She’s made a fortune through her Plantagenet and Tudor novels, including The Other Boleyn Girl, which became a Hollywood film starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.
Yet historical author Philippa Gregory says it’s time for the monarchy to be consigned to history – even though she’s one of the leading supporters of Queen Camilla‘s reading charity.
‘I just don’t think it’s really appropriate in the modern world, and I object if it’s particularly expensive,’ says Philippa, 72.
Last year, the Royal Family received £86.3 million from taxpayers via the Sovereign Grant. King Charles also received £27.4million from the Duchy of Lancaster in 2024, while Prince William was handed £22.9million from the Duchy of Cornwall in 2025. Taxpayers also paid millions of pounds in undisclosed security costs.
Philippa helped launch the Queen’s Reading Room Festival in 2023 and acted as a judge at her Commonwealth essay writing competition the following year. Her comments come as the scandal over Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor engulfs the Royal Family.
Last week, the King’s brother became the first royal in nearly 400 years to be arrested when police officers swooped on his temporary home on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk.
Historical author Philippa Gregory says it’s time for the monarchy to be consigned to history
Philippa concedes that Camilla deserves praise for her efforts to encourage people, and particularly children, to read. ‘What Queen Camilla has done for reading, and for literature and for literacy in this country is really, really significant,’ she says.
Speaking on Radio 3’s Private Passions programme, she adds: ‘It’s nothing personal, it’s not about them personally, but I just don’t know that in a mature democracy we need a royal family.’
Princess Bea’s stylist expecting first child at 43
Olivia Buckingham has shared online that she is pregnant with her first child, calling the news the ‘best birthday gift’
Olivia Buckingham, who’s helped Princess Beatrice become one of the best-dressed royals, is celebrating a transformation of her own.
The fashionista, who has also styled actress Poppy Delevingne and Downton Abbey star Elizabeth McGovern, is expecting her first child at the age of 43.
‘The best birthday gift I could ever dream of,’ Olivia says next to this photograph of her bump which she shared online. ‘I feel so incredibly grateful I get to start this next chapter of my life with a baby on the way. It’s never too late to live the life of your dreams.’
The stylist – whose great-grandfather, Noel Croucher, was chairman of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange – is not known to have a boyfriend and declines to name the father of her unborn child.
Jockey Sam’s wildest ride yet
The Prince and Princess of Wales’ pal Sam Waley-Cohen became the first amateur jockey to win the Grand National for decades in 2022. Now, he’s embarked on an even more daunting challenge.
The entrepreneur, 43, is currently in fourth place in the 500km (310 mile) Gaucho Derby in Argentina, in which 40 equestrians race across Patagonia’s deserts and mountains, deprived of their mobile phones and sleeping in tents en route.
‘It’s like the old western pioneers,’ says Sam, who’s raising money for Oxford Children’s Hospital, where his brother, Thomas, was treated for cancer before he died from the disease aged 20.
Known for the brightly coloured frocks he enjoys wearing to parties, ceramicist Sir Grayson Perry refuses to leave his house after suffering a ruptured Achilles tendon. ‘I’ve been laying low for a while,’ wails the cross-dressing potter, 65. ‘None of my outfits go with the [surgical] boot. I have grown a beard.’ That would make an interesting look with his dresses!
Prue Leith: Reform has the recipe for success
Cookery writer Dame Prue Leith is the mother of Reform UK MP Danny Kruger
Reform UK may have won its first major celebrity endorsement.
The Great British Bake Off judge Dame Prue Leith says: ‘I’m beginning to slightly see the point of Reform, because the rest of the political parties don’t seem to be doing anything, so at least there’s some action there,’ she tells Saga magazine.
Dame Prue’s son, MP Danny Kruger, defected to Reform from the Conservatives last September. Dame Prue, 86, adds: ‘My great ambition is to live long enough to see him [Kruger] in Downing Street. My chief objection to Reform is Nigel Farage. But, actually, what he says is not so stupid about the cost of living, immigration and wokeism.
‘I agree with him about all of them. I think the woke thing has done a lot of good because it’s forced us to think about a lot of things, but it’s gone too far.’
Boris’ girl aces her first tennis outing
Tennis star Boris Becker with his wife Lilian on a tennis court as she holds his daughter
Boris Becker won the first of his three Wimbledon singles trophies as an unseeded 17-year-old in 1985.
Could his daughter conquer tennis at an even younger age?
I ask only because Boris has introduced his youngest child, Zoe, to the joys of the tennis court at the tender age of just three months.
The star, 58, proudly shared a photograph of his wife Lilian, 36, carrying Zoe while she holds a pink tennis racket at the Aspria Harbour Club Milan in Italy.
‘Taking my girls to the club for some tennis,’ he says. ‘It’s the first time mama is back on court.’
Five months after John Cleese declared he would ‘certainly not’ be working with the BBC again, one of its current ads – for a ‘Creative Diversity Lead: Editorial & Training’ – seems unlikely to change his mind.
The Fawlty Towers creator had observed that, rather than commissioning ‘the best possible programmes’, the BBC was obsessed with ‘social engineering’. The ‘Diversity Lead’, who’ll take home £81,000 a year, illustrates his point. He or she will be ‘a cornerstone of the BBC’s new pan-genre Creative Diversity leadership model’, will ‘build the capability of the BBC’s supplier’ and ‘meet the organisation’s portrayal and representation ambitions’. No laughing matter.
Before The Crown and Adolescence star Erin Doherty split up with fellow actress Sophie Melville last year, she declared that their seven-year relationship was her ‘proudest accomplishment’. Now, Sophie is sharing a notable milestone with her new partner, Lee Braithwaite, who appeared opposite Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in the 2024 film We Live In Time.
Lee is undergoing gender reassignment and has been showing off the results of ‘top surgery’, a breast-removal procedure, online.
Lee launched a GoFundMe page last September, appealing to the public to pay for the operation, and raised more than £1,400.
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