Royal family

Tuesday

Kara Kennedy

The empty eco-activism of renting clothes

From time to time my Instagram algorithm will taunt me with a dress. It is – unequivocally ­– the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen. Satin, emerald green, halter-neck. The dress retails for about £200, and is always sold out in my size. The ad that Instagram teases me with is for a rental, which you can pick up for £73. This is the latest fad in so-called eco-activism. Rent a dress for an astonishing amount – usually a dress that’s sold out or difficult to track down – and you will save the world! Fighting back against the mortal sin that is fast-fashion. The trend is so popular now

Wednesday

Liz Rowlinson

Why househunters are heading to Royal Berkshire

When the Prince and Princess of Wales announced they were moving their family to the Royal County of Berkshire this summer, estate agents reported a ‘flurry’ of enquiries about properties around Windsor and the village of Bucklebury, 50 minutes west on the M4. The Middleton family had already been increasing their interests in and around Bucklebury, where they have lived since Kate was young. James Middleton and his French wife, Alizée, own a farmhouse there, and Pippa Middleton’s husband, James Matthews, has acquired Bucklebury Farm Park. Pippa and her husband also bought a £15 million mansion nearby this year. And where royals and their relatives lead, it seems others follow.

Monday

Emma Wells

Yours for £3k a week, the townhouse with royal history woven into it

The 34 early Georgian houses that line Fournier Street, in the heart of Spitalfields, are a perfectly preserved microcosm of East London life through the centuries. Since it was built in the 1720s, the street – which runs between Brick Lane and Commercial Street, in E1 – has variously been home to the city’s wealthiest and poorest. With many of its first residents Huguenot weavers escaping religious persecution in France, the street is characterised by its series of highly glazed lofts, harnessing the light vital for the skilled textile work, with many of the houses subsequently bought by those in the silk trade. Arguably one of the finest houses on the

Monday

Alexander Larman

The Crown doesn’t need a disclaimer

The fifth series of Netflix’s The Crown will soon be upon us. Scripted, as ever, by Peter Morgan, the show will cover the travails of the royal family throughout the 1990s, spanning everything from the then Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s marital difficulties and eventual divorce to the rumours of Prince Philip conducting an affair with a much younger woman (his partner in carriage driving, we are told). Jonny Lee Miller, erstwhile Sick Boy from Trainspotting and Sherlock Holmes from Elementary, dons thick glasses and a grey wig to play former prime minister John Major, a decent man who never stood a chance. Later in the series, we are promised the first

Friday

Julie Burchill

Let’s give Meghan Markle the applause she deserves

The late actor Christopher Plummer once likened working with Julie Andrews on The Sound of Music to ‘being hit over the head with a big Valentine’s Day card’. Reading the latest bulletin from the Duchess of Sussex, the image returned unbidden; having to listen to the ceaseless stream of platitudes that this bad actress expels verbally into the world is like being hit over the head with an inspirational poster – LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE – until one loses the will to live, let alone laugh and love. But whereas we might once have loathed her, so shameless is the ageing starlet in pursuit of income – sorry, insight – that

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Meghan Markle’s podcast is about the word ‘crazy.’ And it’s barking mad

‘Calling someone crazy or hysterical completely dismisses their experience,’ says Meghan Markle in her strangely throaty professional podcast voice. ‘It minimises what they’re feeling. And you know it doesn’t stop there. It keeps going to the point where anyone who has been labelled it enough times can be gaslit into thinking that they’re actually unwell. Or sometimes worse to the point where real issues of all kinds get ignored. Well that’s not happening today.’ Cue the intro music – ‘I am woman, I am fearless, I am sexy’ etc. – to the latest episode of Archetypes, the Duchess of Sussex’s Spotify series. ‘I feel pretty strongly about this word crazy,’

Thursday

Sam Leith

Charles III will reign in an age where feeling trumps duty

Charles III’s first address to the nation as King began by speaking of sorrow – and went on to speak of love. He used ‘love’ or its cognates eight times in that short speech. He spoke of his ‘darling Mama’ and ‘dear late Papa’, of love for Harry and Meghan, love for his people and for tradition, and the loving support of his ‘darling wife’. He spoke, too, of grief and consolation. In setting out his stall as King – if that’s not too vulgar an expression for what he has been doing over the past few days – Charles III has done so in terms of feeling. He has

The Spectator

How The Spectator reported the Queen’s life

The reason the British people love the Queen, and are willing to die for her, is that they can understand what she is about, in a way that they cannot understand what the constitution, cabinet and parliament are about, or the Courts of Justice or the Bank of England, or any of the other abstractions which comprise our so-called system of government. Monarchy is credible, as Bagehot said, because it is personal. Seeing is believing. That is why all the old royal ceremonials are important: not because they are incomprehensible and mysterious, but because they are intelligible and familiar. All that talk about the magic of monarchy is very misleading.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Must Charles change?

When something starts to be said with such frequency that it fast becomes the conventional wisdom, one should pause, step back and give it a second thought. In almost every ‘Advice to King Charles’ column I’ve read, and in broadcast commentary too, the same piece of wisdom is being repeated: the new King must now distance himself from his own strong opinions on a range of subjects, and assume an air of neutrality on anything remotely controversial or ‘political’. He must forget, and we must forget, that he once had beliefs. ‘You can do it, Charles,’ we’ve been saying. ‘You can wipe your personal software of all that clutter, empty

Douglas Murray

A hereditary monarchy is good for politics

I suppose it was inevitable that with the death of HM the Queen certain floodgates would open. During her reign it often felt as though there were forces that she was single-handedly holding back. As Lionel Shriver has noted elsewhere, they have come in particularly malicious form from parts of the US. But there is one part of the republican critique of monarchy that has returned which is too little addressed, and which I have found myself countering in recent days. Not, I might add, from the sort of people who are simply hostile to our country and its past, but rather from people who wish us well but are

Scott Methven

Recollections of a Queen’s piper

In 2015 I was lucky enough to become the Queen’s Piper. I played the bagpipes every morning for about 15 minutes under the window of Her Majesty, normally while she was eating breakfast. The Piper to the Sovereign is part of the household so I travelled with Her Majesty to her royal residencies, including Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Balmoral Castle and the Palace of Holyrood house. The appointment also involved welcoming guests and visitors to the households for audiences with foreign and domestic dignitaries such as ambassadors and heads of state – and also British citizens receiving OBEs or CBEs and so on. For these occasions my role consisted mainly

Prudence Penn

A lifelong friendship: the Elizabeth I knew

On 29 January 1947, the Queen and Princess Elizabeth came to St Mark’s in Mayfair to attend my marriage to Eric Penn. On the following day they set sail on HMS Vanguard for South Africa where King George VI and the Queen, accompanied by their two daughters, were to make a historic tour of the region at a pivotal moment not just in the history of the union of South Africa, but of the British Empire itself. Princess Elizabeth and I were both born in 1926 within three months of one another, but our paths did not cross until I became engaged to Eric. He was comptroller of the Lord

A.N. Wilson

The Queen’s strength was that she did not change

Her task – did she ever quite realise it? – was to preside over a country in decline; and not merely to preside over it, but to be the nation’s anaesthetic, creating the illusion that the nightmare was not happening. When she was born, at 17 Bruton Street, by Caesarean section, on 21 April 1926, Britain commanded the mightiest, richest empire in the history of the world. By the time she died, Britain had ceased even to be what Gore Vidal once called it, an American aircraft-carrier. It was simply a muddle of a place, which had lost most of its manufacturing industrial wealth, all its political influence in the

Joan Collins

Memories of Princess Elizabeth

I am completely and utterly devastated by the passing of our wonderful, inspirational Queen, as I’m sure are so many in our fair isles. It is the end of the brilliant Elizabethan era. I was so proud to have been part of her last Jubilee. After being driven along the circuitous pageant route around London, I finished up seated in the Royal Box, waving at Her Majesty in what would prove to be her last appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, where she sparkled in emerald green. This brought back memories of May 1945, when we were all celebrating the end of the second world war. My father drove

Toby Young Toby Young

What Charles shouldn’t do

One of the most regrettable trends of the past few decades is the creep of politics into every aspect of our public life. Institutions tasked with preserving our heritage, such as Tate Britain, Kew Gardens and the National Trust, are busy holding themselves to account for their historic links to slavery and colonialism, while the police, the civil service and the Church of England have embraced the mantra of equity, diversity and inclusion. The people in charge of these organisations – liberal, urban, highly educated – don’t think of these values as politically contentious, while those of us who don’t fall into those categories – probably the majority of the

Monday

Ameer Kotecha

Elizabeth II was our greatest diplomat

The grief is still raw and the news has barely sunk in. I feel quite heartbroken. But I know that many the world over feel the same. The death of Queen Elizabeth II has special resonance here in this country, in the Realms and in the Commonwealth. Yet there is barely a corner of the world that her smile did not touch. There is quote in The Great Gatsby I have always liked, and now it makes me think of her. For she ‘had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced,

Friday

His Majesty King Charles III

King Charles’s first address as monarch in full

I speak to you today with feelings of profound sorrow. Throughout her life, Her Majesty the Queen – my beloved mother – was an inspiration and example to me and to all my family, and we owe her the most heartfelt debt any family can owe to their mother; for her love, affection, guidance, understanding and example. Queen Elizabeth’s was a life well-lived, a promise with destiny kept, and she is mourned most deeply in her passing. That promise of lifelong service I renew to you all today. Alongside the personal grief that all my family are feeling, we also share with so many of you in the United Kingdom, in

Alec Marsh

Lessons for life from the Queen

Having taken the Queen’s remarkable longevity, good health and work ethic for granted right until the end, might her subjects now appreciate her approach to life? Because through her combination of sheer graft – she received Liz Truss to kiss hands two days before she died – and her attitudes towards health, leisure and emotional resilience, Queen Elizabeth II bestowed on us an invaluable guide to living well. The problem is that most of us haven’t spotted it. It begins with some obvious don’ts: don’t smoke – the Queen had that lesson first-hand from her father George VI (albeit her sister Margaret didn’t listen). Don’t drink too much: she was

Thursday

Toby Young

I’ve finally been offended by a joke

I went to the O2 on Sunday night to see the comedians Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock. Chappelle, who survived an attempt to cancel him last year, didn’t disappoint, delivering some hilarious, politically incorrect jokes, and Rock was equally seditious, although his set went on for too long. But the rest of the evening was pretty painful. The effort it takes to get to this relic of the New Labour era is truly Herculean. Indeed, Rock made a joke about it, claiming he’d set off from his hotel on Wednesday morning and only just arrived. The Tube station is North Greenwich, one beyond Canary Wharf, and your only hope of

Tuesday

Ruth Bloomfield

The rise of the ‘neo-Geo’ country pile

The Queen’s wedding gift to Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in 1986 was a brand new 12-bedroom house in the Berkshire countryside. Sunninghill Park was an unfortunate mash-up of architectural styles, from its Tudor-ish chimneys to its vaguely Arts and Craftsy roofline and the monumental columns flanking its entrance. And how we laughed. It was the first time a royal had lived in a new build since Queen Victoria’s son Prince Albert moved into Bagshot Park in Surrey in 1879. The Duke and Duchess of York’s property was instantly nicknamed ‘SouthYork’ thanks to its resemblance to Southfork, the Ewing family ranch in Dallas. Back then, newly built period-style houses were