A hugely intriguing week in Dutch publishing mishaps, as the Netherlands’ edition of a new book about the royals names King Charles and the Princess of Wales as the two family members who supposedly speculated about the skin colour of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan’s then-unborn son. The opus in question is Endgame by Omid Scobie – officially, a Sussex-friendly journalist; unofficially, a jacquard polo shirt influencer of quite substantial importance. Asked about the raging drama, Scobie declared: “To be honest, I’ve been operating a bubble of no emotion for the last 10 days.” Which you’ll know was the exact same thing Lytton Strachey said in the week of publication of his volume on Queen Victoria. Nothing becomes a contempo historian like the “I can’t even” of it all.
But we race ahead of ourselves. The details – I want to say facts, but I somehow feel that judgment is best reserved for now – are these. Omid Scobie, who increasingly looks like a felt-pen drawing of Omid Scobie, has this week published Endgame, which the publisher says is “a penetrating investigation into the current state of British monarchy”. Go on. “An unpopular king, a power-hungry heir to the throne, a queen willing to go to dangerous lengths to preserve her image, and a prince forced to start a new life after being betrayed by his own family … this is the royal family’s endgame. Do they have what it takes to save it?” You get the gist. For anyone who ordered the word salad, he recommends the Windsors “move forward with growth”.
