Omid Scobie’s new book, Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy’s Fight for Survival, has sparked palpable tension from within Buckingham Palace, as a source tells ET that Prince William is absolutely furious about the scandal that has resurfaced about the royal family.
The source says that there was already wide distrust of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and their motives in the royal family, which, the source adds, has all just been reignited as a result of the latest developments that led to royal author Scobie’s book being pulled from the shelves in the Netherlands on publication day on Tuesday after the Dutch version of Endgame outed the two royal family members alleged to have questioned the skin color of Harry and Meghan’s son, Archie.
The same source also tells ET that Harry and William’s relationship has remained completely fractured, and this makes it even more unlikely that any reconciliation will take place in the future anytime soon. The fact that allegations are again enveloping the royal family, the source says, has infuriated family members.
In a statement to ET, a spokesperson for the Dutch publisher of Endgame, Xander Uitgevers, said “the rectified edition of [Endgame] by Omid Scobie will be in bookstores on [Dec. 8].” As for why the Dutch publisher removed the book from shelves in the Netherlands, the spokesperson said it was removed “due to an error that occurred in the Dutch edition.”
Scobie insisted to the BBC that the manuscript he turned in “didn’t have names in it.” He also said a “full investigation” is underway to get to the bottom as to how the names were included in the Dutch version of his book.
Meanwhile, William and his wife, Kate Middleton, on Thursday attended the Royal Variety Performance 2023 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where the couple avoided questions about the scandal. The scandal erupted not long after Scobie spoke to ET and explained why he broached another sensitive subject in his book — affair allegations between William and Kate’s former bestie, Rose Hanbury.
While Scobie said “there’s no truth to suggest” that the rumors — which first surfaced in April 2019 — are true, he found it interesting how the palace handled the situation behind closed doors.
“I thought it was really interesting to analyze how the palace dealt with that,” Scobie says in reference to U.K. journalists digging around for any shred of evidence that might suggest the extramarital affair was true. “The worst-case scenarios that they feared would happen, you know, just those rumors themselves were going to have enough impact, negatively, on William’s reputation. We still see them [the rumors] trend on Twitter on a regular basis … that’s something that’s incredibly damaging, I think, for William. It probably looks even worse, actually, that there was a kind of willingness to throw Harry under the bus simply to make these things disappear.”
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