The utter stupidity of Tom Sykes completely amazes me.
But if Tommy Boy wants to perpetuate the idea that William is a volatile man who can't control his emotions, who I am I to argue with his take? Seeing as he's living in his own fantasyland, let's continue on.
Prince William has threatened to “boycott Sandringham” and shunned a key family gathering with his father last weekend in disgust at learning of Meghan Markle’s triumphant imminent return to the U.K. on the arm of Prince Harry.
The visit is being paid for by King Charles, who I am told is “happy” at the “outcome” which means he will get to meet his grandchildren, Archie and Lilibet, for the first time in several years.
So the thought of Andrew on Sandringham grounds doesn't repel William but his brother does?
I also exclusively revealed on my podcast with guest Mark Dolan yesterday that William is so appalled by what he sees as his father’s betrayal that he refused to join a customary family lunch after Trooping the Color last weekend, and left the celebrations with his wife, Catherine and his three children immediately after the RAF flypast.
Is that the reason? Or is it really that Will & Kate needed to head back to Forest Lodge because they didn't bring their secret fourth child along to Buckingham Palace for Trooping? You know, the little girl who rode with nanny Maria last December for the Christmas lunch to Buckingham Palace and rode back home with George and Kate. Staying for the post-Trooping lunch would have taken another hour and a half or more of their time, which probably makes the almost three-year-old child feel left out.
He will boycott “the big house” at Sandringham “for ever” if Harry and Meghan are invited there, as they have been lobbying to be allowed to for several weeks, one source said.
"Forever"? As in, he'll never breathe the air within Sandringham's walls ever again? My god, what a ridiculous take!
And an extraordinary revelation just published in The Sun, that Charles is footing the bill for Harry and Meghan’s security detail during the trip, will infuriate Wiliam, who will see it as irrefutable evidence that his father, who he believes has been weak, has allowed himself to be emotionally blackmailed by Harry and Meghan into greenlighting them a VVIP visit.
Charles’ friends have defended the king, with one telling me tonight that he was likely inspired by the Bible story of the prodigal son, saying, “It’s a happy outcome for the king. The fatted calf will be slaughtered.”
I sense a plan is afoot, and not the one Richard Eden or the Wales fandom has been clutching their pearls over. If there is a letters patent issued before Harry sets foot on UK soil again, I won't be surprised.
However friends of William said the King should support his heir and that he owes William more respect.
Interesting how that "respect" only goes one way: William's. William refuses to bow to his father in public at every opportunity. William refuses to do basic work for his job. His wife, Kate, basically gets outworked by every other royal, even though she's the youngest of working royals with her husband.
The king’s offer to underwrite Harry’s security means that a still unresolved decision from RAVEC about Harry’s security becomes irrelevant—for now.
The fact that Charles is paying settles an argument I have been having with the rest of the royal commentariat for the better part of this year.
While it is true that the Sussexes have been relentlessly pushing the story, the revelation that Charles’ office has been secretly planning the logisitics and how to pay for the trip shows the true engine of Harry and Meghan’s return to the tent is Charles.
Which is why I see a plan in action. A plan to talk to Harry and encourage him to divorce/separate and come back to the UK with the kids.
It is an astonishing betrayal of his loyal and dutiful heir who has made clear he never wants to see Harry again, believes he should be exiled (as far away as possible) and has told friends he blames the stress of Harry and Meghan’s betrayal for aggravating Catherine’s cancer.
Who really thinks William is "loyal and dutiful"? Seriously?! The guy who had to be told he needed to attend Pope Francis's funeral instead of attending an Aston Villa game? THAT guy?
Prince William and his father have long had a toxic and deeply troubled relationship.
The history behind it is not obscure. Discussing William’s “frostiness with his pa,” one source told me, “[William] probably feels he is due no lectures from that quarter (Charles) on the subject of duty and personal wishes. [Diana] might just agree.”
Charles has always done his duty. Diana played media games because she wanted to hit back at Charles publicly when she realized she would no longer have the opportunity to be queen.
The fact is that William watched his father conduct a years-long affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, the intimate and deeply distressing details of which his mother confided in him.
Diana conducted a long-term affair with James Hewitt, who was William & Harry's riding instructor! Isn't that gross? Fucking one of your boys' teachers? That's basically what Diana did. I don't see Tommy Boy mentioning that inconvenient fact.
She wept and raged to William, before eventually speaking about it on television to an audience of millions.
But, of course, Tommy Boy isn't going to mention all of Diana's affairs, is he? That would ruin the fantasyland narrative he has going in this article.
When the marriage was formally dissolved in August 1996, it was again to her son that Diana turned.
Emotionally inappropriate manipulation by Diana. Diana would rather spend 10+ hours talking on the phone to her "energy healer" instead of dealing with her own insecurities via therapy.
The price of the settlement was that she would forfeit the style “Her Royal Highness” (a demotion that left her ranking below her own children).
No. Diana specifically gave it up in exchange for more money. It was her idea. Fergie had divorced and retained her HRH. Diana used her HRH as a negotiating tactic and lost it. Fergie lost her HRH right afterwards due to Diana.
Diana’s butler Paul Burrell (whom William and Harry would themselves accuse of betraying their mother) says William sat with his mother one night, put his arms around her and promised: “Don’t worry, Mummy, I will give it (the HRH) back to you one day when I am king.”
It was a vow he could not keep because, less than a year later, Diana died.
If Diana were still alive, she'd be on her third or fourth marriage. She would be talked about in the same way people now discuss the York family. Diana would be seen as a detriment to her sons. Fleet Street would have already published a story line about how everyone needed to worry about Diana's bad influence on William, and how he could not keep his overbearing mother out of his life. Everyone would have gotten tired of her drama queen antics shortly after the millennium. If you want to die on the hill of Diana being a saint, please be my guest.
Charles’s communications operation has successfully laundered this history, and William has, for strategic reasons, gone along with the clean-up. He has never publicly denounced his father or Camilla, well aware that to undermine the carefully constructed narrative of a reconciled, blended family would only harm the institution of which he will one day be the head.
Actually, it's more like the truth was coming out about Diana before she died. You just can't admit that Diana was a pathologically insecure and emotionally unbalanced woman. She was the source of all her own problems, but admitting those basic facts would screw up your fantasyland narrative. It will be fun to watch you cope when reality loudly starts crashing in!
The rewrite of history (the ultimate goal of which was always to enable Camilla to become Queen Camilla) has been so obligingly amplified by a royal press corps dependent on palace access that it has become, for most people, the default assumption.
There was no rewrite of history. "Queen" is the legal title of the king in the UK. Camilla was always going to be queen once they married. But keep lying to yourself and your readers about it.
Indeed, most outsiders had forgotten all about the historical strains between William and Charles until I started reporting on the tensions between them on The Royalist, in the autumn of 2025, shortly after I was excluded from palace briefings.
I decided to make the William–Charles feud one of the stories I would put extra effort into following after I was told about it in passing by multiple sources, all with strong personal connections to the family.
Oh, is someone (Tommy Sykes) looking to retaliate after being kicked out of the BP comms WhatsApp group chat? Tommy Boy is putting "extra effort" into HIS storyline. Isn't that convenient? What does he have to report on without it? He clearly doesn't have very many BP sources, if any, as he got kicked out of the WhatsApp group. How much of this "feud" is due to his bitterness at not receiving information from one side?
In 2025, after several media outlets picked up rather obliquely on the story I was telling about the increasing estrangement between the two men, the palace placed a story in the newspapers saying that my narrative was false, and that William and his father had in fact just spent a weekend together at Balmoral in Scotland for a strategy weekend, brainstorming the future of the monarchy.
William’s wife, Princess Catherine, had not come, so as not to disturb the heavy thinking.
Within a matter of minutes, I had two sources telling me the story was rubbish. William was actually in Scotland shooting grouse with a rowdy group of friends. He and his father had not spent more than a few hours together, and had not even slept under the same roof, as Charles stays at Birkhall, a five-mile drive along bumpy estate roads from the big house (Balmoral Castle).
Wives had not been invited so the men could have some fun.
The weekend was more about heavy drinking than heavy thinking, my sources said.
But does William having a shooting & beers weekend with his friends mean that he's "feuding" with his father? William has been doing these kinds of weekends with his friends before his father became king, so what does any kind of "feud" have to do with William's copious vacation time?
The reality of this trip is that Harry and Meghan have won: they simply enacted the half-in, half-out status they wanted all along, and now the King is endorsing them.
Half in, half out is a direct repudiation of the settlement imposed at the Sandringham Summit in January 2020, when Queen Elizabeth II had made it clear the arrangement was not on offer.
How are they "half in"? HOW? A five-day trip equals being "half in"? Good grief, The Duke of Gloucester is 33rd in line to the throne currently and consistently outworks William, but Tommy Boy can't seem to remember that inconvenient fact when he described petulant William as "loyal and dutiful." Prince Richard is loyal and dutiful, William not so much.
But there is a chasm between what is good for Charles the father and what is good for Charles the King.
To bring Harry back, to platform him, to bless his reintegration so explicitly, is to ask the British public to forgive everything Harry said in Spare, in the Netflix series, and in the long procession of interviews in which he painted his family and significant elements of the country as cold, cruel and racist, none of which he has retracted, all of which he continues to stand by.
A possible five-day, family trip equals reintegration. REALLY?
I can't wait to see what kind of bullshit Tommy Boy is going to put out later on this summer with the Sussex divorce and Harry's upcoming tragedy. Eton did train Tommy too well in churning out trash.
