Kisses from a prince are always saving people. Snow White from the poisoned apple. Sleeping Beauty from her eternal snooze. And now we have Prince William swooping in with a perfunctory peck to bring his York cousins back in from the cold.
Over the weekend, Princess Anne’s son Peter Phillips married National Health Service nurse Harriet Sperling at a quaint little church, stuffed with a riot of spring blooms and a full flight showing of HRHs out in their best bib-and-tuck force. However the big news out of the day was not how tickled ruddy pink the newlyweds managed to look (or the bride’s possible product placement tiara), but the controversial appearance of Princess Beatrice and Princess Beatrice, back in the royal fold.
The last couple of weeks have not been a good time to be a York, thanks to their Daddy Not So Dearest: Police announced they were widening their investigation into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to look at possible sexual misconduct and it was revealed he is alleged to have behaved inappropriately towards a waitress in the Royal enclosure at Ascot in 2002. (Andrew has previously denied all wrongdoing.)
This comes after his arrest, de-princing, eviction from a grand royal home and the US Congress asking him if he would mind popping over and giving evidence about his BFJ. (Best Friend Jeff.)
Given all this, Bea and Euge, as they are reportedly known to their friends, were said to be experiencing an emotion that neither Andrew nor his Sancerre-soaked inamorata Sarah Ferugson have ever experienced – shame. Therefore The Girls, deeply embarrassed this thinking went, were reportedly planning to steer well clear of cousin Peter’s wedding, not wanting to distract from the happy couple.
Well au bloody contraire.
On Saturday the skies put on a very British display of drizzle: There were the Princesses, the B1 and B2 of the Burberry classes, clip clopping their way up the road in $2000 heels, past the bank of press and onlookers.
Then came the truly shocking moment, when Prince William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales turned up, her looking like a million bucks and him gallantly wielding a brolly to keep his wife dry. As the assembled members of the royal family milled around outside the church William was photographed kissing Beatrice on the cheek, AKA the peck heard around the world.
The reason: The Waleses’ attitude towards the York sisters has been generally characterised as Arctic, a fact first noticed on Christmas Day, when the prince was filmed studiously ignoring Eugenie outside church while he fiddled with his scarf.
The Wales/York rift valley can be traced back to the fact that it was William who was reportedly the agitating force who pushed King Charles to defenestrate his louse of a younger brother.
It was William, an ear keenly attuned to public feeling, who was busy telling Charles that Crown Inc could no longer let Jeffrey Epstein’s BFF continue to swan around Royal Lodge, practising his putting in his silk-lined drawing room while he waited to start his Zoom with a Kyrgyzstani gas billionaire who wanted Cowes week tickets and to run a pipeline through a few Uyghur camps.
Then came the release of the Epstein files that dragged Beatrice and Eugenie front and centre, the tranche of documents revealing that they had flown to the US days only days after Jeffrey Epstein’s release from his jail term on teen sex charges to help celebrate and with emails suggesting they entertained the paedophile financier’s contacts in London and possibly showed them around Buckingham Palace.
The cleanliness of the hands of all members of the York family has come increasingly into focus.
In March, leaked emails revealed that Andrew jointly owned a tax-free offshore Caribbean fund with Jonathan Rowland, whose father David Rowland, has been called a “shady financier” by the UK press and “my trusted money man” by Andrew.
These emails showed that Beatrice and Eugenie were set to be given $189,000 (£100,000) in 2011 by David Rowland.
There have long been questions asked, and no immediate answers forthcoming about how Beatrice and Eugenie have paid for the luxe lifestyles, including the 17 holidays Beat took in 2015 while making only $37,000 working for Sony Pictures.
Let’s also not forget that curious incident when a businessman named Selman Turk wired $1.4 million (£750,000), allegedly stolen from Turkish millionairess Nebahat Isbilen, to Andrew in what Turk said was a gift for Beatrice’s wedding.
Andrew, Sarah, Beatrice and Eugenie, The Times has reported, received $2.6 million (£1.4 million) in a series of payments, allegedly made by Turk. In 2023 Andrew reached a confidential settlement with Isbilen.
Sarah, Beatrice and Eugenie have never been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to these matters.
In October last year, days before Andrew lost his titles, Beatrice was in Saudi Arabia hosting a five-star afternoon tea, just the latest in a long line of trips the sisters have made to the region.
Ex Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, who was friends with Diana, Princess of Wales, put it deliciously when she recently wrote of them on her Substack, that the princesses’ Middle Eastern trips are “are hustle bazaars for nepo nightmares and crypto creeps hoovering around for the crumbs of sovereign wealth funds. One wonders why they allegedly rejected Prince William’s request to audit their business activities to ensure there are no reputational risks.”
The two women have been dragged into the controversy over Andrew’s wrongdoing, if only by the fact he is their father. Only last week, a friend of William’s was quoted by Sykes as saying: “The Yorks are a crime family. In a crime family, the next generation gets drawn in. They may have been indoctrinated as children, but no one, 20 years later, seriously argues that it’s not their fault and that they are immune to the consequences of their actions.”
That is not to say, Sykes writes, “they are guilty in a courtroom sense” but that William “thinks they are contaminated. And in the age of the social media pile-on, William understands something his father simply does not: that contamination, fair or not, is fatal.”
Then on Thursday last week the York girls’ reputation suffered another heavy blow when the UK government’s National Audit Office (NAO) revealed that Beatrice and Eugenie have never personally paid a single penny in rent for the large properties they occupy on royal grounds, despite doing absolutely about as much for the monarchy as the recessive haemophilia gene.
Likewise Andrew, when the NAO also revealed that until April (APRIL) the former Duke of York was charging staff to rent properties on the Royal Lodge estate – despite him only having paid a peppercorn rent himself.
Given all this, William and Kate have steered a path so clear of Beatrice and Eugenie you could have slapped a six lane motorway down the middle of it and ahead of the wedding, it had seemed like a no-brainer. The Waleses would spend Saturday avoiding their Chernobyl-ish cousins.
And then came the great plot twist and Saturday’s churchyard kiss, a moment which just happened to take place in direct line of sight of the press. Funny that.
Because this kiss was not just a kiss, according to The Royalist’s Tom Sykes, but a sign that Charles is winning the power battle that has been going on behind the scenes with William. When the prince bent down to plant one on Beatrice it “was about Charles reasserting control over the family.”
According to Sykes, there has, for years, been a tussle going between Charles and William since the King’s 2024 cancer diagnosis. When Charles revealed his health battle, “a huge amount of power flowed almost instantaneously into William’s court as people started aligning themselves and getting ready for the next reign”.
During this time, as decisions about the fate of Andrew, Beatrice and Eugenie have come up, the King and the prince have displayed starkly different attitudes. The King wants to be Mr Conciliatory, magnanimously not letting the sins of the father taint his daughters and prevent them getting to go to Ascot, while the prince reportedly thinks that the princesses are reputationally toxic and should be shunted off to social Siberia.
However now the pendulum has, per Sykes, swung back towards the King because thanks to the wonder of modern medicine “his aides and his doctors are now confident that he may live something approaching a normal lifespan.”
Read in this light, the Prince of Wales’ cousinly kiss was not a gesture of support but a bending of the knee.
That moment, Sykes wrote on The Royalist Substack, “was an expression of Charles pulling power back.
“William was making it clear that he is a loyal servant and will ultimately go along with what his father wants”.
What’s also interesting to note here is what we did not see – we did not see Kate making polite small talk to Beatrice or Eugenie or William also duly pecking Eugenie’s cheek, with her having so closely aligned herself with Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
At least for now, we can bet on a happily-ever-after for the connubially blissed-up Peter and Harriet. And Beatrice and Eugenie? I wouldn’t be putting any money on them getting any sort of fairytale ending.
Daniela Elser is an editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with Australia’s leading media titles.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.news.com.au ’
