Prince William struck bargains with the media to keep the Rose Hanbury story quiet?

Thank you to the people who alerted me to these tweets. Over the past two years, we’ve seen time and time again that the British media has a complicit arrangement with Prince William specifically. It’s transactional – media outlets get a whiff of a story involving William and they go to him and he’ll give them something else in exchange. Or they yank his chain whenever they want more photos of his family, but that yanking wouldn’t happen unless they had something they were holding over his head. For the past two years, it’s been clear that one of the things they’ve been holding over his head is his alleged affair with Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, who is his neighbor in Norfolk.

Around this time two years ago was when the affair story was just beginning to spill out into the British papers. A shady item appeared in the Daily Mail, the infamous “rural rivals” story about Kate trying to push Rose out of the Cambridges’ social circle. Then William ran to Richard Kay at the Daily Mail to whine and explicitly throw the Duchess of Sussex under the bus. William spent a lot of time threatening British media about the story. Was there an explicit tit-for-tat, where William served up negative stories about Meghan in exchange for keeping his wandering sceptre out of the news? According to Foreign Policy’s Deputy editor James Palmer, that’s something that’s pretty widely known.

the palace has been protecting Prince William from the tabloids for *years* and has a complicated relationship with newspaper editors, including alternating between sending them legal threats and effectively striking bargains with them to leak on Markle

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) March 18, 2021

this is why British papers weren't even *touching* William's alleged affair with Rose Hanbury.

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) March 18, 2021

While Palmer isn’t saying anything that wasn’t already known/believed in gossip circles and royal-media circles, it’s interesting to see it spill out on Twitter from a “legitimate journalist.” I genuinely believe that William and Rose’s “alleged” affair is common knowledge in British, American and international media circles, as well as common knowledge among the British aristocrats and probably the Royal family too. It’s just a matter of seeing which outlet – probably American, I would assume – will be the first one to do a major exposé. And the affair story is SO TIED to the smear campaign against Meghan too. March 2019 was when Meghan was in her last trimester with Archie. She was being viciously ripped to shreds in the British media and so much of that was because William actively made her a target in exchange for the media burying the affair story.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

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