before her May wedding quickly dominated headlines for weeks …

For what it’s worth, Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty Magazine, isn’t buying the candy-coated reporting.

“People forget Meghan is an LA girl,” Seward suggested. “It’s very different for her to suddenly come here and marry into the royal family…I think Meghan thought she had an ally in Kate…Kate was pregnant and unwell. And then she had a new baby. So she couldn’t give Meghan the attention she expected. And I think that’s when things started to sour.”

So is it a case of misunderstanding? Or did the two women get off on the wrong foot? We’ll have to wait and see…

On February 5, The Daily Caller told its readers that it was Princes Harry and William who were allegedly feuding, not their wives:

Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton’s alleged feud is reportedly really between Prince Harry and Prince William after the eldest offered some “brotherly advice.”

It reportedly happened when Prince William shared that he was “quite concerned that the relationship [with the Duchess of Sussex] has moved so quickly,” Katie Nicholl said in a clip from TLC’s “Kate v. Meghan: Princesses at War,” per E! News Monday. 

And that “‘You know, this seems to be moving quickly. Are you sure?’ And I think what was meant as well-intended brotherly advice, just riled Harry,” she added.

That advice reportedly translated to Harry that William wasn’t behind his decision to marry Meghan Markle.

Nicholl continued, “Harry is hugely protective of Meghan. He saw that as criticism. He interpreted that as his brother not really being behind this marriage. And I don’t think things have been quite right ever since.”

However, royal biographer Lady Colin Campbell explained that the alleged distance between the brothers is all about Markle’s influence on her husband.

“Everything I hear is that Harry is completely beguiled by Meghan, and completely enthralled to her and has changed considerably,” Lady Campbell shared.

Baby Archie

On March 4, 2019, Gateway Pundit‘s Niall McCrae didn’t sit on the fence when discussing the Duchess of Sussex’s baby shower:

Keep your seatbelts on, folks. According to Vanity Fair, Meghan revealed at her baby shower that her imminently expected will be raised as a gender-fluid child. Of course, this was denied by Buckingham Palace. But nobody would be surprised if this progressive princess, supported by her widely popular and slightly wild husband Harry, fully meant what she allegedly said.

It was predictable from the outset that Meghan would be a wrong ‘un (should anyone imply such inference, I attribute none of this to her ethnicity or American nationality, which freshen the Windsorhood). She is the epitome of the self-righteous, virtue-signalling, celebrity social justice warrior. Narcissistic Meghan wants to emulate and exceed Diana, and ensure that in future movies she will be not the actress but the actual heroine.

Never being a fan of Diana, my response to her untimely death in 1997 was coolly detached as I saw all those flowers, all those personal messages from people who never met her. However, Diana obviously fulfilled a need in society, and the outpouring of grief after the tragedy marked a turning point in British culture, from the traditional stiff upper lip to open emoting. As Tony Blair said when taking office earlier that year, ‘A new dawn has broken, has it not?’

We all wish Meghan and Harry a healthy and happy child. A boy is rumored, and perhaps that explains the gender fluidity. As a devout feminist, Meghan would probably be less keen on undermining the sex of a daughter: instead, she would be raised a strong female, preparing to right the wrongs of the patriarchal world.

On Monday, May 6, The Independent reported on ancient rules regarding royal custody of grandchildren. Keep in mind that this now pertains to King Charles:

… there is a fascinating law in place that means that Prince Harry and Meghan may not always have full legal custody of their child.

More than three centuries ago, a law was enacted that means the sovereign has full legal custody of their minor grandchildren, royal expert Marlene Koenig explains.

The law, called “The Grand Opinion for the Prerogative Concerning the Royal Family,” was introduced by King George I in 1717.

“George I did not get along with his son, the future George II,” Koenig tells The Independent.

“I believe it came about when the Prince of Wales [George II] did not want to have the godparent for his son that his father wanted – so George I got Parliament to come up with something.”

This means that when Charles, Prince of Wales becomes sovereign, he will have custody of his minor grandchildren.

According to Koenig, issues surrounding the law arose in 1994 when Diana, Princess of Wales separated from Prince Charles.

Diana expressed wishes to take their sons, Harry and William, to live with her in Australia, but couldn’t due to the regulations laid out by the custody law …

Hmmm …

CNN tries to trap Trump on Markle

On June 1, CNN tried to trap President Trump into saying that the Duchess was ‘nasty’. Instead, he said (29-second point in the video):

No, I didn’t know that she was nasty.

Here’s the full exchange:

Fake News CNN is at it again, falsely claiming President Trump called Meghan Markle "nasty." Here is what he actually said. Listen for yourself! pic.twitter.com/kLuPXBLMhf

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 1, 2019

REPORTER: She said she’d move to Canada if you got elected. It turned out she moved to Britain.

TRUMP: There are a lot of people moving here [to the U.S.] So what can I say? No, I didn’t know that she was nasty.

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 1, 2019

FAKE NEWS is truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 1, 2019

Another Twitter user, since deleted, observed — nearly correctly:

List of women Trump has used the word “nasty” to describe: -Hillary Clinton -Nancy Pelosi -Meghan Markle -Kamala Harris -San Juan mayor -Danish prime minister.

August 2019: the turning point

Valentine Low, the author of 2022’s best-seller Courtiers, tells us that, by August 2019, things were unravelling quickly for the Sussexes, who already had a US PR team lined up:

By August 2019, things were “awful and tense” within the Sussex household. There were also clues that Harry and Meghan did not see their long-term future as working members of the royal family. Their Africa tour was coming up, but there was nothing in the diary after that. Meanwhile, staff were increasingly aware of the presence in the background of Meghan’s business manager, Andrew Meyer, and her lawyer, Rick Genow, as well as her agent, Nick Collins, and Keleigh Thomas Morgan of Sunshine Sachs. The US team had been very busy, working on deals not only with Netflix but also a deal for Harry’s mental health series for Apple+ with Oprah Winfrey and Meghan’s voiceover for a Disney film about elephants.

The most the public knew at the time was that the Queen had arranged for the couple to go on a tour of Africa, as part of a goodwill sign towards the Commonwealth countries there:

While preparing for the Africa tour, the team was trying to persuade the couple that it would be appropriate to do an interview with the British media. Sam Cohen suggested Tom Bradby of ITV, who already had a relationship with Harry. Meghan was reluctant at first. Her attention was focused on the prospect of doing an interview with Oprah Winfrey. After thinking about it, however, Harry said they would agree. There was one proviso: he and Meghan could not do interviews together or be in the same shot. That would go against their deal with Oprah, which at that point was slated for the autumn of that year. (It eventually went ahead more than a year later, in March 2021.)

The Express was on to the Sussexes at that time.

On Saturday, July 28, the paper reported that the Sussexes’ job vacancies were no longer on the Clarence House recruitment site:

The American and the Duke of Sussex are no longer listed on the recruitment page of Prince Harry’s father Prince Charles’ website. Prince William and wife Kate however, remain there. One family friend said of Harry: “He wants to control everything and everyone he’s involved with. How he’s going to pay for it is another question.”

Under the recruitment tab of the Clarence House website vacancies are listed for staff keen to work for Charles and Camilla and the Cambridges.

Regardless of there being any vacancies available, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were listed at the top of the site, along with Charles, Camilla, William and Kate.

The couple are no longer there.

The suspicion the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have now split from Prince Charles on his website also raises questions about funding.

The costs of Harry’s office and his royal duties are met by a stipend from the Prince of Wales.

Between them Harry and William share about £4million a year, with the lion’s share going to the direct heir to the throne.

But without his father’s support, Harry would have to turn to the Queen for funding – and she already has a lengthy list of people to support.

… Meghan and Kate seemed to have patched up their differences with a visit to Wimbledon this summer.

But Meghan and Harry aides sparked outrage when it emerged there were rules on how to approach them in Windsor.

The Sun reports neighbours are advised against initiating conversations with the couple.

However, if Meghan or Harry start a discussion they are welcome to exchange pleasantries with the young couple.

They are also asked not to play with the couples’ dogs or request to see their baby, the report claims.

On Thursday, August 1, The Express had a follow-up article:

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry made big changes in their lives during recent months as they simultaneously became parents for the first time. The royal couple split from their charity partnership with Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge in January. Three months later it was announced Prince Harry would team up with US talk show legend Oprah Winfrey on a new TV series about mental health.

This was followed by the birth of their first son Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor on May 6, 2019.

Since then, Meghan and Harry have planned a forthcoming royal visit to South Africa in autumn.

They also raised eyebrows after citing their intention to raise Archie as a “private citizen” despite him being seventh-in-line to the throne.

The royal baby lives with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex at their Windsor Estate home where they can maintain strict privacy …

Her mum, Doria Ragland, lives in Los Angeles where she is a yoga instructor.

Doria has crossed the pond to visit her daughter and grandson but a royal expert has now revealed Meghan may be looking to set up house over there.

Emily Andrews told Yahoo’s The Royal Box the Duke and Duchess of Sussex may well purchase a property in the USA for work and personal reasons …

The royal expert did not suggest that any purchase would mean a permanent move to the United States …

She and Harry are expected to travel to the Queen’s official Scottish residence, Balmoral Castle, along with other senior royals this summer.

The idyllic holiday home becomes the Queen’s two-month break from royal duties every July and August.

Vogue

On August 2, Meghan’s issue of Vogue that she had guest-edited appeared on the shelves.

The Spectator rightly objected to the Duchess’s perceptions of life. She appears to think that it’s not what you do that matters, it’s what you look like that counts. Look at Harry in the photo — a completely different person:

"The message behind Meghan Markle’s choice of @voguemagazine cover stars was clear: you are moral not because of what you do but because of who you are – be it female, transgender, black or freckled," writes Joanna Rossiterhttps://t.co/hKvhKeAXlz

— The Spectator World (@TheSpectator) August 1, 2019

The issue featured the Duchess’s supposed heroines.

Author and journalist Douglas Murray wrote about it for UnHerd — ‘Meghan and Harry are playing a dangerous game’:

… Meghan Markle, otherwise known as the Duchess of Sussex, has guest-edited the September edition of Vogue. The contents of the issue are perhaps unsurprising. As well as inevitably celebrating prominent women, such as the teenaged school truant Greta Thunberg, the Duchess has also set out to prove that women don’t need men to give them status. Something she has done by including an interview with her husband, Prince Harry.

This in itself has drawn a certain amount of comment, and will not have calmed fears some people had that a highly political figure marrying into the nation’s most necessarily non-politically opinionated family might cause problems down the line. The fact that Meghan Markle’s pre-Harry politics might be best described as ‘woke’ is in some ways unimportant – a prominent Donald Trump-supporting Republican marrying into the Royal Family would raise similar concerns, to say the least.

The worry was that Prince Harry’s marriage to Ms Markle would end up tipping him towards her political path, fears that will not have been calmed by his appearance in the high-end fashion magazine. In the royally-guest-edited issue, Prince Harry talks about a number of things, the headline-grabber being his claim that he and his wife would not have more than two children because of its impact on the environment and climate change …

It is the Prince’s follow-up comments, however, that dish up the problem, less for his audience than for the Prince himself. Watching Prince Harry beginning to play the game of identifying ‘unconscious bias’ is like gazing at a hapless amateur juggling with loaded pistols; it is enough to make any well-disposed person want to scream “Stop” and seize the guns from his unsuspecting hands.

The comments appear in a conversation between the Prince and primatologist Dr Jane Goodall, on the subject of what humans can learn from chimpanzees. At one point Dr Goodall says that children do not notice skin colour, to which Harry adds: “But again, just as stigma is handed down from generation to generation, your perspective on the world and on life and on people is something that is taught to you. It’s learned from your family, learned from the older generation, or from advertising, from your environment.” Well perhaps …

One of the most extreme forms of – generally unconscious – bias that people demonstrate throughout their lives is towards attractive people, and not only in the selection of partners. Study after study shows that good-looking men and women stand a better chance of promotion in their chosen field of work than people who are average-looking or actively unattractive.

For instance, it may be carefully suggested that the editor of September’s issue of Vogue would not be editing September’s edition of Vogue if, rather than the acclaimed beauty she is, she looked rather more like a member of the Addams family. Or indeed an average-looking member of the general public. There may be many reasons why Prince Harry requested Meghan Markle’s hand in marriage, but her looks must have – consciously or otherwise – at least counted in her favour on the way to the altar.

Another form of bias that people express throughout their lives – again, consciously or otherwise – might be an inclination towards someone who is financially or socially secure. I should never want to accuse a Duchess – or any other member of the Royal Family – of any variety of bias. And yet it seems possible that in her search for a husband Ms Markle may have demonstrated some form of bias (unconscious or otherwise) towards thrones and their heirs. I will put the point no stronger. But in her search for love, Ms Markle must have met many people. Perhaps she met many princes and mingled with many a duke. But it is striking, at the very least, that of all the people who appeared across her path, the one she ended up marrying in a low-key ceremony at Windsor Castle happened to be the second son of the Prince of Wales.

Balmoral no-show — part 1

It was a given that the Royals joined the Queen during her summer holiday at Balmoral and participated in her favourite country pursuits.

However, the Duchess was fussy.

On August 11, The Sun reported:

MEGHAN Markle might fake a headache to avoid taking part in blood sports when she visits the Queen in Balmoral, a royal expert has claimed.

Sports like hunting and fly fishing are much-loved group activities at the Queen’s summer retreat in the Scottish highlands.

With a 50,000 acre estate comprising of grouse moors, forestry and farmland, animals to hunt are in no short supply in Balmoral.

But the Duchess of Sussex, 38, who follows a vegan diet during the week, isn’t a fan of hunting – despite her husband Prince Harry being taught from a young age.

Writing for the Mail on Sunday, royal editor Robert Jobson said: “Meghan, however, who rather disapproves of such blood sports, may choose to feign a headache.”

BBQs and picnics are thought to take place daily at Balmoral, regardless of the Scottish weather, as the royals are so fond of all things outdoorsy.

“It is hunting which is perhaps the biggest passion”, Robert added of the royal hobby, which includes shooting birds and deer.

“Her Majesty shot her last stag in 1983 near to the Spittal of Glenmuick, in a spot that is now called The Queen’s Corry.

“But she still attends shoots and drove Kate to a grouse shoot when the couple visited a couple of years ago.”

This I did not know. Wow:

The Queen was taught to stalk deer by her late cousin, and best friend, Margaret Rhodes.

Returning now to Meghan:

Earlier this week, a source told Fabulous pescatarian Meghan would try fly fishing to appease her father-in-law Prince Charles.

They added: “But there will no softening on Meghan’s stance against hunting, any stag or deer hunting fills her with horror.

“Venison will not be one of her menu choices for sure.”

However, the Queen was also fussy. And, after all, Balmoral was her estate.

Five days later, on August 16, The Sun told us that Her Majesty despised ripped jeans and wedge heels. Meghan loves both:

It has been reported that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will make their first trip to the Scottish castle this summer, but the Queen has her firm views on correct attire.

Speaking to Fabulous Digital, the source said: “The Queen is no favourite of jeans so the US boyfriend look and ripped jeans will be left in Frogmore Cottage along with any wedges which her Majesty hates with a passion.”

Meghan Markle has often demonstrated she is a fan of wearing denim, and recently caused a stir when she showed up at Wimbledon wearing jeans …

It is thought this year Meghan will visit the castle for the first time, where the Sussexes will be given their own wing, as well as enjoying a traditional afternoon tea with Her Maj.

A source told the Sun on Sunday: “The Queen and Prince Philip adore the couple and, of course, their new great-grandson Archie, and they have invited them to Balmoral for a few days.

“It is testament to Meghan that she has been given this invite. It’s a huge honour.”

However, they did not go, according to the Mail‘s September 6 report:

aides insisted the Sussexes were too busy working on charitable projects to join the Queen at Balmoral this weekend …

There had been rumours that the Sussexes would be joining the monarch at Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands this week with their baby son Archie.

But while most of the Royal Family have made the long trek up to Aberdeenshire, Harry and Meghan actually have no plans to fly to Scotland at all.

Sources close to the couple insist that the decision should not be seen as a ‘snub’ – and Harry only rarely goes up to the Queen’s Deeside estate nowadays.

The US Open

Instead, the Duchess made plans to fly to New York to see her friend Serena Williams compete at the US Open.

Serena Williams was said to be hesitant as she lost at Wimbledon when the Duchess was in the stands:

Despite the long flight and a stressful delay for Meghan, sources have claimed that Williams’ coaches aren’t massively thrilled that the Duchess has come to support her friend, as she could distract her from the game in hand.

They are said to be concerned due to the fact that Williams lost when Meghan attended her last match at Wimbledon.

A source told Page Six: ‘Serena asked her coach about Meghan coming when she won last night and everyone is worried, as tennis players are very superstitious, and Serena lost when Meghan came to watch her at Wimbledon.’

The source added that Williams’ aides were concerned that the trip was a publicity stunt.

However Williams is said to ‘adore’ Meghan and ‘wouldn’t have a word of it’.  

It is not yet known where in New York Meghan will be staying and who she will be staying with, however she is thought to have flown first class for the two-day trip across the Atlantic.    

It comes just days after her husband spoke out about sustainable travel at an environmentally-friendly tourism event in Amsterdam. 

And last month he is understood to have given a passionate barefoot speech about saving the planet at Google’s £16million climate change summit in Sicily.

Meghan’s 7,000 mile journey to New York and back is expected to generate 986kg of carbon dioxide. 

The article has a helpful map showing all seven flights that the Sussexes took between August 6 and September 6 in Europe.

Harry excused his flights as follows:

He took a scheduled flight to Amsterdam this week to promote Travalyst, a scheme for environmentally-friendly tourism.

Speaking at the event, the prince refused to apologise for his recent private flights, saying: ‘I spend 99 per cent of my life travelling the world by commercial.

‘Occasionally there needs to be an opportunity [to fly privately] based on a unique circumstance to ensure that my family are safe – it’s as simple as that. 

‘For me it’s about balance. It’s not a decision I would want to take, but if I have to do that, I will ensure that I balance out the impact that I have.’ 

Harry dismissed concerns over his carbon footprint by insisting that he ‘offsets’ his emissions by donating to renewable energy incentives and planting trees. 

Returning to tennis, it seems that Serena Williams’s coaches were correct. Meghan’s presence and Williams’s loss coincided, as the Mail told us on September 8:

Tennis fans have accused Meghan Markle of jinxing Serena Williams last night as she watched the tennis star lose and fail to secure an historic 24th Grand Slam at the US Open, just months after she attended Williams’ defeat at Wimbledon.

The Duchess of Sussex, 38, was called a ‘bad luck charm,’ with fans citing the resounding loss at the Wimbledon final to Simona Halep and the year before at SW19 to Angelique Kerber.

The Royal was the centre of attention in New York as she watched with Williams’ mother Oracene Price but the pair were left disappointed as the former number one was beaten 6-3, 7-5, by Canadian Bianca Andreescu.

Balmoral no-show — part 2

As for Balmoral, the Mail article continued:

Prince Harry and Meghan’s absence from the trip has left Her Majesty ‘hurt and disappointed,’ the Mail on Sunday understands, at a time when she likes to bring her friends and family together at her favourite time of the year.

The Queen is already said to be ‘baffled’ by Meghan and Harry’s inability to steer clear of PR calamities, and is concerned that her beloved grandson and his new wife are failing to listen to their team of advisers.

On September 8, The Sun told us:

THE QUEEN was left “hurt and disappointed” when Meghan Markle skipped visiting Balmoral in favour of her last-minute trip to New York over the weekend.

In opting for the US Open instead:

she snubbed the Queen’s invite to attend the Highland Games – something that proved a disappointment according to royal insiders.

The Mail on Sunday described the move as an “outright snub” adding that Her Majesty “is ‘hurt and disappointed’ at a time when she likes to bring her friends and family together.”

According to insiders the monarch had been looking forward to “a few days of merry chaos” with her great-grandchildren, including Archie who is still yet to visit the Queen’s summer home with Harry and Meghan claiming he is “too young.”

While Meghan was watching Serena Williams:

the Queen was joined by Prince Charles and Camilla at the Braemar Gathering Highland Games on Saturday …

The Queen is currently staying at her nearby summer residence Balmoral where she last night hosted Boris Johnson and girlfriend Carrie Symonds.

But the Prime Minister was forced to cut short the anticipated weekend-long visit after a turbulent week.

One week later on September 16, The Express reported:

The Queen “does not want to talk about the Sussexes” according to claims from a royal insider. People spending time with Her Majesty, 93, have reportedly been told not to mention Meghan Markle or Prince Harry. Leading royal expert Quentin Letts tweeted the bombshell remark this week, claiming it was the only subject that was strictly banned from discussion.

That is really bad.

As the King would say, ‘Dear, oh dear’.

The article continues:

Letts tweeted on Friday: “Friend of an acquaintance was about to go riding with HMQ.

“Was given v firm advice ‘Talk about anything except one subject.’ Brexit? ‘No, The Sussexes.'”

This comes after claims of clashes within the royal family.

The Queen was reportedly left “deeply disappointed” by Meghan and Harry’s hostile behaviour.

Several royal sources claimed the monarch was not impressed with the way Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have acted since marrying last year.

She is reportedly “disappointed” with their behaviour as representatives of the British monarchy around the world.

There is plenty more to come about the Sussexes. Stay tuned.

Looking back at Harry and Meghan in old articles

Following on from Wednesday’s post, I have a few bookmarks about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex which are worth exploring in light of Prince Harry’s new book, Spare.

As Harry portrays his situation, nothing the Royal Family gave him was ever good enough. Let’s look back and see what was said at the time.

I will end the post with analyses of Spare for readers’ weekend viewing.

Nottingham Cottage

We know from Spare that he thought Nottingham Cottage — Nott Cott — in the grounds of Kensington Palace, was not an adequate home for him, either single or married.

A Daily Mail article from August 22, 2016, ‘Eugenie’s moving in to Kensington Palace with William, Harry and Kate’, shows us the full palace layout and where everyone lived at the time. What a delightful enclave for family members, young and old alike.

This is what Richard Kay wrote about Diana’s former apartment and Nott Cott (emphases mine):

It is Margaret’s four-storey residence, which also has an eight-car garage, that is now home to William, Kate and their children Prince George, three, and Princess Charlotte, one.

William’s decision to return to his childhood home, the source of memories much happier than those of his late mother, triggered the regeneration. It followed a period of soul-searching and house-hunting.

Clarence House, where until his wedding he had shared an apartment with Harry, was briefly considered until his stepmother, the Duchess of Cornwall, loftily declared: ‘There’s no room here.’

Then there was St James’s Palace next door — but William was said to find it ‘rather gloomy’.

The only other option was Buckingham Palace, but imagine the upheaval — and the angst for Prince Charles — had the popular William set up home in his grandmother’s official residence.

‘It would have suggested a very dangerous message: that the Queen was apparently endorsing her grandson as her successor,’ says a courtier.

Kensington Palace was where William really wanted to live with Kate. But he drew the line at returning to his mother’s old flat, Apartments 8 and 9, because, according to Princess Michael, of the ‘ghosts’ of Diana. (Margaret’s old flat is said to have a ghost, incidentally — a woman in a blue dress.)

After Diana’s death, her apartment was stripped to the bare floorboards. Even the light fittings were removed.

For a decade it was left as a shell before being split into offices for charities, as well as providing a home for the head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff.

Thus William and Kate’s first marital home — KP’s Nottingham Cottage (where Harry now lives) — was of modest proportions. Self-contained, cosy and private, it was formerly the home of Prince Philip’s private secretary, Brigadier Sir Miles Hunt-Davis, and his wife Gay.

Two years later and, after a £4.5 million taxpayer-funded refit, they were ensconced in Apartment 1a, Princess Margaret’s old home.

So, Nott Cott was of modest proportions, yet it was William and Kate’s first home after they married. Harry makes it sound as if it were an insult that he and Meghan were expected to live there as newlyweds.

By the way, Kensington Palace is home to more than members of the Royal Family:

The 50-plus residents include senior courtiers, military figures, domestic staff and even a few members of the public, who pay the market rent for accommodation.

In return, they get 24-hour armed police security, their own telephone exchange and a team of gardeners and craftsmen to maintain the palace, which was adapted for royal use by Sir Christopher Wren.

… Clearly, with so many Royals and VIPs, the security — which we have purposely not highlighted in our graphic — is world-class.

At the time it was built, ‘KP’ was in the countryside:

Originally a Jacobean mansion, KP was bought in 1689 for the princely sum of 18,000 guineas by William III. Suffering from chronic asthma, he hoped to benefit from the Kensington air, which was cleaner than in the city centre, and commissioned Sir Christopher Wren to make it a home fit for a king.

Queen Victoria resisted moves to turn it into a national gallery. And despite similar attempts in this century — part of Prince Charles’s plan to streamline the Royal Family — Victoria’s descendants still live there today.

Here is a little-known fact about the palace and Princess Margaret’s apartment:

… for Diana, haunted by unhappiness, it came to be ‘more prison than palace’. Princess Margaret’s decline from being a vibrant party-goer — and party-giver — was marked by her loneliness, rattling around a 22-room apartment after her divorce from the Earl of Snowdon …

… after a £4.5 million taxpayer-funded refit, they [William and Kate] were ensconced in Apartment 1a, Princess Margaret’s old home.

Veteran palace staff have jokingly wondered whether repairs included the replacement of a loose-fitting drain cover outside the front door.

According to Margaret’s former chauffeur David Griffin, Diana drove over the cover if she had a late-night assignation because the route was not covered by CCTV cameras. He said: ‘Whenever the Princess heard the cover clanking late at night, she knew it was Diana and would peer out. It usually meant Diana didn’t want anyone to see who she was bringing home.’

2017 — engagement year

2017 turned out to be the year that would change Harry’s life permanently.

It is no wonder that the Queen thought that Harry’s future would include Africa. Here he was in October that year with the co-founding patron of the charity, Sentebale — ‘Forget me not’. The charity is in memory of Princes Harry and Seeiso’s late mothers:

Meaning ‘forget me not', @Sentebale was founded in #memory of the mothers of our Co-Founding Patrons, Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso pic.twitter.com/9E3wZ3IHQJ

— @Sentebale (@Sentebale) October 17, 2017

In November 2017, Harry and Meghan announced their engagement.

On January 24, 2018, Vanity Fair explored how the couple met. Note that no sooner had he slipped a ring on her finger than a television film was in the making (original emphases in bold):

Well, it is looking like they are going to have to hire an extra fact-checker or two for the forthcoming Prince Harry–Meghan Markle Lifetime movie, as the details relating to the pair’s “origin story” grow increasingly . . . complex.

Let’s recap: in November, on the day their engagement was announced, the shimmering couple sat down for a joint interview with the BBC, where they were asked how they met. (In their case, the circumstances of their meeting—given the very separate spheres, not to mention continents, they each occupied—held special intrigue.) Meghan and Harry explained they had been set up by a mutual friend—but, just as it appeared Harry might let slip the friend’s name, Meghan cut him off, and said they would try to maintain “her” privacy. Yes, her!

Of course, this clue had the British press off to the races …

The press came up with several names, all of which turned out to be wrong. Finally, the matchmaker’s name emerged:

But now E! News has come along and . . . added a new dimension to the mystery … the outlet claims that it can confirm that the actual “real heroine of this love story” is Violet von Westenholz (whose name had also been bandied about back in November). Who is she? Well, her father is a baron and friend of Prince Charles, and she has, according to E!, “been in Harry’s trusted inner circle of friends for years.” (Curiously, Violet’s younger sister, Victoria, had once been romantically linked to Harry, in fact.)

Harry had been concerned about finding the right woman:

E! offers this pretty amusing sourcing about Harry’s state of mind before meeting Markle, which touches on . . . the possibility of his using Tinder: “Harry was having a really hard time finding anyone. It’s hard enough finding someone new to date. He can hardly go on Tinder or a dating app like normal people, but to meet someone that you actually connect with, that was proving to be almost impossible. It was something he had confided in his closest friends about; he was ready to meet someone but it was so hard to actually find the right person.”

It was at about this point when von Westenholz encountered—yes—a star of USA’s Suits with a lifestyle blog named Meghan Markle. The two reportedly “became friends through Violet’s P.R. work” with Ralph Lauren. E! says that Markle had “been a part of the London social scene for a while,” and that, with the knowledge that Harry was looking for love, as it were, Violet put two and two together and let Harry know “she might just have the perfect girl for him.”

Von Westenholz has, unsurprisingly, not responded to E!’s request for comment about her role in the relationship.

At the bottom of the article is one of the engagement photos. Why does Harry have a problem with the placement of his right hand? He always looks as if he’s trying to hide something with it. Two fingers are often out in a horned gesture. Perhaps his therapist could explore that a bit more with him. It might unlock secrets of his psyche.

The Markles speak out

Members of the Markle family spoke out in the weeks before the wedding on May 19, 2018.

On May 2, the Mail featured an article on the April 26 letter that Thomas Markle Jr sent to Prince Harry. He wrote it on yellow lined office pad stationery, the sort that is available everywhere in the United States. Markle shared it with In Touch magazine.

Excerpts from ‘Meghan Markle’s brother warns Prince Harry to cancel royal wedding’ follow:

Elder sibling Thomas Markle Jr has warned the 33-year-old royal to ditch the May 19 union with the ‘Suits’ actress.

Mr Markle slammed the American star, insisting that 36-year-old Meghan is a ‘jaded, shallow, conceited woman that will make a joke of you and the royal family heritage.’ 

The letter, shared with In Touch magazine reads: ‘As more time passes to your royal wedding, it became very clear that this is the biggest mistake in royal wedding history.’

‘Meghan Markle is obviously not the right woman for you.

‘I’m confused why you don’t see the real Meghan that the whole world now sees.

‘Meghan’s attempt to act the part of a princess like a below C average Hollywood actress is getting old.’

The 51-year-old, who is from Oregon in the US, then went on to claim that their father went into debt in order to support Markle’s acting dream and is still struggling financially. 

He also claims that their father was not invited to the wedding …

Mr Markle accused his sibling of turning her back on the family and said she is ‘falsely’ trying to portray herself as the new Princess Diana.

He told the Daily Mirror: ‘She’s clearly forgotten her roots. It’s torn my entire family apart. Meg likes to portray herself as a humanitarian, a people’s person and a charitable person but she is none of those things to her family.

‘She is giving the greatest ­performance of her life. She is acting phoney. I’ve read that Meg wants to be like Diana. 

‘Diana was worshipped by everyone in the world. She was loved for the right reasons.

‘That’s what Meg wants, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. She’s not genuine like Diana.’

Mr Markle has not seen his sister since 2011 when the pair – and Meghan’s film producer ex Trevor Engleson, 41 – attended the Los Angeles funeral of their grandmother, Doris. 

However, Markle Jr was not without his own notoriety:

Markle believes that his brushes with the law may have embarrassed his half sister who is avoiding him. 

He was in the news at the start of the year when he was thrown in jail for two days for a drunken brawl with his fiancee Darlene Blount on New Year’s Eve. 

Last year Markle was also arrested for brandishing a gun at his fiancee during another drunken fracas, although the charges were later dropped.

He blamed his behaviour on struggling to cope with the extra pressure and scrutiny he and the rest of his family have faced since Meghan’s royal engagement.

New title for Harry

On the big day, Saturday, May 19, 2018, the BBC reported that the Queen conferred upon her grandson a title that had not been used since 1749:

Prince Harry has been given a Scottish title by the Queen.

He will be the third Earl of Dumbarton – a title that has strong military connections and one not used since 1749.

On her marriage, Meghan Markle has become the Countess of Dumbarton.

The title goes back to the time of King Charles II:

The first to hold the title was George Douglas, a younger son of the first Marquess of Douglas, who was created Earl of Dumbarton in 1675.

A Scottish nobleman and soldier, George was given the title by Charles II in recognition of his military service.

On George’s death at St German-en-Laye in France, the title passed to his son, also called George, who became the second Earl of Dumbarton.

The title became extinct when the second earl died in 1749, meaning it has not been used in more than 260 years.

Dumbarton has historical significance dating back to the Dark Ages:

Dumbarton, on the north bank of the River Clyde, to the west of Glasgow was founded in the fifth century and was once the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Strathclyde.

It is the site of a volcanic rock on which stands Dumbarton Castle. During its long history, the castle has been both a royal residence and a fortress.

Dumbarton was a Royal Burgh between 1222 and 1975.

Mary Queen of Scots was kept at the castle as a young child for several months in 1548 for her safety before she embarked for France to become the bride of the Dauphin, the young French prince.

The wedding

In the days preceding the wedding, many Britons will recall the effusive, if not over-the-top, headlines.

The BBC televised the wedding in full. I watched the sermon from Bishop Curry, the President of the Episcopal Church in the United States. Then I watched the couple exchange vows. I remember there was something about that I didn’t like.

Although the ceremony took place in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, there were many American elements to it, as the BBC reported:

It was a traditional wedding – the dress, the bridesmaids, the vows, the hymns. And it was very, very different.

The Palace made it clear in a stream of announcements that they wanted a different kind of wedding.

But it was the service that marked this out as a modern, diverse wedding for a modern, diverse couple: the Kingdom Gospel choir setting toes tapping, a young black cellist, and a breathtaking address from Bishop Curry, the President of the Episcopal Church.

Every royal wedding is a chance for the Royal Family to relaunch and reinvent. There may have been trouble in the week before the wedding. But that is in the past.

This wedding was about the future, a different future for the Royal Family.

And how. Little did we realise it at the time.

The article had a summary of highlights. The BBC omitted mentioning that Prince Charles walked his new daughter-in-law down the aisle, as Thomas Markle Sr had been too ill to attend:

The wedding service combined British tradition with modernity and the bride’s African-American heritage.

The Most Rev Bishop Michael Curry, the president of the US Episcopal Church, gave an address, the Rt Rev David Conner, Dean of Windsor, conducted the service and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, officiated.

“There’s power, power in love,” said Bishop Curry, who was invited to speak by Ms Markle.

“If you don’t believe me think about a time when you first fell in love. The whole world seemed to centre around you and your beloved.”

In a fiery, passionate speech, he also referenced the African-American spiritual song Down by the Riverside, which was sung by slaves, and when he realised he had gone on too long, he told his audience he had better wrap up as “we gotta get you all married!”

Indeed.

Also:

Lady Jane Fellowes, the sister of Prince Harry’s late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, gave a reading from the Song of Solomon.

Karen Gibson and The Kingdom Choir performed Ben E King’s soul classic Stand By Me during the service.

As the bride and groom signed the register, 19-year-old cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason – who won the 2016 BBC’s Young Musician – performed three pieces by Faure, Schubert and Maria Theresia von Paradis.

He was accompanied by musicians from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the English Chamber Orchestra and the Philharmonia.

The gospel choir also performed Etta James’ uplifting version of Amen/This Little Light of Mine as the newlyweds left the chapel.

Afterwards, the couple went into Windsor:

After the service, the duke and duchess travelled through Windsor along a route lined by tens of thousands of well-wishers.

The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead said more than 100,000 people visited the town on Saturday.

The celebrations

Guests seemed to be divided up into two groups for two different celebrations.

The first was the Queen’s luncheon for the happy couple:

All 600 guests were invited to a lunchtime reception at St George’s Hall, hosted by the Queen. The best man, the Duke of Cambridge, acted as compere.

Guests were treated to a performance by Sir Elton John and were served langoustine canapes, Windsor lamb, and champagne and pistachio macaroons. Instead of a formal sit-down dinner, food was served in bowls.

If I were hosting, I would have put my foot down re bowls. Formal or not, it’s an extraordinary occasion. Eat off a plate.

Then again, remember Harry’s words before the wedding: ‘Whatever Meghan wants, Meghan gets’?

Here is a photo of the elderflower and lemon cake:

The wedding cake is to be served at the Reception. It was designed by Claire Ptak and features elderflower syrup made at The Queen’s residence in Sandringham from the estate’s own elderflower trees, as well as a light sponge cake uniquely formulated for the couple. #royalwedding pic.twitter.com/kt5lE4tEn9

— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) May 19, 2018

Royals, celebrities and sports stars attended. The article has a partial list.

As it was not a state event, there were no politicians, only former Prime Minister John Major, who had been:

a special guardian on legal matters to Princes William and Harry after the death of their mother …

Members of the public were invited into the Castle grounds to see the newlyweds. There were 1,000 in all, most of whom were charity workers.

Then came the evening reception, which Prince Charles hosted at Frogmore House, which, in time, became the couple’s home:

On Saturday evening, the newlyweds are celebrating with 200 close friends and family at a private reception less than a mile from Windsor Castle at Frogmore House, hosted by Prince Charles.

Ms Markle was expected to break with tradition for royal brides and make a speech at the event.

No taxpayers’ money was spent:

The Royal Family will pay for the wedding, including the service, music, flowers and reception.

On Monday, May 21, The Sun reported on Meghan’s speech.

The bride’s mother Doria Ragland, 61, attended, as we remember, and wore a beautiful Givenchy outfit. Both she and her daughter had a most positive view of the Royal Family:

MEGHAN Markle declared “I have found my Prince” as she made a romantic speech to her new husband hours after joining the Royal Family.

The Duchess of Sussex bravely took the microphone to profess her love for Prince Harry– while thanking his family for “welcoming” her at the Royal Wedding reception.

In the speech, the US actress particularly singled out the Prince of Wales, just hours after her new father-in-law walked her down the aisle in the wedding of the year.

She is said to have a “special bond” with Prince Charles, grateful of his kindness to her and her mother during the huge change in her life.

Meghan’s mum Doria Ragland, 61, was the bride’s only family member on her big day after Meghan’s dad Thomas Markle dropped out due to health issues …

According to one source, the Duchess of Sussex expressed her gratitude to Prince Charles at how welcoming he had been to both herself and her mum.

They told the Daily Mail: “She has been so touched by how welcoming the Prince of Wales has been. So is her mother.

“Honestly, they are touched beyond belief. It was important to her to make a point of thanking him publicly, although, of course, he knows privately how she feels.”

Another source told the newspaper: “It is often said that he always wanted a daughter and I think he has been really moved by how well they have got on.

“There is definitely a connection there. Meghan’s mother means more to her than anything, so it was lovely to see the way he was so welcoming to Doria too.”

The evening reception took place in:

a £300,000 glass marquee in the grounds of Windsor Castle paid for by Prince Charles.

Harry’s dad left guests in stitches with a speech about changing his nappy, while the groom delighted everyone when he referred to Meghan as his “wife”.

Jubilant guests were later treated to an incredible firework display that could be seen for miles around Windsor as the Royal Wedding was brought to a close.

The Sun said that, earlier, Thomas Markle Jr retracted the sentiments he had penned in his aforementioned letter to Harry:

… he has now backtracked on his scathing comments – branding it a “moment of madness”.

There was a bit on the clothes:

The loved-up pair gazed at each other during the ceremony, with Meghan wowing in her spectacular gown by designer Clare Waight Keller of Givenchy.

She teamed it with a dazzling Mary Diamond Bandeau tiara – lent to her by the Queen.

The article made one mention of:

star-studded guests that had gathered at the couple’s reception at Frogmore House on Saturday night.

That was because there was another article about them and much more to read about this special day, including, but not limited to, the following:

• • Meghan wore Diana’s ring as Harry drove the pair to their star-studded reception after tying the knot
  • Meghan changed out of her Givenchy wedding dress into a bespoke lily white high-neck silk crepe gown by Stella McCartney for the party
  • Celebrities including George and Amal Clooney, the Beckhams and Oprah Winfrey partied the night away at the lavish bash
  • Elton John entertained guests by singing his hit songs ‘Tiny Dancer’, ‘Your Song’ and ‘Circle of Life’ at the party
  • Prince Charles ‘had reception guests in stitches’ with gags about changing Harry’s nappy before a glittering firework display

Harry’s friends’ hurt feelings

However, not everyone who thought they would get an invitation to the evening bash received one.

On May 21, Katie Nicholl, Vanity Fair‘s royal reporter, had quite the list in ‘Some of Prince Harry’s Old Friends Were “a Bit Surprised” to Not Be Invited to the Evening Wedding Reception’ (bold emphases in the original). This is why I think there were two groups of guests:

While George Clooney was the last man standing at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding party and James Corden had guests in stitches with his hilarious jokes, some of Harry’s oldest pals were left wondering why they hadn’t been invited to the party of the decade. Below, a few of the old friends who didn’t make the cut.

While she was at the wedding and afternoon reception at Windsor Castle, Violet von Westenholz wasn’t at the evening party. Having played cupid—it was von Westenholz who gave Harry Meghan’s number after suggesting they meet—von Westenholz was notable by her absence. Perhaps she had double-booked, as she was seen at the wedding of Harry’s old chum Ed Watson to Cara-Louise Pratt later in the evening.

While Harry generously extended wedding invitations to his exes (he thought it was the right thing to do, according to one of his pals), neither Chelsy Davy nor Cressida Bonas got a golden ticket to the bash. Though reports claimed Davy was there, a family friend told Vanity Fair that she didn’t get an invite to the party, despite speaking to Harry in a tearful phone call last week. “It was their final call, a parting call in which they both acknowledged Harry was moving on. Chelsy was quite emotional about it all, she was in tears and almost didn’t go to the wedding. In the end, she went and promised Harry she wouldn’t try and gatecrash the party.”

There was also no invite to either the wedding or the reception for Harry’s old party chum Natalie Pinkham. The prince has known Sky Sports presenter Pinkham for more than 10 years and they stay in regular touch. “Natalie was a bit surprised not to be there,” said a source who knows them both. “She and Harry still talk so it was a surprise for her not to be invited at all.”

Another society nose out of joint was that of Astrid Harbord, one of the prince’s oldest friends, who has a reputation for being a party girl but wasn’t at the party of the decade. Harry’s old army pal James Blunt and his wife, Sofia Wellesley, were also left off the elite evening guest list. “Some of Harry’s pals were a bit surprised not to get the golden ticket to the evening party,” said a society friend. “There was actually another wedding that weekend that a lot of them were invited to, so they got to have fun in any case.”

Prince Charles’s 70th birthday charity party

On Tuesday, May 22, 2018, the Queen held a garden party for the then-Prince Charles in honour of his 70th year.

He was born on November 14, 1948, but, beginning with the garden party, special celebrations and exhibits marked his birthday year.

A bee plagued Harry during the speech he gave in honour of his father. Meghan stuck her tongue out. (Why?)

The Sun reported, complete with many photos of the new bride:

MEGHAN Markle was left giggling as her new husband tried to swat away a bee as he gave a birthday speech for his dad.

The US actress couldn’t help but smile as Prince Harry was buzzed by the insect during a 70th birthday bash for Prince Charles.

At one stage the playful royal even seemed to stick her tongue out as her new hubby struggled with the persistent pest – a flashback to Christmas Day when she did the same at Sandringham.

Prince Harry had been speaking about his dad’s “selfless drive to affect change” to the garden party crowd at Buckingham Palace when he was forced to swat away the insect …

But as he tried to go on, the 33-year-old interrupted himself – waving a bee away and saying: “sorry, that bee really got me.”

While many in the crowd laughed, none were more amused than Meghan.

The new royal burst out laughing, leaning forward as she was overcome with giggles at her new husband’s mishap.

She also exchanged smiles with Prince Charles and Camilla as they chuckled at the insect’s ill-timed interruption.

The second-in-line to the throne appeared to be slightly embarrassed by his son’s praise during his speech, bashfully tapping his cane on the floor as Prince Harry addressed the crowd.

Meghan today seemed comfortable with her in-laws as she attended her first official event as a royal.

That sentence reads a bit oddly with the addition of ‘today’, as if she had been uncomfortable in the past. Hmm.

Analysis of Spare

Moving on five years to the present day, we see a different Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

Dan Wootton, who writes for the Daily Mail and hosts a two-hour GB News show every Monday through Thursday, has devoted the week to discussing Spare as well as Harry’s interviews.

On Monday, January 9, his column began as follows:

If the Queen Consort Camilla is ‘dangerous’ and a ‘dragon’ for working with the British free Press to improve her reputation, then Prince Harry and Meghan are themselves dragon slayers.

We’ve now had to sit through hours of a grim fantasy created by the embittered Sussexes, most recently outlined in painful softball interviews by their BFF Tom Bradby on ITV in the UK and woke US media allies Anderson Cooper on CBS and Michael Strahan on ABC.

The fairy tale goes that this selfless and altruistic couple were forced to smash relations with their British royal relatives and flee the country because of a vicious briefing campaign launched against them, even seeing the Press conspire with the institution and senior members of the Royal Family to drive out such a popular pair.

That narrative is deranged.

It’s a hypocritical invented account designed by snivelling Harry and fake Meghan to avoid taking any account for their own behaviour, including credible claims of bullying against staff by the American diva.

Well, I’ve had enough of media figures tiptoeing around what we all know are falsehoods.

If Harry and Meghan claim briefing the tabloid Press is some sort of unforgivable ‘crime’ undertaken by Charles, Camilla, William and Kate, then they are just as guilty.

How do I know? Well, I was on the receiving end of such briefings by the Sussexes’ own communications team during my years covering Meghan’s time in the Royal Family as I broke a series of now infamous scoops, from Tiaragate, the bitter rivalry between Kate and Meghan, and, ultimately, Megxit.

On Tuesday, he had just finished reading Spare. Wootton holds nothing back in his analysis, which begins with this:

… I needed to take a wash after reading what is without doubt the most pathetic, self-serving and tone-deaf autobiography ever because of the number of vitriolic and deeply personal swipes he takes at his own flesh and blood.

No one is safe.

Not even the late Queen, who Prince Harry paints as cold, detached and old-fashioned, rather than a monarch desperately trying to hold her wayward family together for the good of the institution.

What’s so disturbing is that, even when describing his version of events in such an obviously one-sided manner, it was still clear to me that Harry is in the wrong about almost every menial gripe for which he opines.

While his father King Charles and brother Prince William are, unsurprisingly given their role, far from perfect, they are left at the end of their tether by Harry’s pig-headed intransigence, especially once he is so heavily influenced by a cabal of woke psychotherapists and Hollywood yes men working in cahoots with his controlling wife Meghan Markle.

Harry has spent the past two years claiming all he wanted was support from the Royal Family.

But Spare makes plain when they tried to offer help and solutions, it was never good enough for the Sussexes, who want everything their own way all the time …

Predictably, having broken a number of damaging scoops about the Sussexes, often accepting briefing from Harry and Meghan’s staff, as I revealed in my column here yesterday, I come in for a pasting, being described as ‘a sad little man’ for first revealing the story of Megxit.

Just like much of the fiction and fantasy in Spare, Harry gets it all wrong again though, incorrectly claiming I was ‘likely working in concert with the Palace, whose courtiers were determined to get ahead of us and spin the story’.

Harry admits he went to the late Queen with the information that I was about to break the story, in order for the Sussexes to release a statement to scoop me, despite the fact I’d given them over a week’s notice already by that point.

Here are Dan’s shows from Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week. Monday’s seems to have disappeared, for whatever reason.

Tuesday, January 10:

Wednesday, January 11:

Thursday, January 12. This one has a video about the Elizabeth Arden cream Harry used on an intimate part of his anatomy to relieve frostbite. He then says that it reminded him of his mother, which creeped out the two men on Dan’s panel:

You can fast forward through the adverts, of which there are many.

Watch early to avoid disappointment.

I will have more on the Sussexes next week.

The clarity and mystery of Liz Truss’s decisions

My most recent post on Liz Truss examined her first two weeks in office as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister, from September 6th through the 16th.

Things had started out so well. Ironically, Jeremy Hunt, who is now Chancellor, told ITV’s political editor Robert Peston on September 7 that Truss would be ‘formidable’. An amazing endorsement from someone who was her natural ally:

"I think she's going to be formidable"@Jeremy_Hunt says Liz Truss has been underestimated by the Labour Party in the same way some Conservatives have underestimated her previously. #Peston pic.twitter.com/Syw4GIIx38

— Peston (@itvpeston) September 7, 2022

Hmm. Did he know anything at that point? We’ll probably never know.

On September 20, The Sun‘s political editor Harry Cole was delighted to announce his and James Heale’s book on Truss, Out of the Blue, which later had to have hastily written chapters added to it:

🚨 Delighted to say ‘Out of the Blue: The inside story of Liz Truss and her astonishing rise to power’ by myself and @JAHeale for @HarperCollins will be out for Christmas..

📣 Announcement: https://t.co/ONn30I51x3

📚 Preorder here: https://t.co/ED9p3DtX3s pic.twitter.com/MEWQk83Hnq

— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) September 20, 2022

Yes, it is still coming out by Christmas — November 24, to be precise:

And some extracts:

Sun: https://t.co/e6veg3Yaxwhttps://t.co/cmwqhOjvC9

Times: https://t.co/4ptijju1bC

Sunday Times: https://t.co/ItzxSXo7OUhttps://t.co/XqCnRPPj4Q

Order: https://t.co/FTwuuryiEQ pic.twitter.com/4dh59wKKt5

— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) November 20, 2022

King Charles and COP27

Liz saw King Charles on Sunday, September 18, the day before the Queen’s funeral. It was not their usual day to meet, but the Royal Family went into private mourning until the end of September:

Monday's Times: Charles gives thanks #TomorrowsPapersToday #TheTimes #Times pic.twitter.com/PtbfYS0CDr

— Tomorrows Papers Today (@TmorrowsPapers) September 18, 2022

On Saturday, October 1, The Times reported that Liz had asked the King not to attend COP27, which ran between November 6 and 18, despite an invitation from the organisers.

This was a good move, in my opinion, as climate change, or whatever it’s being called this week, has turned highly political.

The article said (emphases mine):

The King, a passionate environmental campaigner, has abandoned plans to attend next month’s Cop27 climate change summit after Liz Truss told him to stay away.

He had intended to deliver a speech at the meeting of world leaders in Egypt.

Had she remained PM, Liz would not have attended, either:

Truss, who is also unlikely to attend the Sharm el-Sheikh gathering, objected to the King’s plans during a personal audience at Buckingham Palace last month.

There were no hard feelings between the Palace and No. 10:

… a Downing Street source claimed the audience had been cordial and there had “not been a row”.

No doubt he was expecting it:

A senior royal source said: “It is no mystery that the King was invited to go there. He had to think very carefully about what steps to take for his first overseas tour, and he is not going to be attending Cop.”

They said the decision was made on the government’s advice and was “entirely in the spirit of being ever-mindful as King that he acts on government advice”.

In the end, the King held a reception at Buckingham Palace for world leaders before they flew to the summit. In light of that, this was rather interesting:

Charles is still determined to make his presence felt there, and how he will do that is “under active discussion”. A senior royal source said: “Just because he is not in physical attendance, that doesn’t mean His Majesty won’t find other ways to support it.”

A source who knows Charles said he would be “personally disappointed” to miss it and was “all lined up to go”, with several engagements planned around his Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI) which aims to persuade businesses to invest in environmentally friendly initiatives.

Public v parliamentary opinion

In late September, a poll showed that Truss was ahead of Labour’s Keir Starmer in Red Wall seats, boosting the Conservatives by eight points:

Truss leads Starmer by 7% in the Red Wall.

At this moment, which of the following do Red Wall voters think would be the better PM for the UK? (19-20 September)

Liz Truss 40% (+8)
Keir Starmer 33% (-6)
Don't Know 27% (-2)

Changes +/- 4 Septemberhttps://t.co/zuxVnswR3k pic.twitter.com/7iUPTZH1M3

— Redfield & Wilton Strategies (@RedfieldWilton) September 21, 2022

Admittedly, that was before Kwasi Kwarteng’s fiscal event, or mini-budget, of Friday, September 23.

That said, I will go out on a limb and say that most conservative voters thought that Kwarteng’s — Truss’s — plan was the right one. My better half and I thought it was refreshingly libertarian.

However, Conservative MPs vehemently disagreed with the public and started writing in to Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, the all-powerful group that Margaret Thatcher dubbed ‘the men in grey suits’.

On September 26, the Northern Echo reported:

A former Tory minister MP has told Sky News the new Prime Minister is “f*****” and the party are already looking to bring her down following Friday’s mini-budget.

The MP said: “They are already putting letters in as they think she will crash the economy. The tax cuts don’t matter as all noise anyway – mainly reversing back to the status quo this year …

Another Tory MP told the broadcaster that Friday’s announcement – which included reversing a 1.25% hike in National Insurance – had been a “s***show”.

Note that MPs were siding with the Bank of England. Very establishmentarian of them:

“The issue is government fiscal policy is opposite to Bank of England monetary policy – so they are fighting each other. What Kwasi [Kwarteng] gives, the Bank takes away.”

The mood among Conservative ‘wets’, to borrow Thatcher’s name for such weaklings, only escalated.

At Liz’s one — and only — appearance before the 1922 Committee on Thursday, October 13, Robert Halfon, a wet, told Truss she had ‘trashed the past ten years’.

The Times had the story:

Liz Truss was accused by a senior MP of trashing “the last ten years” of Conservative government as her party turned on its new leader over the mini-budget.

Robert Halfon, a former minister who chairs the education select committee, unleashed a furious attack on her financial measures, saying they disproportionately benefited the wealthy and meant she had abandoned “workers’ conservatism”.

Anything but, however:

According to an MP present, Halfon told Truss in a meeting of the 1922 Committee of backbenchers — her first as prime minister — that “in the last ten years we had the living wage, a focus on apprenticeships and skills”, contrasting that with “bankers’ bonuses, benefits cuts and now cuts to affordable housing targets”.

His intervention came after Truss tried to assuage Conservative MPs by saying she had “shielded families and businesses from bills of up to £6,000 this winter and for the winter ahead, while Labour has no plan beyond the next six months”.

The meeting did not go well. Halfon seemed to voice other MPs’ concerns:

… a Tory MP who has been in the Commons for more than a decade said: “It was the worst 1922 I’ve ever been to.” They added: “With each tough question she looked like she’d had the wind knocked out of her — the 31st of October could finish her off on the basis of the reception she got in that room.”

Halloween — who schedules these things? — was supposed to be the day Kwasi was going to set out more detail behind his fiscal event. Liz’s friend and neighbour in Greenwich was on hand to support her:

Thérèse Coffey, the deputy prime minister, told reporters outside the 1922 meeting that the chancellor would meet MPs before presenting his medium-term plan on Halloween, stressing that engagement was key.

In the event, Truss had to sack Kwarteng and appoint (ahem) the aforementioned Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor. He delivered his shocking budget on Thursday, November 17, to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s approval. Sunak nodded several times during the presentation.

Returning to The Times‘s article of October 13, what other wets said presaged the future:

Even those who back the prime minister expect some sort of climbdown. One MP said: “She will have to unwind everything fiscal in the statement. They have to backtrack. There is no alternative. They’ve done it on the 45p and they’ll have to do it on the rest.

“Then if we are still 20 points behind in the polls we will have to change leader. We are cold-blooded like that.”

Another admitted there was “definitely still a big split between her and the Rishi [Sunak] side of the party”. Asked if Truss would have to perform another U-turn, they said: “Ultimately, I suppose it depends if she’s leveraged into that position by our own party, but it’s all by those with 20,000 majorities.”

Hmm … Hmm.

However, one Rishi Sunak supporter — Esther McVey — is deeply unhappy over his Chancellor’s budget:

Esther speaking for the majority. We will punish the Tories come the GE.

— Dolores Jukes (@DoloresJukes) November 22, 2022

On Tuesday, November 22, McVey rightly tore the budget apart in ConservativeHome, saying that Hunt’s tax rises are ‘socialist measures’ that are ‘punishing Conservative voters’:

… It wasn’t helped by the Chancellor’s statement being such a pendulum swing from the Liz Truss / Kwasi Kwarteng mini budget. People went from thinking they were getting their taxes cut to seeing them hiked.

The Autumn Statement was clearly an over-correction to that mini-budget. Going from one extreme to the other is hardly reassuring for people. A middle ground was needed: an acceptance of Conservative principles, with a costed plan and the accompanying narrative to reassure the markets.

Instead, Hunt delivered his statement with a doom and gloom that would have appropriate were the country on the brink of financial collapse. However, despite some serious challenges, things are not so dire that we had to have such excessive medicine.

For instance, the ten-year gilt yield – the interest rate the Government must pay on a new decade-long loan – was 3.14 per cent, whereas, even before the notorious mini-Budget in late September, that same yield was much higher at 3.49 per cent.

Britain is no more indebted than other comparable countries. Our national debt (albeit too high) stands at 97 per cent of GDP,  whereas France, Canada and the US stands at 115 per cent, 116 per cent and 132 per cent respectively. Across the G7, only Germany has lower levels of government debt than the UK.

So when I stood up in the House of Commons at PMQs the day before the budget and said –

Given that we have the highest burden of taxation in living memory, it is clear that the Government’s financial difficulties are caused by overspending and not due to undertakings. Does the Deputy Prime Minster therefore agree, if the government has got enough money to proceed with HS2 at any cost then it has sufficient money not to increase taxes, if however, it has so little money it has to increase taxes (which is the last thing for a conservative government to do) then it doesn’t have sufficient money for HS2 [High Speed Rail 2]?

So can I gently urge the Deputy Prime Minister not to ask Conservative MPs to support any tax rises, unless and until, this unnecessary vanity project is scrapped, because I for one won’t support them.

– it was to remind everyone there are better choices for our Conservative government than hiking up taxes.

In fact, given that unprecedented tax burden, any self-respecting Conservative would instinctively know that the answer is to spend less. Dropping HS2  – an out-of-date white elephant, costing north of £150 billion which (as Andrew Gilligan revealed on my show on GB News) the Ministers themselves know will deliver less economic benefit than the cost of it – would have been an ideal place to start.  That would certainly have been more desirable than increasing taxes on hard-working families who are already feeling the severe pain of higher energy prices and increased mortgage payments.

If a Conservative government with a sizeable majority – in a time of financial pressure – won’t cut public expenditure to start living within our means, then when on earth will that ever happen? …

Parliament is debating Jeremy Hunt’s budget this week. In Monday’s proceedings, a number of Conservative MPs spoke out against it.

Liz’s U-turn on windfall tax

On October 12, two days before she sacked her friend and neighbour Kwasi Kwarteng, she appeared to do a U-turn on ‘no new taxes’ by allowing an announcement for a new levy on green energy firms.

Her ally, then-Business (BEIS) Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, defended the move and claimed it was not a windfall tax:

Rees-Mogg: “this is not a windfall tax…this is rationalising the market” https://t.co/yerPyN4WlK

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 12, 2022

Guido Fawkes reported (emphases his):

The government has announced a new plan to impose a multi-billion pound levy on green energy firms to fund support to consumers. Renewable and nuclear electricity generators in England and Wales will now have their revenues capped after windfall tax-hating Liz Truss seemingly bowed to pressure to limit profits. The announcement came from BEIS last night, which is calling the new policy a “Cost-Plus-Revenue Limit” and spinning that it isn’t in any way a windfall tax “as it will be applied to ‘excess revenues’ as opposed to profits”. If it walks like a tax, swims like a tax and quacks like a tax…

The latest backtracking on free market values by the government comes just 41 days after Liz Truss told party members at the London husting that they could read her lips, and there would be no new taxes under her leadership …

On Today this morning, Rees-Mogg tried performing a Jedi mind trick, saying “this is not a windfall tax…this is rationalising the market”…

Despite the government’s denial that the new revenue limit is a tax, the boss of RWE – the third biggest renewable power generator in Britain – has told The Times the move “is a de facto ‘windfall tax’ on low-carbon generators that, if not designed and implemented correctly, could have severe negative consequences for investment in the renewable and wider energy market and so for the energy transition.”

Guido warned that Labour’s support for the new levy is not a good sign:

Ed Miliband welcoming the policy with open arms should give the government sufficient pause for thought before it buys its own spin…

The mystery of Liz signing UK up to EU’s PESCO

Early in October, Liz did a strange thing, considering she is a staunch Brexit supporter.

She attended the first ever meeting of the European Political Community in Prague. The European Political Community is Emmanuel Macron’s brainchild.

This group is made up of EU member countries, yet, somehow Liz got an invitation. No one knows for certain.

However, she went.

She met with Macron on Thursday, October 6, in an effort to get the Channel dinghy crossing issue resolved.

GB News reported:

Liz Truss hailed Emmanuel Macron as a “friend” on Thursday, as the two countries signalled that a new agreement could be close to tackle small-boat crossings in the Channel.

The pair met at the first summit of the European Political Community in Prague, a gathering pushed for by the French president.

There, the pair said they looked forward to “an ambitious package of measures this autumn” to address issue of migration across the Channel.

And in a sign that Ms Truss hopes to improve relations with Mr Macron, she had no hesitation in labelling him a “friend”, just weeks after refusing to do so …

Mr Macron later suggested it was a “problem” if Britain could not call itself a friend of France.

But Prime Minister Ms Truss adopted a different tone ahead of a meeting with Mr Macron in Prague on Thursday.

She told broadcasters: “I work very, very closely with President Macron and the French government and what we’re talking about is how the UK and France can work more closely together to build more nuclear power stations and to make sure that both countries have energy security in the future.

“We’re both very clear the foe is Vladimir Putin, who has through his appalling war in Ukraine threatened freedom and democracy in Europe and pushed up energy prices which we’re now all having to deal with.”

Asked if he was then a friend, Ms Truss said: “He is a friend.”

The bi-lateral meeting between the two leaders, which took place towards the end of the day, appeared to signal some progress on the issues of migration and energy, both areas Ms Truss had raised as priorities ahead of the summit.

“Thank you for being here,” Mr Macron told the PM when they met.

It also emerged that the two countries have agreed to hold a joint summit next year to “take forward a renewed bilateral agenda”, in a further sign of the desire for warmer relations between the two countries.

On migration, a joint statement said the leaders “agreed to deepen cooperation on illegal migration within the bounds of international law, to tackle criminal groups trafficking people across Europe, ending in dangerous journeys across the Channel”.

But the big, and secret, news was that Liz had signed the UK up to the EU’s PESCO — Permanent Structured Co-operation — which is a military initiative.

Nigel Farage announced the move on his GB News show as soon as he had heard.

On Friday, October 7, The Express said that the move could affect British armed forces by dragging them into an EU army:

The Prime Minister has been warned not to allow the UK to be dragged into an EU Army by accident after she signed a military deal this week at Emmanuel Macron’s European Political Community (EPC) summit in Prague. The decision to go into part of the PESCO has alarmed some Brexiteers who fear it could undermine the UK’s sovereignty.

Former defence minister Sir Gerald Howarth, a leading Brexiteer has led the campaign to resist joining PESCO for many years.

He said: “This is very serious and we must be very careful. The issue around PESCO is that the structures are permanent.

“We must not sign up to anything which undermines our sovereignty and where we do not have a veto.

“Second, we must not do anything that undermines NATO. If we have learnt anything over the last few months is that we need NATO for the defence of western values and Europe against our enemies which at the moment is clearly Russia.”

Even if this has to do with Ukraine, and enables us to move troops and military equipment more easily, it still raises questions:

At the EPC meeting on Thursday, the EU member states voted unanimously to allow the UK to join the the mobility project that would allow the UK to move troops and military equipment more quickly.

The UK Government decided to enter the strand in case Britain is called upon as a NATO ally to defend the Baltic states from a Russian invasion.

However, staunch Brexiteer Mark Francois MP was relaxed about it:

One senior Brexiteer, former Armed Forces Minister, Mark Francois, who now chairs the powerful group of Tory Brexiteers the European Research Group (ERG), said he believes that the move was the right one.

He said: “As we are outside the EU, we can opt in to individual PESCO projects if they have merit and looking at how we could speed up reinforcing the Baltic States from the UK, across internal EU borders, may well have military advantages.

“However, it is NATO that remains the bedrock of our security, especially in deterring further Russian adventurism and we should never forget that.”

On October 9, David Kurten, a former London Assembly member and founder of the Heritage Party, said that signing the UK up to PESCO was a betrayal of Brexit:

Brexit Betrayal: Truss signs UK into PESCO Military Mobility.https://t.co/l5tp1Smj8w

— David Kurten (@davidkurten) October 9, 2022

One month ago, the aforementioned Sir George Howarth appeared on Farage to say that we still do not know what part of PESCO Liz signed us up to. He was clearly concerned, saying that the implications could be important, especially as none of the countries involved has a veto. The EU calls all the shots:

Today, one month on, we are none the wiser about our involvement in PESCO.

Someone must know what’s going on. In fact, a lot of people probably do know.

Liz’s final week

All of Liz’s opponents, whether on the right or the left, told us that Liz and Kwasi, joined at the hip politically, had to go.

Project Fear started as soon as Kwasi delivered his mini-budget on September 23.

On September 27, Bloomberg told us that UK markets had lost $500 billion in combined value since Liz Truss became PM. Really?

Investor confidence has been shattered by the mini-budget rolled out by the Truss government https://t.co/pr672GVsvL pic.twitter.com/CDHGt4SWtz

— Bloomberg UK (@BloombergUK) September 27, 2022

‘Investor confidence’ means international markets, ergo part of the Establishment.

Also at that time, former Conservative Chancellor George Osborne, who served under David Cameron, stuck the boot in.

On September 29, a comment from an UnHerd reader appeared in response to one of their articles, beginning with ‘Is this the end for Liz Truss?’:

Osborne features heavily in it. The reader quotes him saying, ‘The markets are punishing Liz Truss for failing to balance her budget’.

The UnHerd reader says:

Right.

Of all people, George Osborne knows full well that is not what is happening. We can be sure he knows this — and is therefore engaging in a bout of very useful political lying — because Mr Osborne also dropped higher rate taxes [the 50% rate], on a backdrop of media squealing … and yet the tax receipts after making those cuts … went up.

So Mr Osborne is a classic shill of the modern era …

As to whether Liz would have to go, the reader supplies the answer at the top of his message:

… well, if the globalists and left-leaning power brokers who’ve comfortably controlled global affairs for the past few decades still retain control, then yes … it is the end for Truss …

… It doesn’t matter if that thing is related to tax, or to immigration, or to fracking … that’s not the point. The chattering and Davos classes are used to being in charge and controlling the direction of travel no matter who we elect.

Speaking of such people, on Wednesday, October 12, King Charles greeted Liz with, ‘Dear, oh dear’, while the press were still there to record it for posterity:

What did he know and when?

The beginning of the end came two days later on Friday, October 14, when Liz sacked Kwasi and appointed (ahem) Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor. This was the shortest and most painful press conference — she only took four questions — in living memory. She looked like a rabbit in the headlamps or a hostage being forced at gunpoint to read out a message:

As soon as she announced it, we knew Hunt was, at that point, the de facto Prime Minister.

Hours later, The Telegraph reported:

Mr Hunt, a former foreign secretary, took the helm at the Treasury following the sacking of Kwasi Kwarteng over the mini-Budget fiasco. Ms Truss turned to him even though the pair have strongly disagreed on economic policy.

Mr Hunt, also an ex-health secretary, endorsed Rishi Sunak for the Tory leadership after being voted out of the race in July, saying: “This is the wrong time for populist crowd-pleasing and the right time for honesty.”

He will hold huge power over a weakened Prime Minister, raising the likelihood that much of her growth plan will now be axed. Allies said that he would act as her “chief executive”.

Mr Hunt ran for the Conservative leadership on a platform of slashing corporation tax to 15 per cent to boost growth but also opposed cuts to personal levies such National Insurance and income tax, with which Ms Truss still intends to press ahead.

His appointment was announced moments before the Prime Minister unveiled her U-turn on corporation tax at a press conference. She ditched what had been a core leadership pledge, meaning the rate companies pay on their profits will go up from 19 to 25 per cent in April. It means she has reverted to the plan put in place by Mr Sunak when he was chancellor.

Quelle surprise!

Conservative Party members had voted Liz Truss in largely on her economic policy.

The elites took out her Chancellor. Soon afterwards, they came for her in the form of Conservative MPs and the 1922 Committee. It was a grand game of political chess, not seen since Margaret Thatcher was removed from office in 1990.

To be continued on Friday.

Remembrance Sunday enters new era with King Charles

The weekend’s events surrounding Remembrance Day and Remembrance Sunday entered a new era with King Charles.

First, however, November 14 is the King’s birthday and his first one as monarch. He turned 74 on Monday:

Wishing His Majesty The King a very happy birthday today. pic.twitter.com/J1ziCRIyU5

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) November 14, 2022

Many happy returns, Your Majesty!

Remembrance Day

Last week, the King and Queen Consort paid their respects to those who died for our freedom:

'When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
⁰For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.' #LestWeForget #ArmisticeDay

🔗 https://t.co/0Fiaq9xEvk pic.twitter.com/qFaVBaQQeK

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) November 11, 2022

On Thursday, November 10, the Telegraph reported (emphases mine):

The Queen Consort today paid tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at a plot created in her memory at Westminster Abbey’s Field of Remembrance.

The plot features two black-and-white photographs of the late Queen taken at the Field of Remembrance in 2002, the year she lost both her mother and her sister.

In one, she stands, head bowed in silent contemplation alongside the Duke of Edinburgh.

In the other, she is bending down to place a small wooden cross amongst others in the ground.

A black wooden cross alongside the photographs reads “In Memorandum. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 1926 – 1922”.

The Queen [Consort], who is patron of the Poppy Factory, was taking part in a ceremony to commemorate the nation’s war dead, which takes place on the Thursday before Remembrance Sunday each year.

She placed her own wooden cross of remembrance, bearing her new cypher, amid a sea of poppies before bowing her head.

The ceremony had a large attendance:

More than 1,000 veterans gathered in the grounds of Westminster Abbey for the short ceremony, observing a two-minute silence as Big Ben chimed to mark 11am.

The Queen Consort then met Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, before being introduced to Poppy Factory staff and then reviewing the plots for regimental and other associations.

Before leaving, she was invited by the Dean of Westminster, The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, to review a plot honouring her late mother-in-law.

Camilla took over the patronage from Prince Harry in 2020, after he relinquished his royal duties:

The Queen took over at the event from the Duke of Sussex when he stepped down from royal duties in 2020. The ceremony marks a tradition, now in its 94th year, that was previously the responsibility of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

Deirdre Mills, chief executive of The Poppy Factory, said:

Her Majesty’s commitment to the ex-forces community has been unwavering. We are grateful to Her Majesty The Queen Consort for her continued support as we look to help hundreds more veterans overcome barriers on their journey towards employment.

Meanwhile, the Princess of Wales toured a children’s centre in London, where she explained the importance of the poppy to a little boy and gave him hers to wear:

The Telegraph had the story:

The Princess of Wales gave a three-year-old her poppy on Wednesday after he pointed it out on her coat.

She stopped to speak to the boy, called Akeem, during a visit to Colham Manor Children’s Centre in Hillingdon, west London, after spending the morning chatting with mothers and health workers.

The two introduced themselves, then:

The Princess asked Akeem if he had a poppy, before adding: “It’s very nice, would you like mine?”

“Yes,” came the response, to giggles from onlookers. The Princess then carefully removed the poppy from her coat, saying, “there you go, you can have my poppy. Shall I see if I can get it out?”

As she fiddled with it, she asked the boy: “Do you know what this is for? It’s for remembering all the soldiers who died in the war.”

She said: “There you go, that’s for you. Will you look after it?”

She gave the pin to his mother so she fasten it for him.

New monarch, new wreath

As we have a new monarch, a new memorial wreath appeared on Remembrance Sunday.

King Charles has his own design, with his own ‘racing colours’, displayed in an elegant ribbon and bow extending across the centre.

The Telegraph described it:

Its poppies are mounted on an arrangement of black leaves, as per tradition for the sovereign, while its ribbon bears the King’s racing colours; scarlet, purple and gold.

The racing colours were also incorporated into the wreaths of King George V, King George VI and the late Queen.

Unfortunately, the King’s wreath had no white in it, which, as I recall, the Queen’s did. In fact, I don’t remember the black in her wreath, only the white.

White symbolises resurrection and eternal life, which we hope the Glorious Dead experience.

The Queen Consort also had a wreath laid at the Cenotaph on Sunday, as the Queen Mother — the previous Queen Consort — had when she was alive:

For the first time, a wreath will be laid on her behalf, by an equerry, and will bear her own family’s racing colours, inherited from her grandfather.

Remembrance Sunday

It was heartening to see that, although the survivors of the Great War have long gone to their rest and that those from the Second World War are, too, Remembrance Sunday still attracts 20,000 people.

The Sunday Times reported that 10,000 took place in the march past the Cenotaph in Whitehall. They were mainly Royal British Legion veterans representing 300 Armed Forces organisations. The other participants were from civilian organisations connected with previous wars and conflicts. War widows also marched past. Cadet organisations representing the respective armed forces also marched past.

The Sunday Times estimated that 10,000 spectators watched from the sidelines.

The march past began and ended at Horse Guards Parade, where Trooping the Colour takes place every June. At the Cenotaph in Whitehall, one person from each organisation handed over a large poppy wreath to lay at the foot of the monument.

Mobility issues are catered for …

Today 9,800 people from around 300 different Armed Forces and civilian associations will line up on Horse Guards Parade for the Royal British Legion organised march past the Cenotaph. pic.twitter.com/2L7duK0ecG

— Royal British Legion (@PoppyLegion) November 13, 2022

… and age is no barrier:

One of the oldest marching veterans this year is 101-year-old WW2 D-Day Veteran Stanley Elliss who is marching for the first time, and the youngest is Luca-Beau, eight, who will be carrying a wreath on behalf of Scotty’s Little Soldiers and remembering her father.

— Royal British Legion (@PoppyLegion) November 13, 2022

This year marked the 40th anniversary of the Falklands War (see the second tweet):

Andy Lawless is marching for the first time today. Her served in the Falklands 40 years ago #RemembranceSunday pic.twitter.com/HNI9I79EAV

— Royal British Legion (@PoppyLegion) November 13, 2022

This retired soldier is from Royal Hospital Chelsea, which Charles II founded in 1682, at the suggestion of his mistress Nell Gwyn. It is a retirement home with a state-of-the-art infirmary.

Those lucky few men and women who live there are known as Chelsea Pensioners. On ceremonial days and when they leave the Hospital, they wear their red jackets and tricorne hats, also designed by Charles II. See the gentleman in the second tweet:

Roy is one of the Chelsea Pensioners taking part in the march today @RHChelsea

“We have to remember.”#RemembranceSunday pic.twitter.com/Sa9LzylkI8

— Royal British Legion (@PoppyLegion) November 13, 2022

The ceremony revolves around the Cenotaph, with its inscription:

THE GLORIOUS DEAD

The commemoration began in 1920 to remember all those who gave their lives in the Great War, the First World War. George V, whom the late Queen affectionately called Grandfather England, was the first monarch to lay a wreath. Note that there was quite a bit of white in his (top right photo) compared with Charles’s. George VI is pictured on the lower left:

A Wreath is laid at the Cenotaph by His Majesty The King.

This tradition was started by King George V in 1920, who unveiled the Cenotaph, and has been continued by every Monarch since.#LestWeForget#RemembranceSunday pic.twitter.com/Y7NG3Bz7VI

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) November 13, 2022

Here is a close-up of George V from 1924:

King George V laying a wreath at the foot of the Cenotaph on #ArmisticeDay in 1924. This photograph was mounted by Queen Mary in a series of albums she created documenting private and public events in her life. https://t.co/YsqzSqDseo pic.twitter.com/1XjU51guIL

— Royal Collection Trust (@RCT) November 11, 2022

Other working Royals also laid their wreaths. Note that William’s is that of the Prince of Wales now. The Queen Consort and Princess of Wales watched from the balcony at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO):

At the #RemembranceSunday Service this morning, remembering all those who have served and continue to serve our nation and the Commonwealth.#LestWeForget pic.twitter.com/zPCsxfcvwv

— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) November 13, 2022

Other members of the Royal Family also watched from the FCDO balcony: The Countess of Wessex, The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, The Duke of Kent and Sir Tim Laurence (Princess Anne’s husband).

The Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces and leaders of the UK’s political parties also laid wreaths. This will be the last time we see EIIR cyphers:

Perhaps the last time
we will see them with The Queen's cypher on their shoulders E👑R pic.twitter.com/UMbLwQbJXk

— oeuf 👋🏻O (@mairE_keyL) November 13, 2022

A short Christian service followed the two-minute silence at 11:00 a.m. The Right Revd Dame Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London, led it:

𝘼𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙜𝙤𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙙𝙤𝙬𝙣 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙪𝙣 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜

𝙒𝙚 𝙬𝙞𝙡𝙡 𝙧𝙚𝙢𝙚𝙢𝙗𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙢.#LestWeForget #RemembranceSunday https://t.co/0Fiaq9x6FM pic.twitter.com/aWzhzruFFh

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) November 13, 2022

The march past took place afterwards.

The morning was poignant, solemn, dignified and, if I may say so, beautiful as always.

The Telegraph quoted Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, who summed up the 2022 ceremony well:

In an interview broadcast on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme, he said: “I think Remembrance Sunday is always poignant.

“I think it’s poignant for the whole nation, this special moment when we pause to reflect on the sacrifice and commitment of others to provide our freedom today.

“I think there’s a special poignancy this year with both the loss of Her Majesty, another loss of a Second World War veteran.

“I also think it’s poignant when we have once again the spectre of war in Europe and all that that entails, and a country that’s been invaded and is fighting for its freedom.”

On Sunday night, the Elizabeth Tower, which Big Ben adorns, had a splendid illumination for Remembrance Sunday, which also remembered the late Queen, for whom the tower is named:

Here you can watch a video of the Elizabeth Tower being illuminated with poppies to mark #RemembranceSunday #WeWillRememberThem #ParliamentRemembers #BigBenPoppies pic.twitter.com/NiQC3BQB51

— Sir Lindsay Hoyle (@CommonsSpeaker) November 13, 2022

My better half and I watch the ceremony every year. Each time, I see something new upon which to reflect privately in the days that follow. This year was no different. Long may those reflections continue.

Rishi Sunak becomes Prime Minister: a momentous morning of historic significance

Tuesday, October 25, 2022, was a historic day for the United Kingdom.

We have our first minority Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak — and, always remember, he is Conservative.

Labour, with all their waffling about equality and short-lists designed to produce the desired result, have not even come close to attaining what the Conservative Party has accomplished organically.

India cheers, on Diwali

When the 1922 Committee, which represents Conservative backbench MPs, announced on Monday, October 24, that Sunak was the winner of the leadership contest, India cheered.

Sunak’s victory as the last man standing with an overwhelming amount of MPs’ votes took place on Diwali.

The Times reported (emphases mine):

The prospect of Rishi Sunak being named as the UK’s first British-Asian prime minister today has been headline news in India’s media.

Newspapers and broadcasters pointed out that his likely victory in the Conservative leadership race would come on Diwali, the festival of lights marking the victory of light over darkness and the most important celebration in the Hindu religious calendar.

The former chancellor’s mother and father are both Hindu Punjabis whose parents migrated from India to Tanzania and Kenya respectively before coming to the UK in the 1960s. But that has not stopped Indian journalists and commentators claiming him as one of their own.

India’s press has not forgotten how then-Chancellor Sunak celebrated Diwali:

The Press Trust of India, a national news agency, noted that Sunak is a devout Hindu and a regular at the temple close to where he was born in Southampton. It reported that he had made history when he was the first chancellor of Indian origin by lighting Diwali lanterns at 11 Downing Street.

Sunak’s rise to the premiership is important to India as it comes 75 years after the nation’s independence in 1947:

The prominent Indian TV anchor Rajdeep Sardesai tweeted: “To think that on Diwali day, UK could have its first prime minister of Indian origin. That too in the 75th year of independence! Yeh hui na baat! [that’s the spirit]” …

The former Bihar state government chief secretary MA Ibrahimi tweeted: “Revenge of history as well. Destiny.” Another Twitter user, Ranjan Kumar, who described himself as a banker, joked: “Reverse colonisation.”

Indian media also celebrated Sunak’s wealth and billionaire in-laws:

Sunak is also married to Akshata Murty, the daughter of NR Narayana Murthy, the Indian billionaire and founder of Infosys, the information technology giant, who has a net worth of $3.2 billion. Many have noted that, through his family ties, Sunak is effectively richer than the King.

“Advantage Rishi Sunak: Narayana Murthy’s son-in-law could be UK’s next prime minister”, read a headline in the Mint newspaper this morning.

Star adopts new motif: calendar PMs

The Star newspaper, having finished comparing Liz Truss’s shelf life with that of a lettuce, put Sunak on the front page as their Prime Minister of the Month for October:

The new PM might herald an end to The Star's run of excellent front pages of late, but if this one turns out to be their swansong, today's front page is pretty good as valedictorian addresses go… pic.twitter.com/aqvPpYzHbt

— Alastair Thomson (@FinanceDirCFO) October 25, 2022

Their Tuesday Thought for the Day says:

Who’ll be the PM for November? Stay tuned …

Liz Truss’s final hours as Prime Minister

Although Liz Truss had not been Party leader after she resigned on Thursday, October 20, she did remain Prime Minister until she tendered her resignation to Charles III on Tuesday morning.

At 9 a.m., she held her final Cabinet meeting, as is customary on a Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a moving van arrived at No. 10 to remove the Truss family’s belongings:

Removal van arrives in Downing Street pic.twitter.com/D0mBFaN18V

— Anne Alexander (@Annemariealex) October 25, 2022

Most PMs use Bishop’s Move removals company. Not so this time around. Liz Truss was always going to be different, and, if Harrow Green was her choice, it was further proof of her standing out in a crowd.

Various Cabinet members filed in through the front door of No. 10. It is likely that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will keep his job under Sunak.

For the competent and calm Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, however, things could be different.

The Guardian‘s daily diary reported:

Wallace is very popular with Tory party members, but there is a good chance that he will be moved. In recent months people have been briefing papers on his behalf saying that he would resign if a new prime minister refused to stick to the plan to raise defence spending to 3% of GDP by the end of the decade. But Rishi Sunak is refusing to make that commitment.

The two also clashed when Sunak was chancellor, and in the summer Wallace publicly critcised Sunak’s stance on defence spending. Wallace backed Liz Truss for the leadership.

Another capable MP, Welsh Secretary Robert Buckland, could be out, too:

In the summer leadership contest Buckland originally supported Sunak. But then, in a highly unusual move, he switched to backing Liz Truss. By that point she was the favourite, and Buckland’s move raised a lot of eyebrows because MPs who pledge allegiance to one candidate almost never normally switch in public, because it makes them look inconsistent and opportunist.

Buckland kept his Welsh secretary job in Truss’s first reshuffle (although if he was hoping for a return to his previous cabinet job, justice secretary, which was going to be vacant when Truss sacked Dominic Raab, he was disappointed). But this morning, Buckland may be thinking his summer Judas performance was not so wise after all.

Another MP who will probably be gone is the veteran Jacob Rees-Mogg, the current Business Secretary. Under Boris Johnson he was Leader of the House then the minister for Brexit efficiencies. He is very much a Boris loyalist:

Yesterday he said he would support Rishi Sunak as PM. But during the summer leadership contest he said he could never serve in a Sunak cabinet. He told Sky News in July:

I think as a chancellor, he made decisions that were of the left rather than on the right, that he was a tax increasing chancellor. I didn’t support the decisions he made.

When asked whether he would serve in a Sunak government, he replied:

No, of course I wouldn’t. I believe his behaviour towards Boris Johnson, his disloyalty means that I could not possibly support him. And he wouldn’t want me in his cabinet anyway.

He will be sorely missed.

At 9:30, the Cabinet meeting ended.

Truss gave her final speech as Prime Minister at 10:15, before going to Buckingham Palace, to tell the King that she was standing down.

Her lectern appeared shortly before 10:00:

The Truss lectern is in place pic.twitter.com/jk10EzojFT

— Darren McCaffrey (@darrenmccaffrey) October 25, 2022

On GB News this morning, Darren McCaffrey explained that, starting 50 years ago, each Prime Minister has had his or her own podium. He showed us the various ones from Gordon Brown’s to Truss’s.

Liz Truss’s has a terrible Zenga style to it, so I was relieved that McCaffrey said that Rishi Sunak would have his own lectern.

Truss’s staff and closest MPs gathered off to one side of Downing Street:

Several dozen MPs came to Downing Street to applaud Liz Truss as she departed, including Jacob Rees-Mogg. Overheard one MP saying “it would’ve been nice to see a few more here.”

— Harry Horton (@harry_horton) October 25, 2022

At the appointed time, she left Downing Street for the final time, joined by her husband Hugh and daughters Frances and Liberty. The three stood off to one side of No. 10.

Truss approached the Zenga podium with a black folder.

On Monday, she pledged Sunak her full support:

Congratulations @RishiSunak on being appointed as Leader of the Conservative Party and our next Prime Minister.

You have my full support.

— Liz Truss (@trussliz) October 24, 2022

However, her valedictory speech struck another tone, that her boldness and ideas were the correct ones.

This is the full transcript:

It has been a huge honour to be Prime Minister of this great country.

In particular, to lead the nation in mourning the death of Her Late Majesty The Queen after 70 years of service,

and welcoming the accession of His Majesty King Charles III.

In just a short period, this government has acted urgently and decisively on the side of hardworking families and businesses.

We reversed the National Insurance increase.

We helped millions of households with their energy bills and helped thousands of businesses avoid bankruptcy.

We are taking back our energy independence…

…so we are never again beholden to global market fluctuations or malign foreign powers.

From my time as Prime Minister, I am more convinced than ever we need to be bold and confront the challenges that we face.

As the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote: “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare. It is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”

We simply cannot afford to be a low growth country where the government takes up an increasing share of our national wealth…

and where there are huge divides between different parts of our country.

We need to take advantage of our Brexit freedoms to do things differently.

This means delivering more freedom for our own citizens and restoring power in democratic institutions.

It means lower taxes, so people keep more of the money they earn.

It means delivering growth that will lead to more job security, higher wages and greater opportunities for our children and grandchildren.

Democracies must be able to deliver for their own people…

We must be able to outcompete autocratic regimes, where power lies in the hands of a few.

And now more than ever we must support Ukraine in their brave fight against Putin’s aggression.

Ukraine must prevail.

And we must continue to strengthen our nation’s defences.

That is what I have been striving to achieve… and I wish Rishi Sunak every success, for the good of our country.

I want to thank Hugh, Frances, Liberty, my family and friends, and all the team at No10 for their love, friendship and support.

I also want to thank my protection team.

I look forward to spending more time in my constituency, and continuing to serve South West Norfolk from the backbenches.

Our country continues to battle through a storm.

But I believe in Britain.

I believe in the British people.

And I know that brighter days lie ahead.

Her speech was Johnsonian in so many ways. Like Boris, she had no apologies: good. After all, she’d made enough already. No backing down from her beliefs. Justification of her actions for her ideals. All good.

She was the first Prime Minister to thank her protection team: outstanding. More PMs should do so.

GB News criticised her for saying that brighter days lie ahead. It was her way of saying what President Lincoln did in the 1860s: ‘This, too, shall pass’. In other words, don’t give up hope.

As for Truss’s future, being a backbench MP will be difficult for her, because she has had ministerial or Cabinet positions since the days of the Coalition government, dating from 2012. That’s a decade ago. She began her Cabinet posts in 2014.

Perhaps she will find a continuing cause to champion:

This does not sound like a speech of an ex-PM who will go quietly into the night.

Sounds like Liz Truss will be a campaigner for freedom from the back benches.

— Tom Harwood (@tomhfh) October 25, 2022

Immediately after her speech, she and Hugh went in one vehicle and her daughters in another, escorted by police and special security detail to Buckingham Palace. Truss arrived shortly afterward.

At 10:56, GB News reported that Truss had tendered her resignation. At that point, King Charles was in charge of the UK, as we had no Government.

That sort of thing used to unnerve his mother, the late Queen, so she tried to make those time periods as brief as possible.

The King’s conversation with Truss was lengthy.

After her motorcade left, it was time for Rishi Sunak to request the King’s permission to form a new government.

The Queen received 15 Prime Ministers during her reign. King Charles, who ascended to the throne just days after Truss became Prime Minister, is already on his second.

Sunak’s first hours as PM

Sunak’s motorcade, also comprised of police and special security, arrived at the Palace immediately after Truss’s left.

He was greeted by:

Sir Clive Alderton, principal private secretary to the king and queen consort, the monarch’s equerry, Lt Col Jonny Thompson, and Sir Edward Young, joint principal private secretary to the king, PA Media reports.

Sunak also spent a long time with the King.

Just before 11:30, the monarch turned the Government over to Sunak. The King had been in charge of us for half an hour. With his mother, it was a matter of minutes. Fascinating.

Someone on GB News quipped that perhaps we should reconsider having an absolute monarchy.

Sunak was due to give his first speech at No. 10 at 11:35. In the event, it was closer to 11:50.

He and the King already know each other through a Prince’s Trust event from a few years ago.

When Sunak arrived in Downing Street, he left his vehicle and immediately approached — thankfully — a new lectern.

There were no MPs around him. If there had, it would have been a phalanx, as he had the support of nearly half of them:

Rishi Sunak's first speech as PM is being carefully stage managed – his MP supporters won't gather in Downing Street to clap him in.

I'm told this is about the "optics" and trying to help greater instil party unity.

— Aubrey Allegretti (@breeallegretti) October 25, 2022

Sunak’s speech lasted exactly five minutes.

It is possible that he knew what Truss had said in hers, because he wasted no time in blaming her for the mess he was about to land in:

I have just been to Buckingham Palace and accepted His Majesty The King’s invitation to form a government in his name.

It is only right to explain why I am standing here as your new Prime Minister.

Right now our country is facing a profound economic crisis.

The aftermath of Covid still lingers.

Putin’s war in Ukraine has destabilised energy markets and supply chains the world over.

I want to pay tribute to my predecessor Liz Truss.

She was not wrong to want to improve growth in this country. It is a noble aim.

And I admired her restlessness to create change.

But some mistakes were made.

Not borne of ill will or bad intentions. Quite the opposite, in fact. But mistakes nonetheless.

He warned of ‘difficult decisions’ to come:

And I have been elected as leader of my party, and your prime minister, in part, to fix [those mistakes – see 11.52am.].

And that work begins immediately.

I will place economic stability and confidence at the heart of this government’s agenda.

This will mean difficult decisions to come.

But you saw me during Covid, doing everything I could, to protect people and businesses, with schemes like furlough.

There are always limits, more so now than ever, but I promise you this – I will bring that same compassion to the challenges we face today.

The government I lead will not leave the next generation – your children and grandchildren – with a debt to settle that we were too weak to pay ourselves.

I will unite our country, not with words, but with action.

I will work day in and day out to deliver for you.

This government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level.

Trust is earned. And I will earn yours.

I hope so.

Then he paid tribute to Boris and said he would continue the 2019 manifesto:

I will always be grateful to Boris Johnson for his incredible achievements as prime minister, and I treasure his warmth and generosity of spirit.

And I know he would agree that the mandate my party earned in 2019 is not the sole property of any one individual. It is a mandate that belongs to and unites all of us.

And the heart of that mandate is our manifesto. I will deliver on its promise: a stronger NHS, better schools, safer streets, control of our borders, protecting our environment, supporting our armed forces, levelling up and building an economy that embraces the opportunities of Brexit, where businesses invest, innovate, and create jobs.

I understand how difficult this moment is. After the billions of pounds it cost us to combat Covid, after all the dislocation that caused in the midst of a terrible war that must be seen successfully to its conclusions, I fully appreciate how hard things are.

And I understand too that I have work to do to restore trust after all that has happened.

All I can say is that I am not daunted.

I know the high office I have accepted and I hope to live up to its demands.

But when the opportunity to serve comes along, you cannot question the moment, only your willingness.

So I stand here before you, ready to lead our country into the future.

To put your needs above politics.

To reach out and build a government that represents the very best traditions of my party.

Together we can achieve incredible things.

We will create a future worthy of the sacrifices so many have made and fill tomorrow, and every day thereafter with hope.

Hmm. That I will be interested to see.

Afterwards, Boris tweeted his congratulations. Better late than never:

Congratulations to @RishiSunak on this historic day, this is the moment for every Conservative to give our new PM their full and wholehearted support.

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) October 25, 2022

He was just in time.

Emmanuel Macron tweeted his congratulations one minute later:

Congratulations to @RishiSunak, who has become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Together we will continue working to tackle the challenges of the moment, including the war in Ukraine and its many consequences for Europe and the world.

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) October 25, 2022

Cabinet resignations roll in

Afterwards, Sunak went to the Commons to meet with Cabinet members who he sacked or demoted.

The Guardian explains why this is not done in No. 10:

Prime ministers normally do the sacking element of the reshuffle in parliament because people losing their jobs can come and go without being photographed, or seen by journalists. Lobby journalists have access to some areas of parliament, but other parts are off limits and trying to doorstep the PM’s office is definitely not allowed.

Sunak started from the lesser end of the spectrum and moved up the ladder:

According Sky’s Beth Rigby, Wendy Morton, the chief whip, and Ranil Jayawarena, the environment secretary, have both been summoned. But were Truss acolytes who were seen as lightweight appointments to cabinet.

Heading to the back benches from where I will continue to represent the constituents, businesses and communities of Aldridge-Brownhills.

— Wendy Morton MP (@morton_wendy) October 25, 2022

👇 My letter to the Prime Minister today. pic.twitter.com/rvSKtKuqRG

— Ranil Jayawardena MP (@ranil) October 25, 2022

Chloe Smith was Truss’s Work and Pensions Secretary:

2/ I look forward to supporting @RishiSunak from the backbenches & continuing to work hard for my constituents in Norwich North.

— Chloe Smith (@NorwichChloe) October 25, 2022

Boris loyalist Kit Malthouse, who worked for him when he was Mayor of London, is out as Education Secretary. His brief stint at Education was under Truss. Prior to that, Malthouse was in charge of Policing:

As I leave the DfE, I do so with profound gratitude to officials, my private office team, and brilliant advisers, who all worked so hard. I hope my successor can harness their commitment to the most important mission in Whitehall: the future and welfare of our children.

— Kit Malthouse MP (@kitmalthouse) October 25, 2022

And finally a huge thank you to all the nursery workers, teachers, academics, staff, social workers and others, who help bring our young people through childhood and set them on a path to success. Our time together was short, but you will hear more from me in the months to come.

— Kit Malthouse MP (@kitmalthouse) October 25, 2022

It is customary for sacked MPs to write a resignation letter.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a devout Catholic, dated his letter ‘St Crispin’s Day’:

Here's his resignation letter:

"I would be grateful if you would convey my resignation as Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to the King." pic.twitter.com/vw6b1wKyOX

— Tony Diver (@Tony_Diver) October 25, 2022

Here’s Robert Buckland’s:

It has been an honour to serve as Secretary of State for Wales, and to have served four Prime Ministers as Solicitor General, Justice Minister & Lord Chancellor.

I am leaving the Government at my request but will be supporting @RishiSunak from the backbenches. pic.twitter.com/nPG6u9ZTQf

— Robert Buckland (@RobertBuckland) October 25, 2022

Brandon Lewis pointed out that he had been one of the longest serving Cabinet members — under four Prime Ministers:

An honour to have been one of the longest serving Cabinet ministers – having done eight ministerial roles, in five departments, under four Prime Ministers.

The new PM will have my support from the back benches to tackle the many challenges we face – as a Party and as a country. pic.twitter.com/ulZjpcHkWk

— Brandon Lewis (@BrandonLewis) October 25, 2022

On a positive note, Suella Braverman could re-enter Cabinet:

Hearing that Suella Braverman is making a return to cabinet less than a week after being sacked over a security breach.

One govt source even suggests she might be back as home sec, perhaps in return for endorsing Sunak. Bold move, if true.

— Pippa Crerar (@PippaCrerar) October 25, 2022

The Guardian‘s Pippa Crerar has more news. Glad to see that Grant Shapps will not continue as Home Secretary. Business is better suited to him:

Hearing that Dominic Raab will return to Ministry of Justice.

His first stint there resulted in his ill-fated bill of rights plan and a barristers’ strike…

— Pippa Crerar (@PippaCrerar) October 25, 2022

Commiserations to Jake Berry, a Red Wall MP and, however briefly, chairman of the Conservative Party. I wonder what Sunak has against Simon Clarke, though. He’s been in the Treasury since Sunak was Chancellor. Hmm. Glad to see that James Cleverly, Ben Wallace and Thérèse Coffey could be staying. I hope that Coffey continues as Health Secretary:

Sunak appears to have finished sackings in HoC – Simon Clarke now gone as levelling up sec – and returned to No 10 for appointments.

Suggests likes of James Cleverly, Ben Wallace & Therese Coffey could be staying – perhaps in other jobs (tho Wallace prob stays at MoD).

— Pippa Crerar (@PippaCrerar) October 25, 2022

Jake Berry tweeted:

It has been an honour to serve as the Conservative Party Chairman, but all good things must come to an end.

I relish the opportunity to serve our great party and my constituents from the backbenches once again.

— Jake Berry MP (@JakeBerry) October 25, 2022

For Foreign Secretary Cleverly, it looks like business as usual. If so, excellent:

Just finished speaking with @DmytroKuleba

The UK continues to back Ukraine’s defence as its people face Russian aggression with unwavering courage.  
 
Ukraine must prevail. 

We stand with Ukraine.

— James Cleverly🇬🇧 (@JamesCleverly) October 25, 2022

With regard to Simon Clarke, it seems there’s a bit of a back story there involving Liz Truss:

Simon Clarke has left his post as levelling up secretary. It is not clear from his tweet whether he was sacked, or whether he quit “voluntarily” to save face.

But it is no surprise that he has gone. He was one of Liz Truss’s key allies, and during the Tory leadership contest in the summer he often criticised Rishi Sunak quite harshly on her behalf, at one point co-authoring an article accusing him of favouring “a Labour-lite economic policy”.

It has been a great privilege to serve as Secretary of State @luhc, working alongside some terrific people to #LevelUp our communities, just as it was before that as Chief Secretary @hmtreasury.

— Simon Clarke MP (@SimonClarkeMP) October 25, 2022

My loyalty to @trussliz and @BorisJohnson was sincere to the last and I appreciate deeply the opportunity they gave me. But I meant every word that I said yesterday: @Conservatives must unite under our new PM and should all work to ensure @RishiSunak succeeds. He has my support.

— Simon Clarke MP (@SimonClarkeMP) October 25, 2022

On another point, he is very tall. When he walked with Rishi, he made sure he kept several paces behind so that no one would notice the difference in height.

ITV’s political editor Robert Peston summed up the departures as follows:

Looks like 11 Sunak sackings, including 3 hardcore Boristas (Berry, Malthouse, Mogg), 1 devoted Lizite (Clarke), and 7 drive-by shootings for various reasons, including perceived disloyalty to Sunak and own goals (Morton, Buckland, Brandon Lewis, Sharma, Jayawardena, Smith, Ford)

— Robert Peston (@Peston) October 25, 2022

Around 2:30, Sunak walked into Downing Street to applause. It is customary for staff to applaud the incoming Prime Minister.

New Cabinet appointments took place.

I’ll leave it here — at 3:14 p.m.:

Sunak now back in No 10 after some brutal work in his HoC office. Does this mean that the likes of Nadhim Zahawi, Chris Heaton-Harris, Ben Wallace, AM Trevelyan, Therese Coffey safe? And of course, Suella Braverman on the comeback trail? About to find out. https://t.co/kcSxLFGA4q

— George Parker (@GeorgeWParker) October 25, 2022

I’ll have more tomorrow, particularly on the leadership contest that took place over the weekend.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng illustrate that one DAY is a long time in politics

Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned early in the afternoon of Thursday, October 20, 2022.

She will remain Prime Minister until a new Conservative Party leader is elected — details to be announced — in a week’s time.

She will have seen the shortest tenure of any British Prime Minister. If she serves another week, that will be a total of 52 days.

More to follow next week.

She met the King this afternoon to tender her resignation. It is, after all, His Majesty’s Government.

Her penultimate meeting with him was last Thursday, immortalised here:

———————————————————————

Yesterday’s post discussed Liz Truss’s sacking of Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor on Friday, October 14, 2022.

A day is a long time in politics

Kwarteng’s defenestration illustrates that one day is a long time in politics, never mind a week.

However, days are eras in Truss’s government, if one can call it that.

On Wednesday, October 19, Home Secretary Suella Braverman was out and, by the end of the evening, the Speaker of the House decided to investigate an unrelated incident at a Commons vote on fracking, during which it was unclear whether the Conservative Whip and Deputy Whip had resigned. More about that in another post.

Returning to Kwarteng, on Thursday, October 13, he said he would be going nowhere. This was The Telegraph‘s headline on the morning of Friday, October 14:

Friday's Telegraph: Kwarteng insists: I'm not going anywhere #TomorrowsPapersToday #DailyTelegraph #Telegraph pic.twitter.com/qWtcruuNkR

— Tomorrows Papers Today (@TmorrowsPapers) October 13, 2022

By the time that headline appeared, Kwarteng was on his way back to London on a red eye flight from the annual IMF meeting in Washington DC.

Shortly after 11:00 a.m., by which time Kwarteng would have returned to London, Guido Fawkes tweeted that Truss would be holding a press conference that afternoon:

Liz Truss to Hold Press Conference This Afternoon https://t.co/FQn6Q9qZnm pic.twitter.com/C5JrprdReh

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 14, 2022

An hour later, Guido followed up with a tweet saying Kwarteng was about to be sacked:

Kwasi Kwarteng Set to Be Sacked as Chancellor https://t.co/nS8HDYyalh pic.twitter.com/5D8VWF5kpe

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 14, 2022

Guido’s post said (emphases his):

Kwasi has just arrived at No.10 for a showdown with Liz Truss. The FT, the Times, the Spectator and the Sun are all reporting he’s about to be sacked. A Boris-era insider texts Guido to say “It’s just getting silly now.” Liz is up in front of the cameras at 2pm. Will she have a new Chancellor by her side?

Just before 12:30, he tweeted that Kwasi was out …

BREAKING: Kwasi Kwarteng Sacked as Chancellor https://t.co/xVWYaEHq1q pic.twitter.com/PV7HlxKMRc

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 14, 2022

… commenting:

Kwasi Departeng…

Twenty minutes later, Guido posted runners and riders for Chancellor:

Next Chancellor Runners and Riders https://t.co/vMBPxOWiAi pic.twitter.com/7QIp4e2leo

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 14, 2022

His post had eight names with a summary about each candidate. Personally, I would have liked to see one of these two:

Simon Clarke: A key and prominent supporter of Liz. Chief Secretary to the Treasury under Rishi, though with some major disagreements with the former Chancellor reported during his time there. A very likely candidate.

Steve Barclay: Widely reported to have been Rishi’s choice for Chancellor had he won the leadership contest.

In the event, we got Jeremy Hunt, as I stated yesterday:

Jeremy Hunt: The centrist, ‘party unity’ candidate that may placate backbench opponents. Would be an admission that the Truss economic programme is DOA. Currently out of the country.

At 1:05 p.m., Guido posted Kwarteng’s gracious resignation letter:

Excellent letter @KwasiKwarteng

— Dead as a Dodo 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 (@Dead_as_a_dodo) October 14, 2022

Guido has a better copy here. Kwarteng was most gentlemanly:

You have asked me to stand aside as your Chancellor. I have accepted.

… your vision of optimism, growth and change was right.

As I have said many times in the past weeks, following the status quo was simply not an option.

… I look forward to supporting you and my successor to achieve that from the backbenches.

We have been colleagues and friends for many years … I believe your vision is the right one. It has been an honour to serve as your first Chancellor.

Your success is this country’s success and I wish you well.

This was Friday afternoon’s headline from London’s Evening Standard:

Friday's Evening Standard: Kwasi 'Forced Out' After Budget Chaos #TodaysPapers #TomorrowsPapersToday #EveningStandard pic.twitter.com/yZZn1kYItK

— Tomorrows Papers Today (@TmorrowsPapers) October 14, 2022

Kwarteng had been Chancellor for 39 days, the second shortest in British parliamentary history.

Iain Macleod lasted one month, before dying of a heart attack in 1970. The Prime Minister at the time was Ted Heath.

What happened behind the scenes

On Friday evening, The Sun‘s Political Editor Harry Cole posted ‘Inside story of Liz Truss’ first 40 days in power that ended in biggest political meltdown for 300 years’.

Excerpts follow, purple emphases mine:

Caught between the rock of mercenary traders in the City and the hard place of mutinous Tory MPs in Westminster, it began to dawn on the Prime Minister that her sticking to her plans risked her becoming the shortest ever serving PM.

But it was an email from the Office of Budget Responsibility to the Chancellor last Friday set in motion the most spectacular collapse in Government authority in modern political history.

The independent scrutineers of tax and spending were brutal in their assessment: A £60billion black hole in the nation’s finances was the direct result of Ms Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget.

The scale of the spending cuts that would be needed just to stop debt interest bankrupting the country were not just eye-watering but politically impossible to even a strong government.

But having junked the 45p rate, Truss was barely treading water as PM, let along one strong enough to take a toxic axe to the size of the state.

The extra £18billion Britain will be paying in interest on government borrowing alone was more than the entire Home Office budget …

And when she claimed at PMQs on Wednesday there would be no cut to public spending, the clock was ticking on a spectacular U-turn.

Even as she told the MPs that a rise to corporation tax “would be wrong at a time when we are trying to attract investment into our country”, privately work was underway to do just that.

The PM began to make preparations to climb down on Wednesday evening, as her Chancellor — her closest friend and ally in politics — flew to Washington to meet global financial watchdog the IMF.

While he was there they openly criticised the Government’s plans in a humiliating dressing down on the world stage.

With inflation rampant, the global experts held up Britain as an example of how not to handle it.

“We were becoming a laughing stock,” one minister admits …

With Kwarteng out of the country, Simon Case the Cabinet Secretary and James Bowler, the new head of the Treasury, turned the screw on Ms Truss to jettison the plans.

And the news was grim from political advisers, too.

This was the second time that Sir Graham Brady from the 1922 Committee had to step in over Kwarteng’s and Truss’s economic plan. The first was Sunday, October 2, during the Conservative Party conference, which caused a U-turn on scrapping the 45% tax rate.

Cole tells us:

Away on holiday, the all-powerful boss of the backbench 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, made his disquiet known in a number of calls with Ms Truss on Wednesday and Thursday.

Just as he came to visit Truss during Tory conference to warn the 45p rate had to be scrapped if she wanted to survive, Sir Graham warned the PM the knives were out for the Chancellor and Kwarteng may need to be offered up as a sacrifice if her administration were to remain in any way credible.

However, Truss’s other good friend and Cabinet member, the Deputy Prime Minister (and Health Secretary) was also allegedly on manoeuvres against Kwarteng:

Deputy PM Therese Coffey was also “determined to get Kwasi” according to one senior Government source.

“She put the knife through his shoulder blades while he was still in the departure lounge.”

It seems that Truss wanted to deal with her Chief Whip first:

Ms Truss also briefly considered firing the Chief Whip Wendy Morton, who MPs consider a lightweight totally unable to herd the various factions of the Tory MPs publicly machine gunning each other.

Hmm. Wendy Morton was part of the reason for the chaos at the aforementioned fracking motion vote.

Moving on:

… the PM wanted to sleep on the decision to finally fire Kwarteng …

“He had an inkling it was coming and didn’t put up much of a fight”, one source said.

But it is hard to overstate just what a serious blow to Truss and her entire project the decision was.

Her closest friend in politics, this was their budget written together, at times in secret, away from advisers, aides and spin doctors.

When she U-turned on the 45p rate, she misleadingly blamed it on a “decision the Chancellor had made.”

Now in U-turning on Corporation Tax she has thrown that fireguard away – leaving the PM the only target left now.

The Telegraph told us more about Kwarteng’s visit to Washington last Thursday:

… the outgoing Chancellor tried to put a brave face on things. Even when he knew his time in Number 11 was up, he didn’t show it.

On the night he departed for London, Kwarteng continued to work the room of bankers and officials at the British Embassy in Washington DC. Rubbing shoulders with the likes of Shriti Vadera, once a Labour minister and now chairman of Prudential; Sir Danny Alexander, vice president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and former chief secretary to the Treasury; and Axel Weber, chairman of the Institute for International Finance, he stopped for quick chats, and even addressed the crowd.

But while to some it seemed like the troubles 3,500 miles away in Westminster were far away, others said he seemed distracted.

He had reasons to be. At first, the British Airways flight out of Washington Dulles at 10.40pm was full and he struggled to get on board. While he and his special adviser managed to find seats eventually, it was an uncomfortable journey home.

In Kwarteng’s own words, his 38 days as Chancellor were a “baptism of fire”. Investors had already delivered the verdict on his policies, but some of the starkest criticism came from Britain’s strongest allies …

But for many observers, it was Kwarteng’s steadfast attitude that surprised. Germany has also been criticised for its €200bn (£174bn) energy bailout. But while their finance minister Christian Lindner adopted a more contrite approach in meetings, saying the spending might not be popular with markets but was nonetheless vital, the Chancellor stuck to his message that the Government was unapologetically pro-growth.

“He just didn’t seem to understand that you can’t just do lots of tax and spending giveaways when the economy is unstable, prices are soaring and borrowing costs are rising,” said one member of the US delegation …

One banker who attended the drinks with Kwarteng said: “We just don’t know what’s coming next from the UK. Which policies are staying? Which are going? Who is staying? Who is going? There’s no certainty any more” …

There was more love for Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, who found friends among the financial establishment in Washington DC. Many have known him for several years. “I just hope they don’t try to hang him out to dry too,” said one US banker.

The Times suggested that Kwarteng had little idea he was about to be dismissed. Yet, motions were in play even during the Conservative Party conference at the beginning of October:

In his suite in the Hyatt Regency hotel at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, he told allies: “The idea that a prime minister is going to bullet her chancellor and survive, I just don’t think is feasible.”

Unknown to Kwarteng, his long-term friend had already been sounding out at least one former cabinet minister about the prospect of replacing him.

Intermediaries had begun reaching out to allies of Sajid Javid, the former chancellor, to gauge his appetite for a return to the Treasury in case Kwarteng was forced to fall on his sword. The prime minister’s emissaries asked Javid to name his price but had not bargained on his conditions being too much for Truss to accept.

“Sajid would have only done it if he had complete control,” one ally of Javid’s said …

It is unclear whether more horse trading took place but by Thursday last week, Javid was no longer in the running, with Truss’s allies instead pivoting to another big beast as their preferred replacement for the chancellor.

Just hours after Kwarteng left the UK for Washington to defend the prime minister’s fiscal plans to his foreign counterparts at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund, senior Truss allies had made contact with Jeremy Hunt, the former foreign and health secretary, who only a month beforehand had backed her rival, Rishi Sunak, for the top job.

Hunt insisted yesterday that when he heard that a “Liz Truss” wanted to talk to him on Friday, he assumed it was a prank call. The twice-failed leadership candidate then cut short a family holiday in Belgium to take charge of the Treasury. By last night — after Hunt’s extensive media round, during which he tore up much of the mini-budget — it felt to many Westminster observers that Hunt, not Truss, was now running Britain. Wiser heads note that the Conservatives appear increasingly to resemble a political death cult, having burnt through four prime ministers in six years and four chancellors in the space of a barely believable four months …

Truss arrived at No 10 without a ringing endorsement and faced a faction-driven Westminster.

Last night, a No 10 source denied that Javid had ever been considered for the role now filled by Hunt. “The prime minister laughed out loud at the suggestion,” they said …

By Thursday afternoon, Kwarteng knew that his political future might be in jeopardy, despite being 3,700 miles away across the Atlantic. He spent most of his time at the IMF gathering skipping meetings to hold talks with No 10 and his aides in London.

Kwarteng eventually cut short his trip by two days and booked the last overnight flight back to London. By then, however, at least one of his closest allies had already guessed that the game was up. “It wasn’t a massive shock,” they said. “There was nothing to come back for, no major meeting or announcement. The only reason he was coming back was to be sacked.”

If Kwarteng suspected on Thursday evening, as he addressed a room of 200 bankers in Washington at the Institute of International Finance, that the axe was about to fall on his cabinet career, he gave no indication.

He told them there were three important things to sort out: the energy package, growth, and keeping the Bank of England independent …

Confirmation that Kwarteng was receiving his marching orders came the next morning. When he arrived at Downing Street after his red-eye flight, he was informed by Truss that she needed to restart her premiership with a “clean slate” — something that would be impossible with him as chancellor. The two had “a warm meeting” in the Cabinet Room.

“The PM felt deep personal sadness at the decision but made peace with it,” an aide said. “Senior party figures had encouraged her to move the chancellor on” …

… Truss’s decision to demote Kwarteng’s No 2, Chris Philp, who had already been blamed for the policy to abolish the additional rate of income tax, has left some moderate MPs incandescent.

“The most disgusting thing she has done is sack Chris Philp,” one said. “He’s got his faults, he makes mistakes, but he’s a good person and the person she needs around her and they just f***ed him around completely. They used him, sucked the blood dry and then spat him out. They are a real bunch of bastards.”

According to a source in Kwarteng’s constituency of Spelthorne, Surrey, the former chancellor experienced his first taste of the public’s dissatisfaction during a walkabout on his local high street shortly after the mini-budget on September 23. Although his pledge to cut stamp duty had been expected to provide a welcome boost to the housing market, Kwarteng was left in no doubt about the views of a local estate agent who, on being waved at through the shop window, responded with a rude hand gesture.

There were signs the wheels were falling off the Truss bandwagon on Tuesday, when she reiterated her commitment to cutting taxes in a speech at a Conservative fundraising dinner for which guests paid £1,500 a seat. Truss, whose speech was described as “a worse version of the one she gave at conference”, was denied a standing ovation.

“It was embarrassing,” one guest said. “I can’t think of another PM who hasn’t received a standing ovation after addressing the same event — not even Theresa May at the height of her Brexit battles. The only topic of conversation was how the party could get rid of her.”

Tory donors are also understood to have snubbed the PM. “Aides came to our table and asked our host, a prominent Tory donor, if he wanted to speak to the PM, as is customary. He told them bluntly that he would rather not.”

Several miles away, at a separate dinner organised by Mel Stride, a leading Sunak supporter, those present were unanimous in their view that Truss should be replaced.

“The major discussions are no longer about her removal but how to do it,” said one of those present. “It was mainstream, moderate MPs. I’ve never been to a dinner like it in my life. The whole room was discussing how to remove the prime minister.”

On Wednesday, Truss faced the wrath of MPs at the 1922 Committee. The No 10 team have privately pointed the finger of blame at the whips for not preparing a proper operation beforehand. Truss was described as “incandescent” that she addressed the back-benchers without Sir Graham Brady, the committee chairman, leading the meeting. “She was stitched up,” an ally said. “It was the same public schoolboy men attacking her at the 1922 who then went out to tweet about how good her tax cuts were.”

Truss appears to have anticipated that calls for her removal would only grow after Kwarteng’s sacking. Within minutes of the prime minister’s disastrous eight-minute press conference on Friday afternoon, Thérèse Coffey, the deputy prime minister and health secretary, held a phone call with dozens of ministers in an attempt to shore up Truss’s support. Looking “very upset”, according to one person on the call, Coffey acknowledged the government had gone “too far and too fast” in the mini-budget but insisted, despite the severe setbacks, that No 10 was determined to prove the “flipping” Office for Budget Responsibility wrong …

Later, Coffey held a second call with backbench MPs, but it did not take long for the mood to sour. Laurence Robertson, a loyalist, told Coffey that Truss’s supporters had been made to “look like fools”, while Johnny Mercer, Andrew Percy and Steve Double are said to have claimed that the party was hurtling towards “disaster.”

… There are reports that as many as 100 letters expressing no confidence in Truss have been submitted to the 1922 Committee, which some backbenchers believe would give Brady a mandate to change the rules and get rid of the year’s grace a new prime minister usually has before a leadership challenge can be launched … 

“I’ve never been more depressed by what has happened in my entire time as an MP,” one former minister said. “She sacked Kwasi out of survival but it actually made it worse for her. I think she will be gone by the end of the week” …

Although many of the party are unified in their desire to remove Truss, there is no agreement on who could replace her …

Truss’s dire press conference

Truss’s press conference last Friday was one for the history books.

She looked white as a sheet and visibly shaken, as if she were a hostage reading a pre-prepared note in front of a camera.

The Naked Emperor’s Substack post from October 17 might give us an indication of what went on (bold emphasis his):

Alfred Kammer, head of the IMF’s European department said he praised the UK’s “strong institutions” but that the IMF would only deliver its verdict once policymakers’ “process of recalibrating” the policies had been completed.

It sounds like Kwasi was sent to Washington DC to be assessed but he failed miserably. He was asked to change his mind but when he stuck to his guns, the message was sent back to London that this guy must be removed.

With the message received loud and clear back in London, a new Chancellor needed to be chosen. Once again, Liz Truss thought she was in charge and looked to replace Kwasi with Sajid Javid. However, once more, the powers that be had other ideas and she was told to appoint Jeremy Hunt.

But the main question remains – where was Jeremy Hunt? Why was he not by the Prime Minister’s side when she announced his appointment?

The answer is that he was nowhere to be seen because Mr. Hunt had been in Brussels for three days. What was he doing there? Who was he meeting with? Was he being given his orders in case Kwasi couldn’t be turned?

Clearly Liz and Kwasi didn’t want to reverse course. Her extraordinarily short press conference … looked more like a hostage video.

Without further ado, here’s the eight-minute press conference, which includes four questions from the media — Ben Riley-Smith from The Telegraph, Harry Cole from The Sun, Robert Peston from ITV News and a fourth whom I’ve forgotten. It starts a little after the 36:00 point:

It took Truss ages to choose the appropriate reporter:

Umm … ahh … let’s see …

She chose The Telegraph and The Sun first, because those would be the most favourable towards her plight, but it did not turn out like that.

This was The Telegraph‘s front page on Saturday:

Saturday's Telegraph: Truss clings to power after axing Kwarteng #TomorrowsPapersToday #DailyTelegraph #Telegraph pic.twitter.com/jnWTnj17BI

— Tomorrows Papers Today (@TmorrowsPapers) October 14, 2022

On Saturday, Harry Cole wrote:

Weakened and defenceless, when I asked the PM at yesterday’s disastrous press conference why she should remain in office, she could barely muster an answer.

After taking just four questions from reporters, she rushed for the exit – barely eight minutes in.

Last night No10 were scrambling to simply survive in office.

“Tax cuts were meant to be the easy part”, a minister claims.

Here is a clip of him asking his question and Truss’s answer, which is about her taking ‘difficult decisions’:

Harry Cole, Political Editor of The Sun, asks Liz Truss why Kwasi Kwarteng had to leave and she gets to stay after designing the budget "together in lockstep."@MrHarryCole | @TheSun pic.twitter.com/W29vJlZ485

— First Edition (@FirstEdition) October 14, 2022

After Truss took the fourth question, she walked away. That was it.

Cole is in the centre of the next video, looking bemused:

Post Truss press conference “Awkwerrrrrrd!” pic.twitter.com/e5PsxrDwWG

— Darren Winter🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 (@DarrenWinter) October 14, 2022

You could not have made this up — any of it.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

More to follow on Friday and early next week.

Liz Truss’s first Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng: what he expected, what he got instead

Yesterday’s post introduced the sad saga of Prime Minister Liz Truss and her first Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng over their fateful fiscal event of Friday, September 23, 2022.

My post ended with the market turmoil and negativity up to Friday, September 30.

Many of us hoped that his plan would work. After all, the market turmoil is global, for different reasons in different Western countries.

What motivates Kwarteng

On Wednesday, September 28, Rachel Sylvester wrote an interesting profile of Kwarteng for The Times, complete with photos of him and Truss from their earlier days as MPs. One from 2013 shows them together at a book awards event and another from 2018 has them enjoying a picnic at that year’s Hay literary festival.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

Kwarteng was pleased with his fiscal event and believed the market’s jitters were temporary:

So sure was he of his plan that he smiled as he announced that he was abolishing the cap on bankers’ bonuses introduced by David Cameron in 2014.

Within hours the pound had tanked, but Kwarteng doubled down, promising that he had “more to come”. As the markets reacted to the UK’s biggest tax cuts in 50 years, the pound fell to a record low against the dollar. One senior figure in the City described the fiscal statement to me as “economically reckless”. Yet the chancellor did not blink, with an ally suggesting that this was just “the City boys playing fast and loose with the economy” and insisting, “It will settle.”

Although it is unclear what Kwarteng thinks today, he and Truss were allies dating back at least a decade:

At 47, Kwarteng is the same age as Liz Truss and is one of her closest political allies. Earlier this year, he moved into a house just down the road from her in Greenwich and now they are neighbours in Downing Street. His appointment as chancellor was one of the first decisions she made when it became clear that she was likely to win the Tory leadership contest. Truss and Kwarteng have been working for weeks on their “shock and awe” shake-up of taxes, including changes to stamp duty and the abolition of the top 45p rate of income tax. The blueprint has been in their dreams for years …

His allies say his politics have also evolved. In 2012 the chancellor was one of a group of free marketeers – including Truss – who published a pamphlet called Britannia Unchained, which described British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world” and railed against a “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation”. He has since distanced himself from the controversial text.

His parents arrived in England from Ghana. Both received a first-class education and had top-flight careers:

An only child, Akwasi Addo Alfred Kwarteng was born in Waltham Forest, northeast London, in 1975. His parents had come to Britain as students in the Sixties. His father, Alfred, an economist for the Commonwealth Secretariat, was educated in Ghana at an Anglican school with a Winchester-educated English headmaster. His mother, Charlotte, a successful barrister, was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher. “It was a self-reliance thing,” Kwarteng once explained. She instilled in her son a ferocious work ethic and education was of fundamental importance to the family.

When his father was posted to Switzerland, Kwasi was sent at the age of eight to board at the fee-paying Colet Court – now St Paul’s Juniors – in southwest London. He admits it was probably too young to be separated from his parents but he not only survived, he thrived. He won a scholarship to Eton where friends recall a “lanky malcoordinated” but hard-working teenager who was determined to make the most of the opportunity he had been given.

Like Boris Johnson, Kwarteng played the wall game – a brutal mixture of football and rugby. “He’s so tall that he was a great addition to any team,” one fellow pupil recalls.

Kwarteng is not attracted to identity politics:

Kwarteng never expressed his desire to be “world king” in the way that Johnson did. “I was slightly surprised when he went into politics,” says a contemporary from Eton and Cambridge. “He wasn’t in a political activist circle at university. People sometimes think one Etonian is just like another, but Boris and Kwasi are very different. Boris wants to rule the world; Kwasi wants to solve problems, rather than just being in power for the sake of it. He’s not going to go out there to break rules. Kwasi does listen to people and wants to discuss ideas” …

Kwarteng’s 2011 book Ghosts of Empire is a far more nuanced analysis than the rose-tinted version of British history favoured by Tory traditionalists. He rejects the “sterile debate” over whether “empire was a good or bad thing” and concludes, “Much of the instability in the world is a product of its legacy of individualism and haphazard policymaking.” According to those who know him well, the chancellor is uncomfortable with “culture war” politics and describes his own philosophy as “relentless pragmatism”. One aide insists, “He is sometimes lazily pigeonholed as a ruthless, black and white free market ideologue. It is true that he is a low-tax Conservative. He’s a free marketeer, but there are occasions when the state does need to intervene.” In 2019, the chancellor told a Tory party conference event: “There’s nothing [better] to convert someone from being a radical free marketeer to seeing the virtues of government action than making them an energy minister.”

He focused on his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge:

“As a student he was charismatic and a bit chaotic,” says a friend from that time. “He was scholarly. The everyday run of things didn’t worry him. He would be immersed in his books.”

He began meeting the great and the good in the Conservative Party:

… the future chancellor was spotted by Dr John Casey, an English fellow and legendary figure among Conservative thinkers, who invited him to his dining club, the Michael Oakeshott Society. There Kwarteng met Tory politicians and journalists such as Norman Lamont, Geoffrey Howe, Norman Tebbit and Charles Moore. Casey insists it was never a political society: “It is devoted to intelligent conversation and strong views don’t go with that.

“He has a first-rate mind and a first-rate personality,” Casey continues. “He is intellectually and personally equipped to be chancellor. He’s a cultured man, an intellectual – there are very few in politics. He’s not like anybody else; he’s himself.”

After Cambridge, Kwarteng won a Kennedy scholarship to Harvard. When he finished his time there, he returned to Cambridge to earn a doctorate in economic history, after which the City of London beckoned:

He then worked as a fund manager at the bank JP Morgan and at Odey Asset Management, run by the Brexit-backing investor Crispin Odey, as well as chairing the Bow Group, a conservative think tank.

His political career began afterwards:

In 2005 he stood as the Conservative candidate for Brent East, coming third, before being elected as MP for the safe Tory seat of Spelthorne in Surrey in 2010, the same year as Truss entered politics. He spent several years on the back benches after criticising coalition policies including the help-to-buy scheme. “He’s genuinely clever, with a very strong academic, scholarly mind,” one old friend says. “But that academic, scholarly mind meant he was happy to speak out against David Cameron and George Osborne and didn’t really worry about the consequences.”

Kwarteng understands the importance of a Prime Minister and Chancellor working closely together:

For now, Kwarteng and Truss are united on economic policy. The chancellor tells colleagues that his role is to support the PM, explaining: “I will facilitate; I won’t emasculate.” One ally says, “Kwasi was completely disillusioned with the battles between No 10 and No 11 under Rishi and Boris. When No 10 and No 11 are at war, nothing works. Kwasi will deliver what the prime minister wants. She is the first lord of the treasury, Kwasi is the second lord of the treasury. That will change the entire mood and approach of government. The institutions will try to break No 10 and No 11 apart, but they underestimate the strength of the relationship between Kwasi and Liz.”

Hmm. Interesting.

British public gaslit

The last week of September was one of news about unfunded tax cuts, the Bank of England stepping in to calm the UK markets, how Kwarteng and Truss didn’t bother to communicate their economic plan and how awful everything was.

On Friday, September 30, Tom Harwood, GB News’s political correspondent and Guido Fawkes alum, put things into perspective, rightly saying that the media were gaslighting Britons:

This is the tax burden. You've all lost your minds. pic.twitter.com/mkpKlvWxdb

— Tom Harwood (@tomhfh) September 30, 2022

That day, The Telegraph‘s Matthew Lynn wrote, ‘There’s no such thing as unfunded tax cuts — it’s our money’:

It is hard to imagine that three simple words could be quite so lethal. But over the last few days “unfunded tax cuts” have been held responsible for the potential destruction of the British economy, and, come to think of it, the global financial system as well.

We are told that the Government’s £45bn package of cuts announced last week have crashed the currency markets, sent mortgage rates soaring, and left the stock market to keel over and die. Any government crazy enough to even attempt unfunded tax cuts can expect to be evicted from office within days if not hours. 

Tosh. Although the phrase has become ubiquitous, we should be a lot more cautious about how we use it. In reality, tax cuts don’t need to be funded, for the same reason that staying home instead of going out to dinner doesn’t need to be ‘funded’, and nor does opting to spend Christmas with your parents rather than flying off to Mauritius need to be ‘funded’ either.

It isn’t spending. It is simply taking less of your citizen’s money. It is state spending that needs to be ‘funded’, and not its opposite – and until we get that straight, and change the language we use, we will never be able to have a grown-up debate about how to manage our economy.

If Kwasi Kwarteng had a grand for every time our broadcasters, newspapers, a think tank, or indeed a growing legion of City analysts, used the term “unfunded tax cuts”, or UTCs as we should probably call them, he’d have enough money to wade into the markets and send sterling back over the two dollar mark. The phrase probably has its own emoji by now, just to make it easier to discuss on WhatsApp (some sort of variant of the scowling face, I’d imagine).

Ever since the pound started falling modestly against the dollar on Monday – because after all “crashing” seems a slightly extreme term for a downwards correction of less than 10pc – the phrase has dominated the headlines.

According to just about every think tank, constant broadcasts from the BBC, dozens of newspaper analysts, the IMF, and just about every major City bank, not to mention a small army of retired central bankers, it was the Chancellor’s decision to cut a few taxes without announcing accompanying decisions on reducing spending that led immediately to a dramatic sell-off in sterling and a rise in bond yields that could only be controlled by emergency intervention by the Bank of England. 

A quick Google search yields 28,000 mentions of the phrase, and that is without even counting social media. According to the credit ratings agency Moody’s “large unfunded tax cuts are credit negative” while according to the former Bank Governor Mark Carney “the message of financial markets is that there is a limit to unfunded spending and unfunded tax cuts in this environment.”

And yet, in reality, we should be a lot more careful about the language we use. We can leave aside the point that the “unfunded” parts of last Friday’s fiscal package amount to no more than a few billion pounds, a trivial sum give the size of state spending, and that by far the largest part of it was made up of the energy support package that all sides of the political spectrum had been calling for. The more important point is this: we shouldn’t ever describe tax cuts as “unfunded”.

By definition a tax cut is not spending any money. It is simply a decision to take less from a particular group of people in one particular way …

Next, the term ignores the possibility that tax cuts might pay for themselves …

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it concedes the argument before it has even begun. “Unfunded” is a boo word, and even more so when you put the inevitable “reckless” in front of it. The language deliberately skews opinion against a reform of the tax system. Even worse, it is used by banks and broadcasters who pretend they are staying neutral – when in reality they are anything but. 

… fundamentally it is only state spending that needs to be funded – not leaving more money in the pockets of long-suffering taxpayers. If we could be a little clearer about that we might be able to have a slightly more sane debate about how much tax the government should be raising and how – instead of hysterical catastrophizing about UTCs.

On Saturday, October 1, The Sun rightly defended the Truss-Kwarteng plan, citing other Western economies’ woes:

On Sunday, October 2, GB News’s and The Telegraph‘s Liam Halligan, formerly of Channel 4 News, was on the money when he said that the market meltdown was the fault of quantitative easing (QE):

… This week of financial turmoil has left millions frightened and angry.

While Kwarteng’s statement sparked last week’s alarming debt repricing, it was by no means the underlying cause. There are far bigger forces at play …

… what we saw last week was just the beginning of a long-term shift away from over a decade of ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing. We’ve indulged in ultra-loose monetary policy since the 2008/09 financial crisis – a necessary emergency measure, which ossified into a lifestyle choice.

And now, the obvious excesses, dangers – and crass stupidity – of this policy, are coming home to roost.

Since that financial crisis, the Bank of England has created hundreds of billions of pounds of QE money, as have similarly aligned central banks, which have blown huge asset price bubbles in stocks, bonds and property.

QE has helped governments borrow cheaply, while making the rich even richer – which is why, having begun as a £50 billion temporary measure to inject liquidity into bombed-out banks, it has morphed, thirteen years on, into an £895 billion monster.

The early tranches of QE stayed largely within the financial system – so didn’t cause serious inflation. But the Covid-era variant, funding furlough and an avalanche of business support loans, has fed directly into the real economy – helping to explain today’s inflation predicament.

This is an inconvenient truth that no-one wants to admit – certainly not the likes of the International Monetary Fund and central bankers who oversaw QE. Better to blame an incoming Tory government ­– one led by a politically vulnerable Prime Minister, with only lukewarm support from her own MPs.

… the idea that this “unfunded cut crashed the pound” is preposterous. Yet that is now the accepted political narrative – that a greed-driven Tory policy collapsed sterling and sent 10-year gilt yield surging as fears swirled of government insolvency, sending higher borrowing costs rippling across the economy, damaging hard-working families and firms.

What I suspect happened is that global currency traders, understanding the top tax cut was politically tin-eared, could see ministers were in for a kicking. With the Government introducing a potentially expensive energy price cap, the moment seemed right to start shorting – that is, betting against – the pound, knowing the media would pile in.

When that happened on Asian markets on Monday, and we woke to a plunging currency, I was astonished that ministers fell silent – given the strength of the arguments on their side …

For now, the Bank of England’s intervention on Wednesday – buying gilts to rein in borrowing costs – seems to have worked. By Friday, the pound was back where it was pre-statement, the 10-year yield having retreated from over 4.5pc to around 4.0pc.

But the City and Wall Street moneymen, having loaded pension schemes with billions of pounds of debt, yet again have the upper hand – effectively forcing the UK authorities to restart the QE asset-boosting machine. This cannot end well.

“Tory tax cuts”. It’s such an easy and convenient scapegoat. The truth is we’re in for a sustained period of painful adjustment – one which our political and media class must urgently start to explain.

The Times‘s Robert Colvile pointed out the global aspects of market turmoil, driven in part by the United States:

The markets were already primed to punish the UK, he [Albert Edwards of Société Générale] argues, because of the Bank of England’s decision the previous day to raise rates at a slower rate than the US and to keep trying to dispose of the assets accumulated under quantitative easing. So Kwasi Kwarteng’s decision to throw in a few more tax cuts just gave an extra push to a boulder that was already rolling …

Admittedly, the attempts of some in government to blame last week’s rout in the markets entirely on global factors strained credulity. But they did have the core of a point. A year ago the Bank of England believed interest rates would stay below 1 per cent. A month ago they were set to top out at 3 per cent. By the time Kwarteng got to his feet, the expected peak had risen to 5 per cent — soaring over 6 per cent at the height of last week’s panic.

Now, some of that rise in September was probably due to anxieties about the new government. But it was also driven, yes, by global factors — in particular decisions made in Washington. Even if Kwarteng had replaced his planned statement with a lusty rendition of the Marseillaise, mortgage-holders would still be facing eye-popping jumps in interest rates. For example, at that 6 per cent rate a typical UK mortgage would, according to the Resolution Foundation, cost an excruciating £4,800 a year extra — but £3,800 of that was already on the way before Friday’s speech. The age of cheap money is over not just for Britain but for everyone.

Over the past three years, a number of conservatives must have wondered why Boris Johnson never delved deeper into economic policy. A letter to The Telegraph gives a possible explanation — global forces at work:

SIR – It takes great strength of character and conviction to stand up and face a baying mob, especially a political one. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have my admiration.

I always wondered why Boris Johnson did not attempt to enact some of his early policies after Brexit, for which he had great public support. Perhaps he understood how the pro-EU and socialist contingents in Parliament and the wider political world would react, and was fully aware of the force that would be against him.

I wish Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng good luck. They have shown enough courage in their beliefs to see this challenge through.

Conservative Party Conference

The Conservative Party Conference opened on Sunday, October 3, in Birmingham.

That day, The Times reported that Kwarteng had requested Cabinet ministers to cut expenditure in their respective departments:

Kwasi Kwarteng has told ministers to make cuts in their departments and warned them “we have a duty to live within our means”.

The chancellor has asked cabinet ministers to send him their “proposals to support growth” by the end of the month.

He is also launching a reprioritisation, efficiency and productivity review across the public sector, which will re-examine “existing spending commitments” and repurpose budgets to deliver the government’s “core priorities”, including growth.

I wrote about the conference, including Truss’s and Kwarteng’s U-turn on abolishing the 45% tax rate, the prominent Conservative MPs in disarray, the rebels and Truss’s closing speech.

On Monday, October 3, the duo pulled out of a fringe event, which cost £3,000 a ticket:

Been told business leaders paid £3k for a ticket to today’s event with Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, which they have both pulled out of

Unsurprisingly, they’re not happy

— Stefan Boscia (@Stefan_Boscia) October 3, 2022

Nigel Farage, looking on from the outside, predicted a Labour rout in the next general election:

A Truss U-turn on tax and an increase in both legal and illegal immigration points to a 1997 style wipeout. It will be fully deserved.

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) October 3, 2022

Meanwhile, Guido Fawkes kept us apprised of market movements, which weren’t nearly as alarming as expected that week:

Gilt futures fell by more than 100 ticks on the news. £ steady.

— Euro Guido (@EuroGuido) October 3, 2022

He rightly criticised Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves for stirring the pot unnecessarily:

Reeves Claims Still Economical with Truth as Bank Purchases Zero Gilts https://t.co/6p99fMnDeX pic.twitter.com/0X8ctBZMod

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 5, 2022

On Wednesday, October 5, as the conference closed, Guido wrote (emphases his):

The Bank of England has been easing off its interventions in the gilt market, leaving Rachel Reeves’s hyperbolic attack lines exposed for their inaccuracies. Julian Jessop points out the fact the Bank did not have to buy any gilts again today, leaving total purchases stable at £3.66 billion. A tad short of the £65 billion she repeatedly claims. This is a further sign market jitters have been effectively mitigated, far from Labour’s claims of an “economic crash”. As a trained economist and former Bank of England employee, Rachel really must know better. Her sums were out by a factor of 17…

At the weekend, while anti-Conservative pundits were still banging on about the 45% tax rate, which Truss and Kwarteng did a U-turn on …

Returning taxation to levels higher than it was under Gordon Brown is not "extreme libertarianism" my friend @NJ_Timothy

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 8, 2022

… The Telegraph‘s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard pointed out that gas prices were already falling, indicating that ‘Liz Truss may be winning her gamble on the energy price cap after all’:

Plummeting global gas prices have slashed the cost of the UK’s energy price cap and may ultimately reduce the monthly subsidy to zero, greatly alleviating the strain on Government borrowing.

NatWest Markets estimates that the price guarantee would cost approximately £30bn over the first six months based on current futures contracts, half the £60bn figure assumed by the Treasury and the rating agencies …

While NatWest remains wary of gilts after the mini-budget and the bond shock last month, it said pessimism over the UK’s public finances may have gone too far. Gilts may no longer be a one-way bet for traders …

Goldman Sachs thinks European wholesale prices may fall a further 40pc by late winter. Average energy bills in the UK would in that case fall to £2,000 or less.

The Government could put its cheque book back in the drawer.

Douglas McWilliams, from the Centre of Economics and Business Research, says that the public finances are in better shape than widely-supposed.

An odd week that began well

By Monday, October 10, things appeared to be looking up for Truss and Kwarteng.

Mel Stride MP, chairman of the Treasury Select Committee and not one of their best friends, was satisfied that the then-Chancellor agreed to review his economic plan on Halloween rather than in November:

BREAKING: Having pressed so hard on this I strongly welcome decision by @KwasiKwarteng to bring forward @OBR_UK forecast MTFP to 31st Oct. If this lands well with markets then MPC meeting on 3rd Nov may result in smaller rise in int rates. Critical to millions of mortgage holders pic.twitter.com/sgn7mB4ovf

— Mel Stride (@MelJStride) October 10, 2022

Tuesday, October 11, was a red-letter day.

The head of JP Morgan said that Truss deserved a chance:

JPMorgan Boss Says Give Truss a Chance https://t.co/iHVr4OWmAQ pic.twitter.com/wMY4H4hc3f

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 11, 2022

Guido wrote:

… Speaking last night from London with US broadcaster CNBC, Dimon backed Liz’s tax plans and hammered home the need for laser-like focus on growth – adding he’d “love to hear that out of their mouth every time a president or prime minister speaks”…

It’ll take time to execute the policies and kind of drive growth and what’s important … [but] there’s a lot of things the UK has going for it and proper strategies to get it growing faster … then it can accomplish some of the other objectives it wants to accomplish too […] I would like to see the new Prime Minister, the new Chancellor, be successful […] I think every government should be focusing on growth. I would love to hear that out of their mouth every time a president or prime minister speaks.

Another proud member of the Pro-Growth Coalition. Although he did warn the US will likely tip into recession in about 6 months…

The IMF did an about-face, as The Telegraph reported:

Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cutting mini-Budget will help Britain to be the fastest growing major economy this year at the cost of higher long-term inflation, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said.

Strong momentum at the end of 2021 means UK economic growth will outpace the rest of the G7 this year. Tax cuts announced in the mini-Budget are expected to lift it even higher than the IMF’s current forecast of 3.6pc, which was published on Tuesday but finalised before the Chancellor announced his plans …

The paper‘s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote, ‘Rejoice: we may be very close to Fed capitulation’:

Not only is the Fed rushing through jumbo rises of 75 points each meeting, it is also draining global dollar liquidity with $95bn a month of quantitative tightening (QT). It has never done the two together before. And it does not understand how QE/QT actually works, as admitted cheerfully by one Ben Bernanke, Nobel Prize laureate as of yesterday …

Ben Bernanke flagged the dangers of a strong dollar and the capital exodus from emerging markets yesterday. Without naming the British gilt market, he said financial stress in the international system was building up and posed a threat. “We really have to pay close attention,” he said. 

On Wednesday, October 12, it was noted that a Federal Reserve hike in interest rates took place before Kwarteng’s economic statement:

Yields spiked before the mini-budget… pic.twitter.com/OGDBpKNF9f

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 12, 2022

Furthermore, the US was also experiencing an unusual increase in mortgage rates, meaning that the UK was not the only country with that problem:

USA 30-year mortgage rates are now at 6.81% and rising. The highest for a very long time. Yet we are all being told here by the MSM that this is only a UK problem.

— Rob Wilson (@RobWilson_RDG) October 12, 2022

On Thursday, October 13, Truss had her weekly meeting with King Charles, who greeted her with ‘Dear, oh dear’ while the press were there:

What did he know?

He would have heard Foreign Secretary James Cleverly defend Truss and Kwarteng on that day’s news round. The poor man.

The Telegraph has a running diary of what went on that morning. This is the summary:

James Cleverly has warned it would be a “disastrously bad idea” to replace Liz Truss as Prime Minister.

Ms Truss is under intense pressure from some of her own MPs to abandon her economic plan following a market backlash to the measures set out in the mini-Budget.

The Prime Minister’s leadership is being questioned after little more than a month in the job, with some Tory MPs already considering who could replace her.

ConservativeHome‘s editor Paul Goodman was also on the airwaves. He told BBC Radio 4 that some Conservative MPs had suggestions for Truss’s and Kwarteng’s replacement:

The former Tory MP told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme: “All sorts of different people are talking about all sorts of different things because the Conservative backbenchers are casting around for a possible replacement for Kwasi Kwarteng, even for a possible replacement for Liz Truss.

“All sorts of names are being thrown about, Rishi Sunak, even Boris Johnson, Kit Malthouse, Sajid Javid.

“But one idea doing the rounds is that Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak, who, after all, between them got pretty much two-thirds of the votes of MPs, come to some kind of arrangement and essentially take over.”

The King probably also knew that Truss and Kwarteng were going to do a U-turn on corporation tax, which they planned to lower to 19%, as it is in Ireland:

Treasury Braces for Corporation Tax U-Turn https://t.co/CDVlEGezdO pic.twitter.com/JKIjzECC72

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 13, 2022

On Wednesday, at PMQs, Truss stood by the cut:

What we are doing is simply NOT putting up corporation tax. It’s not a tax cut, we’re just not raising corporation tax. And I feel that it would be wrong, in a time when we are trying to attract investment into our country, at a time of global economic slowdown, to be raising taxes. Because it will bring less revenue in.  And the way that we are going to get the money to fund our National Health Service… is by having a strong economy with companies investing and creating jobs.

On Thursday, October 13, Guido wrote:

What a difference 24 hours makes: this lunchtime The Sun broke the news that Truss “is considering raising Corporation Tax next year in spectacular mini-Budget U-turn”. A source tells Harry Cole that while the U-turn is being seriously considered, it wouldn’t be back up to the 25% proposed by Rishi before leaving the Treasury.

An unpleasant surprise for Kwarteng

Meanwhile, Kwarteng was in Washington at the annual IMF meeting.

Guido’s post had an update:

Channel 4 doorstepped him on his way in, where he said “I’ll be coming out with a statement on 31^st October and I’m not going to pre-empt that.” As The Speccie’s James Forsyth points out, if the markets are now pricing in a U-turn, and the government decides against one, they’ll likely be in a worse position than they were 24 hours ago…

On Friday, October 14, we woke up to the news that Kwarteng was summoned back to London, under the guise that emergency budget negotiations had to take place. The IMF meeting was to last into the weekend:

Kwasi Abandons IMF for Emergency Budget Negotiations https://t.co/5nXRb3aKaF pic.twitter.com/EmRXcagsji

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) October 14, 2022

This could mean only one thing — that his time as Chancellor was over.

Guido reported that Mel Stride was happy that Kwarteng’s economic package was about to be shot to bits:

… one source quoted in the Financial Times claims “Almost everything in the Budget is now up for grabs” …

For those who enjoyed the excitement of tracking Priti Patel’s flight back to the UK ahead of her sacking by Theresa May, you can follow Kwasi’s flight in real time here …

Mel Stride, Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, spoke on the Today Programme and welcomed a U-Turn. He called it a “powerful” signal to markets and added the government’s “fiscal credibility is now firmly back on the table”. He added the Conservative party should give the government “more time” and space to “rest”. How generous…

Sterling and bond markets had rallied following the first reports of a U-turn, which only adds on the pressure for more reversals. Elsewhere in the markets, today is the final day of the Bank of England’s gilt operations. Although gilt markets appeared steady this morning, the real test will come on Monday…

A Downing Street source tried to downplay Kwarteng’s return:

A No 10 source tell me the PM thinks the Chancellor is ‘doing an excellent job and they are in lockstep.’

When asked if Liz Truss wants Kwasi Kwarteng to continue in the job in the coming months, the source said ‘yes.’

More @BBCr4today in a mo https://t.co/pesmDwDjjd

— Chris Mason (@ChrisMasonBBC) October 14, 2022

Kwarteng had scrambled to take the last commercial flight from Dulles Airport to Heathrow:

Article suggests Kwasi Kwarteng took the last commercial flight to leave Washington Dulles last night meaning he is onboard
BA0292 due into Heathrow 10:44 UK time. https://t.co/wRLqFMVoMH https://t.co/WBdD5lYjcv pic.twitter.com/m9DplN7jmz

— Jack Doyle (@jdoyle597) October 14, 2022

The next bit of news was that Truss was going to hold a press conference that afternoon.

Guido wrote:

Liz is set to U-turn on the corporation tax freeze at 2pm this afternoon. It’s rumoured she’ll whack it all the way up to 25% in the spring. Kwasi won’t be appearing alongside her…

Speculation began on who the new Chancellor would be. The Sun‘s political editor Harry Cole tweeted the following in the hours before the press conference, indicating Jeremy Hunt:

Cabinet ministers think it’s gonna be Hunt

— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) October 14, 2022

Just told my cabbie. While putting a tie on. On my day off. https://t.co/MhAwZGk2JM

— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) October 14, 2022

Hunt called for even more swinging tax cuts and 3% of its GDP on defence by 2027-28.

He also could not garner the support of 30 MPs to run himself….

— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) October 14, 2022

Cabinet members were correct about Jeremy Hunt:

The Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP @Jeremy_Hunt has been appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer @HMTreasury. pic.twitter.com/bldKWr3crG

— UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) October 14, 2022

King Charles approved the following appointments from Truss:

JUST IN: The King has been pleased to approve the following appointments:

Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP as Chancellor of the Exchequer;

Rt Hon Edward Argar MP as Chief Secretary to the Treasury;

Rt Hon Chris Philp MP as Paymaster General, and Minister for the Cabinet Office.

— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) October 14, 2022

Nigel Farage was rightly furious about a Remainer assuming the post of Chancellor:

A new proportional voting system will kill @Conservatives off, and after 12 years of Tory misrule — they deserve it.

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) October 14, 2022

Harry Cole got a copy of Truss’s letter to Kwarteng, thanking him for his hard work:

Dear Kwasi.. pic.twitter.com/pKaKVh8eXm

— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) October 14, 2022

The nation now had a new dream team. This seconds-long video is a must-see. The UK is doomed:

The dream team pic.twitter.com/xRZjQ2gGId

— Calgie (@christiancalgie) October 14, 2022

I’ll go into Truss’s press conference tomorrow.

In short, it was absolutely dire and lasted only eight minutes, which included four questions, one of which was from Harry Cole. His face is a picture:

.@MrHarryCole's face post press conference. Instant meme material. pic.twitter.com/GI2YrtxljY

— Sam Blackledge (@samblackledge) October 14, 2022

I’ll have more tomorrow on how shocked Kwarteng must have been as well as what this means for Truss’s premiership.

King Charles says ‘Dear, oh dear’ to Liz Truss days before she sacks Chancellor; premiership ruined

Pity our Prime Minister Liz Truss.

The choice of Conservative Party members, the lady who wanted a Thatcherite premiership of low taxation and high growth, is now silent.

On Thursday, October 13, in her private weekly meeting with King Charles, he greeted her with ‘Dear, oh dear’:

He could have at least waited until the press were out of the way.

On Friday, October 14, she was forced to sack her Chancellor and good friend Kwasi Kwarteng.

The two of them were not playing the globalist game for high taxation and low growth.

Kwarteng’s brilliant mind

Kwarteng was elected as MP for Spelthorne in 2010, part of Prime Minister David Cameron’s fresh, youthful Conservative intake that year.

He worked on Brexit in 2019 as part of Theresa May’s government. Later that year, he was keen for Nigel Farage to stand down candidates in order for Conservatives to win convincingly in the general election — and get Brexit done:

"Now is the time for @Nigel_Farage to step aside."

Business Minister @KwasiKwarteng says "it's obvious to many people that the only way we're going to get #Brexit done is by voting for a Conservative government."#GE2019

Follow #Ridge live 👉 https://t.co/qplpD1wUuK pic.twitter.com/X0FmpiV2Gk

— Sophy Ridge on Sunday & The Take (@RidgeOnSunday) November 10, 2019

Under Boris Johnson, in 2021, as Business Secretary, he became the first black — and first Conservative — Secretary of State. In that role, he refused to lift the moratorium on fracking. On the other hand, on July 6, 2022, he ensured that two coal plants are staying open to help ensure that the UK has adequate energy supplies this winter.

He was not a man in favour of high taxes, even in the wake of the pandemic, telling LBC radio on March 2, 2021:

Obviously we have to balance the books over time, but I’m a low tax conservative. The real key is to grow the economy. The best remedy for the deficit, the best remedy for the economy is to open up the economy, allow people to get on with their lives, allow businesses to start trading again.

In July 2021, he politely opposed the National Insurance tax hike.

In June that year, he supported the Government’s caution on lifting final coronavirus restrictions in England and sagely predicted that there would be no more lockdowns in England.

Once Liz Truss was made Prime Minister, we found out more about his friendship with her, which began when she, too, was first elected to Parliament in 2010.

On September 6, 2022, the Mail posted an old photo from earlier parliamentary days of the new Chancellor and the new Prime Minister with this caption:

The new Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is a close friend of Liz Truss, so close that he lives 350 yards away in Greenwich.

The article also told us more about his towering height and intellect (emphases mine):

Although he is not widely known to the public, the 47-year-old MP for Spelthorne, Surrey, comes equipped with a solid academic background.

At 6ft 5in, Mr Kwarteng is a powerhouse physically and intellectually …

He speaks German, Greek and French, and writes poetry in Latin.

One friend recalled how, when the school introduced Italian to the curriculum, ‘the teachers were trying to teach rudimentary Italian but Kwasi learnt the whole language – the teachers were struggling to keep up with him’.

Like Boris Johnson, who attended Eton a decade earlier, Mr Kwarteng shone at the Wall Game, a hybrid of football and rugby, where he played First Wall, described by an Etonian as ‘an almost suicidal position that involved spending much of the match having his head scraped against brickwork’ …

He was a prefect at the school and is still, it is said, held up as an example of how to succeed in Oxbridge interviews.

He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge:

He excelled at Cambridge where friends described him as ‘supremely confident, but not arrogant’.

One said he ‘had quite a few girlfriends – he had catching up to do after his boys’ private school upbringing’.

Professor Tim Whitmarsh, who taught him Latin and Greek, was quoted as describing him as ‘a bit of a young fogey’, saying: ‘I once saw a 19-year-old Kwasi in full brown tweed bumbling around with a pipe in his mouth on a baking hot day.’ 

More recently:

Last year, Mr Kwarteng bought a Victorian villa just 350 yards from Miss Truss’s £1.5million four-storey townhouse in Greenwich, south London.

Now they are neighbours in Downing Street too.

At one point Mr Kwarteng was dating Amber Rudd, the former Conservative home secretary, but the pair split up.

He then met Harriet Edwards, 36, a former pupil of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and now a high-flying corporate lawyer specialising in advising private clients on ‘succession’ planning.

The pair married in 2019 and have a baby daughter, Ida, born last year …

Said to be a ‘pragmatist rather than an ideologue’, the free-marketeer’s ministerial office allegedly boasts a large whiteboard on which are scrawled the letters ‘MSH’, standing for ‘making s*** happen’.

With the multiple challenges facing the new chancellor, it is a mantra that may serve him well.

On September 7, The Telegraph had a profile of Kwarteng, which gave Truss supporters further hope.

We discovered that he wrote for the newspaper and had decidedly conservative opinions even in his 20s. The article featured a screenshot of his column of August 1, 1997 about higher education — ‘Don’t go to university, make money instead’:

The man appointed the 109th Chancellor of the Exchequer had been considered a rising star well before he entered Parliament and first made his name at the age of 22 with a column in The Telegraph.

From higher education to the rise of “lad mags”, Mr Kwarteng left a trail of published evidence showing his youthful thinking on the state of Britain. 

According to Mr Kwarteng, universities were not just a waste of time for those hoping to make lots of money but “a trick of the mind”. They offered value of a sort as “a place for reflective thought, like the monasteries of the Middle Ages,” but were only really popular as a way of proving one’s smarts …

While universities might be conducive to research, on the whole, Mr Kwarteng thought, “the university added little to the talent which was already in them”. 

For that reason, the MP for Spelthorne thought it “ridiculous” that everyone should go to university.

Also in August 1997, he also wrote about his scepticism of those who know best in ‘”Experts”: it’s the same old story’, wherein he expressed his doubts about climate change:

“We live in the age of the expert,” he declared, “of course, all these experts are invariably self-appointed, and they all contradict each other.”

Mr Kwarteng lamented the loss of Western “reason and objective investigation” and said that the witchdoctors of “simple peoples” had been “reincarnated in a modern, Western, suit-wearing capacity.

“They are the consultants, health gurus, constitutional experts, psychologists and sociologists who seem to spring from the ground at every opportunity.”

… In his column, he highlighted global warming as an example of “conjecture” dressed up as “granite fact”.

It’s a pity he later changed his mind. Perhaps he did it for political expediency. Who knows?

On at least one issue, however, Mr Kwarteng has clearly come to accept the views of the experts …

As Business Secretary, he has declared it essential for governments to intervene to tackle climate change. 

The Telegraph article has several more of his columns to explore.

Kwarteng as Chancellor

A fortnight before he delivered his fiscal event to Parliament, he pledged that his focus on growth would be ‘relentless’. The Times reported:

The new chancellor has promised a shift in economic policy towards an “unashamedly pro-growth agenda” rather than worrying about redistribution.

Kwasi Kwarteng promised “to do things differently” as he acknowledged the need for higher borrowing over the winter to help households with their energy bills. However, he promised “fiscal discipline over the medium term” by ensuring the economy would grow faster than government debt, saying this would require deregulation and tax cuts.

After meeting key City figures, including the chief executives of Barclays, NatWest, Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC, Kwarteng said that he wanted to deal with economic problems through growth, with a goal of getting the underlying rate up to 2.5 per cent.

“The prime minister and I are committed to taking decisive action to help the British people now,” he said. “That means relentlessly focusing on how we unlock business investment and grow the size of the British economy, rather than how we redistribute what’s left.”

He and Truss needed to work quickly to come up with the fiscal event. The nation had been in mourning for the Queen from September 8 through September 19. Meanwhile, the Conservatives’ opponents were braying for a statement.

On Thursday, September 22, Kwarteng tweeted:

More information on today's Bill 👇🏾https://t.co/gXqafmt1We

— Kwasi Kwarteng (@KwasiKwarteng) September 22, 2022

That day, The Spectator‘s Katy Balls explained that Truss wanted to move quickly:

Liz Truss is in a race against time. It’s not just the prospect of an election in two years. It’s the political problems – from party management to events outside of one’s control – that quickly clog up a prime minister’s in-tray. It’s why for all the efforts to play down Friday’s fiscal event as a mini-Budget, it is likely to be anything but small. Truss and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng plan to push through as much as possible while their stock is highest …

Truss and Kwarteng have said their priority is to boost growth. In order to do that, they are undoing plenty of policies by their predecessors. The plan for investment zones – areas that could benefit from a lighter planning regime and various tax breaks – has already been briefed as a change of priorities compared to the former Levelling Up secretary Michael Gove. A government insider told the Financial Times this week: ‘The plans make Gove look like a socialist.’ There will also be further measures to undo more of the policies brought in by Rishi Sunak as Chancellor. 

Coffee House understands one plan under consideration is the return of tax-free shopping for tourists. As Chancellor, Sunak axed the 20 per cent discount for foreign visitors – leading to an outcry from MPs who said it would make Britain less attractive to businesses. At the time, the Treasury defended his decision on the grounds that ‘this is getting rid of a tax cut that mainly benefits foreign billionaires.’ However, the sector has voiced frustrations that this has led UK business to drop off while European capitals have seen business go up.

How will all this go down? As the Bank of England raise interest rates by 0.5 percentage points to 2.25 per cent in an attempt to combat inflation, already there are warnings about the effect of the government’s planned borrowing. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that the planned tax cuts are likely to push UK borrowing and debt to unsustainable levels. The hope in government is that rather than spark alarm, the markets will have already priced in the new direction they are taking, and what happened in August suggests they may well have done so.  

‘The strategy is do everything now,’ says one person close to Liz Truss. ‘This government has balls of steel’. In adopting this approach, Truss and Kwarteng are taking a gamble – and it won’t be too long before it becomes clear whether or not it is paying off.

True conservatives cheered the package Kwarteng delivered to Parliament on Friday, September 23:

Thirty years of hurt,
Never stopped me dreaming….
(It's going lower, taxation's going lower) https://t.co/JRrontSnVx

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) September 23, 2022

We felt as if Brexit would finally become the reality that would thwart Labour:

This #MiniBudget has shot Labour's fox#LizTruss and #KwasiKwarteng
have genuinely put Clear Blue Water between the two parties now:

HIGH GROWTH, LOW TAX economy of the @Conservatives
OR
a HIGH TAX, LOW GROWTH, handout economy of @UKLabour

— Manish Singh (@Manish_05Singh) September 23, 2022

Our debt would remain the second lowest in the G7:

UK’s Debt Will Still Remain Second Lowest in G7 https://t.co/zIfaNdJV0Q pic.twitter.com/NrfLy6wTKd

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) September 23, 2022

Guido Fawkes posted Kwarteng’s economic plan in full as well as a summary, excerpted below:

Price of Energy

• • Government freezes household energy bills at £2,500
  • Government will subsidise wholesale energy prices for businesses
  • Total cost of energy package for 6 months from October will be approximately £60 billion

Inflation

• • Government plan will reduce peak inflation by 5%
  • Chancellor: Bank of England independence is “sacrosanct”

Growth

• • Government will focus on growth target of 2.5%

Barriers to Enterprise

• • Government will bring forward bill to unpick regulation and launch a review into decision making
  • Increase disposal of government land to build more homes
  • Government will remove cap on bankers’ bonuses …
    

Tax

• • Planned rise in corporation tax is cancelled, it will remain at 19%
  • Annual investment allowance will not fall to £200,000 as planned, will remain at £1 million
  • Office of tax simplification abolished, tax simplification mandated in all government departments
  • IR35 rules changed: 2017 and 2021 reforms scrapped
  • Planned increases in duty for beer, wine and spirits cancelled
  • VAT free shopping for overseas visitors
  • Increases to National Insurance contributions cancelled
  • Stamp duty threshold raised from £125,000 to £250,000; for first time buyers it will rise from £300,000 to 425,000
  • Kwasi will abolish the highest 45% rate of income income tax. Top rate now 40%.
  • Basic rate of income tax cut to 19% from April

Ahead of Kwasi’s statement:
FTSE 100 is at 7,120
£/$ 1.1163
£/€ 1.1435
10 year gilt yield 3.49%

That afternoon, The Telegraph‘s Allister Heath was over the moon:

This was the best Budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver, by a massive margin. The tax cuts were so huge and bold, the language so extraordinary, that at times, listening to Kwasi Kwarteng, I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, that I hadn’t been transported to a distant land that actually believed in the economics of Milton Friedman and FA Hayek.

But Liz Truss and Kwarteng are very much for real, and in revolutionary mood. The neo-Brownite consensus of the past 20 years, the egalitarian, redistributionist obsession, the technocratic centrism, the genuflections at the altar of a bogus class war, the spreadsheet-wielding socialists: all were blown to smithereens by Kwarteng’s stunning neo-Reaganite peroration.

Hardcore, unapologetic liberal Toryism is back. This fiscal statement is in some ways an even bigger deal than that previously greatest of Budgets, Lord Lawson’s extravaganza of 1988, so long ago that my generation cannot remember it. All the taboos have been defiled: the fracking ban, the performative 45pc tax rate, the malfunctioning bonus cap, the previous gang’s nihilistic corporation tax and national insurance raids. The basic rate of income tax is being cut, as is stamp duty, that dumbest of levies. There will be more reforms, more deregulation from a Chancellor explicitly committed to a flatter and simpler tax system.

It wasn’t merely the policies that were astonishingly good: just as remarkable was Kwarteng’s language, the arguments he deployed to explain his decisions, the lucid free-market philosophy from which they emanated. He spoke of the need to bolster incentives, to encourage business investment, to increase work, to reward savings. He explained that this meant that the returns on capital and labour had to be improved. He wants to usher in a new Big Bang in the City and launch dozens of new Canary Wharfs on steroids.

At a stroke of a pen, Britain’s competitiveness, its attractiveness to investors and top talent, has been transformed. Money and jobs will flow in, especially from the Eurozone. Britain’s central pathology is low growth, held back by faulty economic, fiscal, monetary and regulatory policies: higher spending begets higher taxes, which lead to a vicious cycle of even lower growth, and hence yet more taxes, and so on.

I watched Kwarteng’s speech to Parliament and the debate that followed. Allister Heath was right in everything he wrote.

On Sunday, September 25, The Sun wrote that its polls indicated the British public supported nearly all of Truss’s proposals that Kwarteng delivered:

DELIGHTED Brits overwhelmingly back Kwasi Kwarteng’s key income tax and stamp duty cuts, a poll found …

And PM Liz Truss says their radical plan will usher in a “decade of dynamism” …

A Deltapoll survey for The Sun on Sunday found many of his central policies have gone down a storm.

His pledge to slash the basic rate of income tax from 20p in the £1 to 19p from next April, benefitting 31million workers, got the backing of 63 per cent of respondents.

A majority of Labour and Tory supporters like the plan.

Meanwhile, the decision to ditch stamp duty for first-time buyers on homes worth up to £425,000 was approved by 61 per cent of respondents.

The move to reverse the 1.25 percentage point hike in National Insurance Contributions was liked by 59 per cent of the 1,553 people surveyed.

Some parts of the mini Budget, however, were far less popular. Just 30 per cent of voters backed the decision to scrap the bankers’ bonus cap.

And even fewer — 28 per cent — approved of the move to do away with the 45p top rate of income tax, which will put more cash in the pockets of society’s top earners …

Some delighted Tory MPs punched the air in delight after Mr Kwarteng detailed his mini Budget to the Commons.

One senior Tory said: “I am delighted. Finally, we have a proper Thatcherite budget.”

But others warned it was a punt that may cost the Tories the next election.

One minister crossed his fingers as he said: “It is a huge gamble. If we see growth then it will have worked. It’s a roll of the dice.”

The annual Labour Party conference convened that Sunday.

The Spectator‘s editor Fraser Nelson pointed out that their leader Sir Keir Starmer opposed only the abolition of the 45% tax rate:

So Starmer has just signed up to the bulk of the £45bn Kwarteng tax cut package

(He opposes Sunak's CT rise, and abolishing 45p rate costs ~£2bn) https://t.co/Fkj0EApVU2

— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) September 25, 2022

The Sun‘s editorial that day reminded Britons that it was Gordon Brown who put the 45% rate in place — and that was late in his premiership, around 12 years ago. His predecessor Tony Blair had not. As such, Labour had no room to complain:

For too long — if partly by necessity of the pandemic in recent years — the Conservatives have been parked on the centre ground, often operating from a Blairite or Brownite playbook.

The spleen-venting over Mr Kwarteng’s most controversial call — ditching the 45 per cent top tax rate for those on over £150,000 — ignores the fact that, throughout the Blair years, it was the exact same as the new 40 per cent levy.

Nonetheless it’s true that the move does give Labour an easy line of attack, as does the Government’s reluctance to trumpet the fact that it IS already subjecting energy giants to a windfall tax — one which is raising around £30billion.

Yesterday Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer confirmed he would retain the vast majority of the Chancellor’s tax cuts if he gained power.

Already, however, the doomsayers, including Torsten Bell, were already weighing in, as Guido Fawkes wrote that day (emphases his):

… Labour have accepted two thirds of the personal income tax cuts. They are only rejecting one cut, the top rate cut…

So the the dividing line between the parties is: Will “new era” economics work and crank growth up to 2.5% before the next election?

Not a chance say Rachel Reeves and the assembled hardline-centrists of the broadsheet punditry, plus all the orthodox economists from the IFS, Institute for Big Government and gloomy Torsten Bell with his distribution charts. Kwasi and Liz say it will work. It won’t surprise co-conspirators that Guido thinks it is less of a gamble than the BBC’s Faisal Islam reckons. Barring oil going to $300 or some other catastrophe, it is far more likely to work than the doomsters would have you believe. If Kwasi and Liz fail to hit the 2.5% target they have set for themselves, they will deservedly lose the next election. The choice now is pull out all the stops and go for growth, or go into opposition…

At conference, two Labour MPs of colour criticised the Conservatives’ choice of Chancellor in Rishi Sunak, his successors and Kwasi Kwarteng. Guido reported on Rupa Huq’s words about Kwarteng, which earned her a suspension from the Party, despite her apology. Shadow Rail Minister Tan Dhesi said he wanted to see white males in the Conservative Cabinet rather that persons of colour:

Guido doesn’t consider Tan’s comments to be half as bad as Rupa Huq’s. His quote about Boris having an Asian do his dirty work for him, alongside Huq’s referral to Rishi as “a little brown guy”, is indicative that Labour somehow questions the legitimacy of non-white Tory Cabinet ministers. Does anyone get the sense Labour are slightly panicked about the Tories having a more diverse front bench than they do?

Fatal criticism despite global problems

But that was nothing compared to the big anti-Truss, anti-Kwarteng fallout that took place elsewhere that week.

On Monday, September 26, the IMF criticised the fiscal event.

Lord Frost defended Truss and Kwarteng in an article for The Telegraph:

The IEA’s head of public policy said that one of Margaret Thatcher’s budgets — that of then-Chancellor Geoffrey Howe — was similarly criticised and ended up being wildly successful:

On Thursday, September 29, Labour MPs were back at home but outside criticism of the Truss-Kwarteng plan continued from globalist sources.

The US Treasury had weighed in against the plan after the IMF had.

The markets wobbled that week.

It should be noted that the UK was not the only country suffering from jitters — it was every other main economy, too.

With regard to us, however, the Bank of England had to step in with a fortnight of measures, too complicated to explain here, that put an end to risky measures that British pension funds had been using for several years.

Nevertheless, Truss and Kwarteng got it in the neck.

The Telegraph had a running diary of events that Thursday morning. Excerpts follow, covering the period from 7:30 to 10:30 a.m.:

The Prime Minister is due to undertake a tour of regional BBC radio stations this morning when she will be grilled on her tax cuts and spending plans after they sparked economic turmoil.

Lord Clarke, the Tory former chancellor, has argued this morning that no other Conservative government would have made a “mistake” like Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget. 

The Tory former chancellor told Times Radio: “If the pound sinks any further, then they will have to perhaps retract some of the measures because the more the pound goes down, the more inflation goes up.”

The Treasury has said Kwasi Kwarteng will deliver a follow up statement to the mini-Budget in November in which he will set out the Government’s medium-term economic plans. 

But the Chancellor is under mounting pressure to deliver a statement to reassure the markets and the nation much sooner than that.

Chris Philp, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has defended the Government’s decision to scrap the 45p top rate of income tax.

Asked why it was necessary to make the move now, he told Sky News: “The top rate of now 40 per cent, reducing from 45, makes us internationally competitive, it puts us on a par with a number of other economies.”

After the Bank of England was forced to step in to calm the markets, Mr Philp told Sky News: “No one’s perfect but I’m not going to apologise for having a plan to grow the economy …”

Chris Philp, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has dismissed suggestions that Kwasi Kwarteng should resign as Chancellor over his handling of the mini-Budget. 

Liz Truss has defended her mini-Budget plans as she said as Prime Minister she is prepared to take “controversial and difficult decisions”. 

Liz Truss has said the world is facing “very, very difficult economic times” as she also insisted Kwasi Kwarteng is working “very, very closely” with the Bank of England.

Liz Truss said that “we have seen difficult markets around the world because of the very difficult international situation we face”. 

Liz Truss has defended the decision to scrap the 45p top rate of income tax as she argued that lower taxes “help everybody”.

BBC Radio Bristol presenter James Hanson challenged Liz Truss over her repeated claim that financial markets around the world have been facing turmoil. 

Daisy Cooper, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, has claimed Liz Truss is in “complete denial” following the Prime Minister’s morning media round. 

The Conservative Party is due to meet in Birmingham from Sunday this weekend for its annual conference. 

Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, has called on the Tories to scrap the event.

Sir Ed said repeated his call for Parliament to be recalled.

Chris Philp, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was told this morning that the mini-Budget needs to be changed. 

Speaking to LBC Radio, he said: “No, well, if you listen to the reaction of British business organisations to Kwasi Kwarteng’s growth plan on Friday, like, for example, the Confederation of British Industry, the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses, the British Chambers of Commerce, they all strongly welcomed the growth plan, and they are the organisations that represent British business…”

The Bank of England’s £65 billion intervention in the UK economy yesterday is a “very targeted, time-limited intervention”, according to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. (You can read the full story on the bailout here) …

Chris Philp was asked during an interview on LBC Radio this morning if that bailout indicated the economy is experiencing “serious problems”.

He said: “Look, they were making a very targeted, time-limited intervention. There was a particular idiosyncrasy to do with the way that particular pension vehicles used long-dated gilts.

“It was a very targeted, very specific intervention to address that issue, which they’ve successfully done – independently, of course, the Bank of England act independently.

“And they’re not the only central bank to have had to make an intervention. Like I said, the Bank of Japan intervened in the Yen dollar market just a few days ago.”

Chris Philp, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has rejected the suggestion that the UK is now in the middle of a financial “crisis”. 

Asked if he accepted it is a “crisis”, Mr Philp told LBC Radio: “Look, I don’t accept the word crisis at all. Look, in the last six to nine months… the financial markets have been in some volatility around the world.”

Sterling has fallen sharply again as former Bank of England governor Mark Carney accused Liz Truss of “undercutting” the central bank …

He said there was an “undercutting” of key City institutions, pointing to the lack of an OBR forecast, a lack of detail about costing and working at “cross-purposes” with the Bank of England.

Ms Truss later told BBC Radio Kent that she is “very clear the Government has done the right thing by taking action urgently to deal with inflation, to deal with the economic slowdown, and to deal with high energy bills”.

Were those accusations from globalists really true?

Was day-to-day business in Britain disrupted so dramatically? And wasn’t the Government helping Britons with their energy bills? As to the latter question, the UK has been providing the most assistance of any European government:

Guess what everyone…NO recession, pound is flying high in all markets. UK trade is booming, unemployment to it's lowest levels for decades, gas/fuel is slowly coming down. Fantastic support from the UK GOV.
WHAT FKING CRISES!!! pic.twitter.com/eCkpLfgdEd

— James (@JamesBu57995988) September 30, 2022

That week, Kwarteng was under much pressure to meet with the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which, as I posted on October 6, has a lot of Torsten Bell alums from his charity, the Resolution Foundation.

On Friday, September 30, he met with the OBR. Guido reported:

The highly-anticipated meeting between the OBR and government wrapped up after 48 minutes. The OBR says they’ll deliver an initial forecast on the October 7, however the government’s readout of the meeting sticks to the line that it will be published alongside Kwarteng’s medium-term growth plan on November 23 …

Meanwhile, Labour were still banging on about the abolition of the 45% tax rate. The cost of subsidising Britons’ energy bills kept increasing, too. Naysayers were pumping up the total expenditure from £60bn to £100bn:

Getting taxation down to a level higher than it was under Gordon Brown does not strike me as "extreme".

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) September 30, 2022

That morning, The Telegraph posted Kwarteng’s editorial defending his fiscal event, which ended with this:

Even in the face of extreme volatility in global markets, with major currencies wrestling an incredibly strong US dollar, we will show financial markets and investors that our plan is sound, credible and will work to drive growth.

By combining our immediate energy support with bold action to reset the fundamentals of the UK economy, we are helping households and businesses today – and putting the United Kingdom on a more prosperous, competitive path for years to come.

That evening, The Times reported that the Scottish Secretary Alister Jack said that Truss delivered what she had promised in the leadership hustings and reminded us that she and former Chancellor Rishi Sunak disagreed on how the British economy should proceed:

Speaking to BBC Radio Scotland on Friday, Jack said: “When you say ‘huge shock’, over the summer [Truss] was very clear that her strategy was to reduce taxes.

“She and Rishi Sunak argued that out over the summer, he said one thing, she said the other, but it shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone when she said she believed the strategy was to be more of an Asian tiger economy, where you keep your higher spending but you grow your economy, and she said to do that she would be cutting taxes.

“To anyone paying any attention to that leadership contest it was plain as day what was going to happen” …

In response to the plans announced by Kwarteng last week, the International Monetary Fund said it was monitoring the situation and urged a rethink, while the Bank of England began buying government bonds to avert what it described as a “material risk to UK financial stability”.

More controversy, ending with Truss’s sacking of Kwarteng, followed.

I will dissect the tragic conclusion tomorrow and, on Thursday, what it means for Truss’s premiership.