Tom Bower is still trying to promote his vile book about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. He’s spent much of the past week doing the talk-show rounds in the UK, and it hasn’t been going well. He admitted to using Deranger trolls as sources, his wildly offensive and false claims about the Invictus Games have been debunked, and Bower comes across as a ridiculous old fart who endlessly rants about how a Black American woman broke his brain and broke the royal family. This has been his raison d’etre for years now: specifically targeting Duchess Meghan and trying to convince everyone that Meghan is the problem and if they could somehow find a “solution” to take her out of the equation, then everything could be “saved.” Back in 2020, he was openly saying that Harry MUST divorce Meghan or find some way to get her out of the way. Six years later, Bower has not moved on, and his rants continue to sound both pitiful and extremely dangerous. This week, Bower appeared on a Daily Beast podcast:
There may be hope that Prince Harry could be enticed to return home by being given a job and brought back into the fold, but it comes with a catch. Royal biographer Tom Bower has been critical of the Sussexes, arguing that they represent a threat to the future of the monarchy.
Discussing journalist and co-founder of the Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s review of the book, The Royalist Podcast’s Tom Sykes points out Brown’s argument that the Royal family needs to “put schadenfreude aside” and give the Sussexes a limited international role.
“What do you say to people who say, ‘Sorry Tom Bower, you’re completely wrong—the answer is not to obliterate them from the monarchy, from the royal family, the answer is to bring them back in the tent, give them a job, and maybe then they can be controlled.’ Do you think it’s just completely naive to think that they would agree?” Sykes asked Bower.
“I think Harry would like that solution,” Bower replied, “but Meghan definitely would not want to live in London….She doesn’t want to be part of Britain,” he continued, adding, “she wants to be a star in California, so I think that as long as they’re married, that is a completely untenable solution. It is only a recipe for more and more sensational danger, because Meghan would always look for a way to complain. She can’t be satisfied. She can’t. She doesn’t want to be part of the British royal family.”
Bower added that Brown, “who is a star,” doesn’t understand that the British public “wouldn’t accept Meghan back on any terms at all.”
“Even if she groveled, they’d feel, ‘Well, you’re not groveling enough.’ They’re really angry with her, so I don’t believe that is the solution.”
Harry and Meghan relocated to Los Angeles, California—Meghan’s hometown—in March 2020 with their son Archie after Harry stepped back from royal duties in January of that year. Daughter Lilibet was born in Santa Barbara just over a year later. Expanding on his own argument about the threat the Sussexes pose for the royal family, Bower said, “Whatever you do with the Sussexes, you couldn’t rely on them to be discreet and silent and obedient for very long because of what their own needs. Selfishness, in the end, would trump everything that the Windsors might offer them and that is a problem, that there’s no easy solution, if there is a solution at all.”
He explained that when combined with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s scandals—namely, his lengthy friendship with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the accusations leveled against him by women like Virginia Giuffre, and his arrest last month—the situation is “quite dangerous and toxic, to say the least.”
“The trouble really is that both King Charles and Prince William haven’t found a way to neutralize the danger, and I don’t know if there is a way. That’s the problem.”
The thing is, I also see how the Sussexes’ California success story is “dangerous” for the monarchy. Obviously, I come at all of this from a different angle, so bear with me. It’s been clear for many years that the Windsors were, at best, extremely careless with Harry, Meghan and Archie’s lives back in 2020, and alongside that, the Windsors absolutely bungled the terms of the Sussexit at the time. The Windsors thought they were in control and they could manipulate the Sussexes (or Harry alone) into coming back, broke and humbled. The fact that the Windsors got it so wrong continues to be a festering wound on the monarchy. The fact that they treated Harry and Meghan so shabbily has created a years-long image crisis for the monarchy. The fact that the Windsors haven’t been able to figure out what to do about Harry and Meghan in six years is a huge problem for the monarchy. But Bower’s solution is basically the same as the institution’s – to whine and cry about Meghan, to engage in misogynoir, to try to drive a wedge between a happily married couple, to lie to themselves about how Harry would come back if it wasn’t for Meghan. It’s almost as if Bower is just repeating the rantings of senior royal courtiers!!
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