JAN MOIR: Snobbish rotters, racist royals and a feisty American... ring any bells? No, not Megxit - the new novel from Sussex cheerleader-in-chief Omid Scobie
Yes, what has Omid Scobie been doing since trying to persuade the world that his friend Duchess Meghan is not his friend and that he is absolutely not a mouthpiece for the wilder foamings of her choleric husband, Prince Harry of Hurty?Let’s get two things straight. Omid’s special royal non-friends are merely misunderstood. Harry is a stone-cold hero and Meghan is not the fake bake, fruit-mangling monster of popular opinion.As he tells it, they are both lovely, sweet paragons who have been treated badly by the British people, the Royal Family and especially – blows a loud, hand-plucked Montecito raspberry – the British media.The former royal reporter has taken time off from managing their reputations and micro-cultivating his eyebrows to write another book. Only this time it is fiction.Remarkably, after spending years complaining that no one took him seriously, Omid Scobie has written a frothy romcom; a cheesy tale of royal snogs and palace sneaks clearly inspired by the adventures of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Published this week, the book has already been snapped up by Universal Television to adapt for the small screen.And if that is not annoying enough, there was reportedly a bidding war over the rights from nine studios, resulting in a seven-figure offer. The Princess of Wales with Harry and Meghan on the Buckingham Palace balcony in 2018Co-written with celebrated young fiction author Robin Benway, Royal Spin is a 306-page workplace romp which chronicles the adventures of Lauren Morgan, a wisecracking, peppy American spin doctor who leaves her job at the White House to take up a post as head of communications at Buckingham Palace.‘Think Emily In Paris meets Red, White & Royal Blue,’ reads the ominous blurb on the cover, although ‘The West Wing for ding-a-lings’ or ‘The Crown for clowns’ might be more apt.Plot points? Before you know it, our heroine Lauren has been forced into wearing ‘pantyhose’ by the fuddy duds at Buck House but soon averts her first Press scandal when a royal-by-marriage wife places ‘a highly offensive racist vase’ in the middle of a table at a luncheon honouring NHS workers from the Caribbean nations – is this ringing any bells?Here’s another clue. The same individual was previously caught telling a foreign shop assistant to ‘learn proper English’. This is clearly meant to reference Princess Michael of Kent, who famously had to apologise for wearing a blackamoor brooch to a 2017 Palace Christmas banquet at which Meghan Markle, then Prince Harry’s fiancee, was also present.Some years earlier she was also accused of telling a group of black diners at a New York City restaurant to ‘go back to the colonies’, which she has always denied.Oh, if only there were a feisty, American, breath-of-fresh air, Meghan-adjacent genius publicist who could weed out the institutionalised racism inside theBritish monarchy while buying everyone doughnuts and looking super cute in her Veronica Beard jacket. Luckily, Omid has invented just the character.‘The adrenaline burn inside Lauren was now a wildfire,’ we are informed, as Lauren solves the problem by writing STATEMENT on a whiteboard and bringing in experts from the British Museum to lecture the dingbat royals on artwork and jewellery with links to colonialism. Job done! Omid Scobie has written a frothy romcom; a cheesy tale of royal snogs and palace sneaks clearly inspired by the adventures of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex Royal Spin is a 306-page workplace romp which chronicles the adventures of Lauren Morgan, a wisecracking, peppy American spin doctor who leaves her job at the White House to take up a post as head of communications at Buckingham PalaceFive minutes later, our heroine is in the middle of a love triangle with a handsome royal reporter called Oliver and the even more handsome Duke of Exeter. Who he? A soulful, misunderstood maverick with ‘soft eyes’ called Jasper who ‘looks more like a movie star than a blue-blooded royal but has issues with the courtiers’.‘I know how this works,’ he tells Lauren on Page 86. ‘They bring you in, build you up, then offer you as a sacrifice when someone with a higher rank makes a mistake. It is the playbook that works, and they use it every single time.’This peevish nonsense is culled straight from the Prince Harry chronicle of complaints, which makes reading Royal Spin sometimes feel like chomping through the spare bits of Spare, Harry’s own whinge of an autobiography.Thankfully, there are no frozen royal penises here to chill the marrow, but we do have to trudge through a tundra of deathless prose in a world where views are ‘picturesque’, journalists act ‘like hyenas’, skies are ‘the colour of the icy blue topaz that was firmly embedded in the Queen’s crown’ and Lauren is drawn to the Duke of Exeter ‘like a moth to a flame’. The ‘chestnut-haired’ minx is pretty keen on Oscar the journalist, too.‘If kissing Oscar at Annabel’s had made her pulse race, kissing Jasper in Singapore settled every loose, rattling thing inside her,’ we learn on Page 185, which makes Lauren sound like Princess Margaret’s drinks cabinet during a stormy passage on the Royal Yacht Britannia. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were recently involved in an imbroglio with Kim Kardashian after photographs were posted online of them attending Kris Jenner’s birthday party at Jeff Bezos’s Hollywood mansion the night before Remembrance SundayOne imagines that author Omid has no insider knowledge on ladder-resist stockings and what it feels like to wear too-tight Louboutin heels, so we must thank co-author Robin for bringing her girly A-game to this fish-out-of-water tale.Omid, for his part, enthusiastically lards the pages with his same old greasy agenda – the racist royals, the snobbish rotters at the Palace, the awfulness of newspapers who don’t share his view that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are truly wonderful people who are more sinned against that sinning.He even throws some shade at poor, shunned Thomas Markle, giving Lauren a troublesome father whose existence threatens to derail her happy life.‘The people your father chooses to associate himself with could absolutely hurt someone and his actions are about to hurt many people, mostly you,’ whimpering Lauren is told on Page 259.It is fiction, but it is fully locked and loaded with an unmistakable underlying message. One that doesn’t do Britain nor its Royal Family any favours.Omid Scobie’s critics might argue that his two previous royal books about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – Finding Freedom in 2020 and Endgame three years later – also contained elements of pure fiction.The first – written with the help of the Duchess of Sussex through third-party sources – was one long howl of petulance which chronicled the Sussexes’ exit from Britain in search of a more authentic life in America.Bombshell revelations on the tear-stained pages included the terrible afternoon when Queen Elizabeth was too busy to see the Sussexes and they had to wait for an appointment. Or that unforgettable day when Kate failed to give Meghan a lift to the shops.Scobie’s grand theme in Endgame was that the downfall of the monarchy was nigh. In the end, his book didn’t sink the royals, but it did contain energetic reiterations of Sussexian pet peeves alongside an enfilade of potshots aimed at the couple’s enemies.Read More Night William and Charles tore down house of York: How Andrew was ejected at midnight from his house You might recall that Dutch editions of the book were recalled after including the names of the two royal ‘racists’ who were alleged to have asked questions about the skin colour of Harry and Meghan’s first child. King Charles and the Princess of Wales were – rightly or wrongly – identified in the furore, which Scobie put down to a ‘translation error’; a version of events that was denied by the Dutch publisher.Both these titles became international bestsellers, even if they will never quite be the kind of history books that go down in the history books.In his novel, the royal author turns to the same themes which pulsate through the Sussex industrial grievance complex: sniffy relatives, courtiers who are crashing snobs, the dastardly ferals in the British Press – but now with the added bonus of the tights-hating, plucky American – a woman who is even more irritating that the White House’s real life Karoline Leavitt – who is going to sort them all out.Meanwhile, how is the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s ‘authentic life’ in America working out? In December, Prince Harry gave a speech at an estate agents’ conference in Toronto. The duchess has added a bookmark to her As Ever lifestyle brand.The couple were recently involved in an imbroglio with Kim Kardashian after photographs were posted online of them attending Kris Jenner’s birthday party at Jeff Bezos’s Hollywood mansion the night before Remembrance Sunday.And last week a grinning Prince Harry was filmed holding up one of his wife’s new chocolate bars, an act of naked promotion that once got Anthea Turner cancelled when she was accused of endorsing a Cadbury Snowflake bar at her own wedding. Omigod, Omid! It would take more than Lauren Morgan and her whiteboard to sort this mess out.
