Royal Rota

This was presumably in response to stories that were coming out about Harry and Meghan courting the press.

Supposedly, they were making overtures to the Royal Rota, to various outlets, um, to get coverage of some upcoming events that they were gonna be at, and I think the royal family, I guess the assumption is that the royal family was like, "Oh, no, no, no, no, they're not gonna be running a, a parallel court to ours.

We've gotta nip this in the bud."

Yeah.

If she was white, we wouldn't even be talking about it at all.

I asked this question of a Royal Rota reporter that I interviewed.

I asked, what exactly, what did Meghan do? You've been on the beat.

What did she do? What was her crime? There is no answer.

No, I'm kidding.

So basically anything they do is on them and it's not to go on the Royal Rota and it's a little bit of a fuck you.

You left, no backsies.

It's a no backsies letter.

Now, another, um, thing that the Sun reports is that Meghan is expected to be photographed and publicized working with some charities in the UK in the coming months, but will keep a low profile to begin with, is how they describe it.

This comes as the couple iron out a new fair structure for coverage of their engagements and public work after they withdrew from the Royal Rota system in 2020.

Although, Rupert, let's not pretend, like they haven't created their own Royal Rota with the WhatsApp group.

Um, their WhatsApp group is basically their faux Royal Rota.

I, I don't understand how they can argue about a system that they've completely recreated for their own benefit.

Well, the hypocrisy of the Sussexes is there for all to see.

Yeah.

[laughs]

Yes, and it's not really cricket, is it? I mean, you know, it's not the way to do it.

So the current state of play with Team Sussex is they are on no speaks with most of the Royal Rota.

And, you know, you can tell who they're speaking to at any one time.

So at the moment, they're speaking to People magazine.

I just don't believe it could be possible.

We will start to see, we're going to start to see lots and lots more of this Royal Rota...

Let's call it by Harry's word, whitewashing.

We're going to see a lot more of that.

And, you know, we're going to talk about the strategy.

And I'm really, really intrigued as well to get your view on kind of what you believe has been going on behind the scenes as well.

We've already alluded to it with the Royal Rotary and things, but timing as well.

the timing of this, but not just the timing of this announcement, but I started to do kind of a bit of a chronological kind of backtrack, a backlog, you know, sort of taking a leaf out of your book and putting the pins in the board.

The problem is that the royal family were, I th- are, I think, completely unprepared for it, and therefore I have no idea what's going to happen.

Indeed, and we do have briefing via the Royal Rota, a little bit more information about what the King thinks about this.

So Richard, just stand by while I bring you this from Robert Jobson, who is a member of the Royal Rota.

He confirms that the King was first made aware of these plans on Sunday.

Sources say he naturally welcomes the opportunity to see more of the Sussex family in a personal and private capacity, but the King is clear that there will be no alteration to the Duke and Duchess's role and status as private individuals and non-working royals in keeping with their clearly expressed wishes and agreement over past years.

I'm disgusted.

I'm completely disgusted.

Joby, can I just ask you about the practicalities of covering this return? Obviously you remain part of the royal rota.

So the media was pretty much flooded with stories of the grand return of Prince Harry.

And when I looked at the various reports, it had Royal Rota writ large all around it.

You had Royal Nica in the Sunday Times.

You had the Telegraph as well.

And that's what they're trying to do.

Make that a real level playing field so that it becomes a less bumpy re-entry into our stratosphere.

slightly i mean it's you could argue it's a superficial question but i'm going to ask it anyway which is that you use the word there like bored i mean we sort of almost design you know it's designed the flooding is designed to almost make us bored of you know everything that's going on a word i had before we went live before we even met today was this idea of it being more palatable and that is a slightly different vibe isn't it because it's one thing to be bored of reports that harry might be here But then I thought it was brilliant what you said just now about the language that's being used by the Royal Rota in these reports.

This idea of being buoyed, this idea of Harry being energised and enthused.