I needed to meditate on all of the happenings with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Tatler this week. For whatever record, I still believe the Tatler cover story was supposed to be about Embiggening Kate. That was obvious from the first quotes released from the piece – it was supposed to be all about how hard Kate works, how she’s perilously close to Zooming herself into an early, overworked grave, how Harry and Meghan are terrible for leaving Will and Kate to pick up the shattered pieces of the Windsor clan, how stoically Kate deals with all of the endless Sussex drama and how she’s the perfect Future Queen. This is why I believe that Kensington Palace and the Cambridges likely did work with Tatler in the early stages. But then something happened and suddenly the Tatler piece was shady AF. First, Kensington Palace sent out two denials, one through an unnamed source, then a second through official the official communications office. Then Tatler responded:

Society bible Tatler has clashed with Kensington Palace over a story claiming that Kate Middleton with her post-Megxit workload – with the magazine backing the piece despite royal insistence that the claims are false.

Sources claiming to be friends of the couple told Anna Pasternak at Tatler magazine that Kate was ‘fuming’ with the heavy workload after Megxit, revealing: ‘William and Catherine really wanted to be hands-on parents and the Sussexes have effectively thrown their three children under a bus.’

A Kensington Palace spokesperson dismissed the claims, saying: ‘This story contains a swathe of inaccuracies and false misrepresentations which were not put to Kensington Palace prior to publication.’

It prompted a Tatler spokesperson to add today: ‘Tatler’s Editor-in-Chief Richard Dennen stands behind the reporting of Anna Pasternak and her sources. Kensington Palace knew we were running the “Catherine the Great” cover months ago and we asked them to work together on it. The fact they are denying they ever knew is categorically false.’

[From The Daily Mail]

Parsing both statements is quite fascinating – KP never claimed to not know about the article, they merely said that they were not given the article to review before publication. That is a whole other thing, because how many media outlets do that for Kensington Palace? I would imagine quite a few allow KP to review pieces before publication. But not Tatler. As for Tatler’s response… “we asked them to work together on it. The fact they are denying they ever knew is categorically false.” Note that Tatler doesn’t say whether William and Kate agreed to work together originally. But yeah, of f–king course the Cambridges knew.

So, here’s my general theory: the Cambridges thought they were authorizing some soft-focus embiggening cover story in which they could continue to smear the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. But Anna Pasternak actually – gasp – did research and spoke to actual people in the Cambridges’ social set (which Will & Kate authorized), including some interviews with the Turnip Toff set. Keen Defenders can cry all they want that “Meghan and Harry are behind this!” But the bigger issue is that Rose Hanbury’s fingerprints might be all over this. If not Rose herself, then the Turnip Toffs who have aligned themselves more closely with Rose than Kate. There’s just too much “Norfolk Drama” in the piece. Which means drama amongst the turnips, not the Sussexes.

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