Richard Eden is certainly proud of himself, isn't he, for having too much "integrity" (NFI) to join the WhatsApp group. He's asking for a pass for his fellow reporters for believing Harry and Meghan, is he? He has been just as triger happy reporting about Project Thaw as anyone, and make no mistake, this whole will-they/wont-they episode has been an arm off of Project Thaw.
Incidentally, I'm pretty sure I've stumbled onto Richard's source. He'd have done better to have joined the WhatsApp group.
What a bizarre self-congratulatory article.
I cannot pretend to have refused to join the WhatsApp group on ethical or indeed any other grounds, because Mr Maguire never invited me to join. Having been a social diarist for most of my career, I am used to being treated with caution. After all, ruffling feathers, not stroking them, is part of my job description.
This week, however, I am profoundly relieved not to be a member of the Sussexes’ WhatsApp group because those who are have been made to look like prize chumps – through no fault of their own, I might add.
Last Friday, they all received a long message confirming details of Prince Harry and Meghan’s return visit to Britain next week. It wasn’t just the type of short message they sometimes receive but a long operational note detailing exactly what the couple would be doing after they landed in this country.
[...]
The reporters should be forgiven. As royal correspondents, they are used to receiving briefing notes that help them cover events. The palace notes are usually factual, so the journalists might have expected Harry and Meghan’s messages to be equally trustworthy.
Fat chance.
[...]
One of the journalists who is a member of the WhatsApp group, Tom Sykes of the Daily Beast, an American website, felt the need to issue a public mea culpa for unwittingly misleading his loyal readers.
‘It is now blatantly apparent what this whole exercise was about,’ Sykes wrote. ‘The tour, the announcement that Meghan and the kids were coming, the whole carefully choreographed media rollout, the months of assurances to the Royal Household that this was happening, the accommodation requests, the detailed planning: it was all just to bounce his poor, weak, loving father into intervening in the Government’s security decision-making, something Charles, to his eternal credit, has refused to do. This is the high-water mark of Harry’s emotional blackmail.’
Strong stuff. Sykes won’t, I suspect, be the only journalist who now refuses to believe a word he’s told by Harry and Meghan when it arrives on his mobile phone.
