This year marks 30 years since an ad in Stage gave rise to the greatest of contributions to fourth wave, pre-fab feminism – Girl power.
However girl power has not exactly caught on inside the walls of Buckingham Palace and it is my sad duty to inform you that there is “tension”, “strain” and “frostiness” between three of the most senior women in the royal family. Or to quote another 90s deep thinker, ice, ice baby.
Kate, The Princess of Wales, whose picture is featured under the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘nice’, has been outed by the Daily Mail as not exactly being on the warmest of terms with Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. In fact Kate, reportedly, has a “frosty relationship” with the princesses, making her the Frozen of the Farrow & Ball set.
According to the Mail, the Princess of Wales, still a nine, and Prince William, the Prince of Wales, passing for a seven, already had an “uneasy relationship” with the York gals, even before their Daddy dearest was de-princed by Princess Anne with a curry comb and a priest bearing holy water.
The report says there were “tensions” between the Waleses and the princesses “even before” the US Department of Justice (DoJ) released millions of Epstein files in late January.
“William and Kate don’t appear to be close to either of the sisters. They haven’t got that much in common,” a source told the Mail. Which is unsurprising given Kate has never made time in her schedule for freebie jollies to the Middle East and Beatrice and Eugenie have never shown a speck of interest in watching Vera re-runs or going to bed by 9:30pm.
Then there has been the complicating factor of them over the water, Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Unlike most of the royal family, Eugenie has seemed to have stayed on at-least-microwaved-to-room-temperature terms with the Californian transplants, staying at their Montecito home, attending the 2022 Superbowl with Harry and making a cameo in their Netflix series.
However Eugenie’s “closeness” to the Sussexes left Kate “cautious”, according to the Mail’s source.
Against this backdrop, it therefore comes as no surprise that the continued unmasking of Beatrice and Eugenie’s parents, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson (two people least deserving of titles since Anne Boleyn gave Henry VIII a ‘Husband of the year’ mug) hasn’t exactly improved cousinly-relations.
The last six months have shown the world the true, horrible extent to which their father is an entitled plonker who was this close to putting a registered sex offender down as his emergency contact and their mother is a morally bankrupt leech who would probably have cosied up to Vlad the Impaler if he would help her pay her credit card bill.
Which is to say, if William and Kate were not exactly thrilled about Beatrice and Eugenie before …
Revelations that the princesses appeared to have accepted thousands of dollars in flights to visit Epstein with their mother only five days after he was released from prison for teen sex crimes and the pedophile’s claim that Beatrice ‘liked’ him could hardly have helped the situation.
In the wake of the Epstein files release, William is “watching closely … while evaluating Beatrice and Eugenie’s future within the Firm”, said the Mail’s source.
Here’s where things get a bit Miss Marple-ish. The source also said that the Princess of Wales is “seldom seen” with either sister.
And so let us go to the tape for an action replay.
If you go back into the archives there are some buddy-buddy photos of Kate with Beatrice and Eugenie from over the years but they are all pre-Andrew’s Newsnight interview, when he outed himself as an absolutely loathsome lump who deserves at least an all over pustulous, incurable rash.
However it’s a different story since November 2019 and there are few if really any aside from wide, whole-royal-family-doing-smiling group shots.
In 2023, the Waleses were paired in the Royal Ascot carriage procession with Beatrice and her husband, Anglo-Italian bit of all right Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and afterwards, Kate was seen chatting to Bea but this is the exception that proves the rule.
Contrast the fact that it is nearly impossible to find an image of the Princess of Wales having a lovely time with Beatrice and Eugenie with the very obvious warmth and closeness on regular display between the Waleses and their cousins Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall and their families or with William’s aunt Sophie, The Duchess of Edinburgh.
The point: Lines in the sand? William and Kate will take two please.
Coincidentally, over in the Mirror the serialisation of a new book, William and Catherine, by that paper’s respected royal editor Russell Myers’ offers an explanation. He writes that in 2019, after Andrew became the royal most likely to trigger dry heaving while appearing on Newsnight, that William went to his father and Queen Elizabeth to urge them to take “immediate action” and to bar him from public life “before the rot further set in”.
“He never much liked his uncle and wanted him out of the picture immediately,” a source told Myers. “William’s view was that he [Andrew] got himself into the whole mess, so he should be left to his own devices to sort it out away from the family.”
William, Myers reports, believed Andrew’s presence in the royal midst was “a stain on all the family” and the monarchy was “engaged in a full-scale fire fight” for survival.
Well give that prince a gold star – he was bang on and today Crown Inc is in its most dire situation since Edward VIII abdicated to moon over Wallis and desultorily mix gin rickeys at noon.
William, we now know, was bang on with the spiralling crisis over both Andrew (with UK police currently assessing whether to open a criminal investigation into his time as trade envoy and facing a second allegation of sex with a woman trafficked by Epstein) and the Palace’s years of trying to bury it all like the Eton Old Boys Association armed with new shovels.
Today, Crown Inc looks just plain old shifty and are really quite impressively failing to meet the moment. Meanwhile the Waleses’ seeming years of subtle distancing of themselves from the House of York looks eminently sensible.
Ginger Spice sang, “if you want my future, forget my past” but there’s little chance of that for Beatrice and Eugenie right now.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of 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 ’
