he cover blurb, from “Lady Anne Glenconner” on this huge book proclaims: “Brilliant. Tina Brown has inside knowledge and writes so well.” The credit for the author of the 2019 bestseller, Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown should in fact be “Lady Glenconner”. You might not think it matters much these days that, over and over again, Tina Brown gets the titles wrong in this book. But this is supposedly the ultimate insider’s look at the royal family over the last forty years or so. And titles are at the heart of the Firm — think of the agony of Prince Harry and Prince Andrew at no longer being able to use their HRH titles and having to give up their honorary military roles.
Lady Glenconner is also being charitable to Tina Brown when she says she writes “so well”. Alas, Brown has a complete tin ear, brilliantly captured in Craig Brown’s pastiches of her style in the British satirical magazine Private Eye. In the opening sentence of this book, she talks about the Sussexes’ Oprah interview as “one of the most ballyhooed in television history.” That is typical of Brown’s taste for odd words, shoehorned into the wrong sort of sentence.
She loves an extended metaphor, too, and crams far too much into frantically overloaded sentences. So Meghan failed “to grasp that the organic lemon and elderflower dessert served at her fairytale Windsor Castle wedding was Alice in Wonderland’s ‘Eat Me’ cake… she would have to simultaneously shrink into the voiceless requirements of service to the Crown.” One can only imagine her copy editor throwing up his hands in horror.
