You can make anything up about the royal family and it will be printed as fact

There are quite a few things that Tina Brown doesn’t know: what ‘jejune’ means; when Louis XIV came to the throne; what the passive voice in prose is (not ‘recollections may vary’); what members of the aristocracy are called (Lady Romsey becomes Lady Penelope Romsey) or what members of the royal family are called (the ‘Dowager Duchess of Gloucestershire’ puts in an appearance).Another thing she doesn’t know (which she shares with other authors of works in this obscenely overstuffed genre) is what’s been going on between members of the royal family in the period between the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and the death of the Duke of Edinburgh – which we aren’t likely to find out until the real private papers and emails become available to some future Jane Ridley. The title of this book is a bit of a swiz.

Until then, in the accounts of writers with various degrees of access, intelligence and perception, all we have is tittle-tattle, and the occasional flash of authentic feeling expressed in public. Some of the gossip in The Palace Papers, like all books of this sort, is grossly implausible. There is a claim of something very private that the future Duchess of Cornwall said to the Prince of Wales the first time they went to bed together, which is dutifully footnoted to a volume by the American journalist Kitty Kelley. A moment’s thought will show how unlikely it is that either person would have shared this with anyone without it having the most disastrous effect on their relationship. But the line is too good to be dropped. At this point one starts to think about volumes of royal muckraking that you can make up anything and have a fair chance of it being repeated. If I said in this review that I happened to know that all the Prince of Wales’s siblings were in the habit of referring to him among themselves as ‘Blodwen’, I dare say it would soon find its way into print as a matter of fact.