The King's Disgruntled Gardeners

0:17Hello listeners and welcome to the show.

0:30turnover is high and the gardeners are underpaid. They're paid minimum wage, the article says, and they're subjective to exacting demands due basically to the intensity of Charles's love of horticulture. There is also a quote from the king. A deputy head gardener failed his probation after Charles asked him a question about a particular flower and he was unable to answer. Charles said, don't put that man in front of me again to another aid. So this was a deputy head gardener. So somebody appointed to a reasonably lofty position. Now, obviously, whether or not that's fair does partly come down to exactly what was said and what his experience was and whether he was qualified to do the job.

1:15And it is hypothetically possible that the guy genuinely failed his probation. I don't know. His name hasn't been published. It's not really possible to look into it at this present point in time. But of course, it all sounds like a drama blowing up among Charles's personal domestic stuff. You know, gardeners you would usually think of as being domestic employees. But obviously I said charity, and that is because Highgrove is, the gardens there are run by the King's Foundation for complicated reasons that I'll try to get into in due course. And the King's Foundation is the same charity that was at the centre of the Cash for Honour scandal.

1:55And the Cash for Honour scandal was also kind of spearheaded by the Sunday Times. In fact, it was the same journalist, Gabriel Pogrund. So no doubt he will not be getting an invite to the palace anytime soon. That's beside the point. Now, for those who don't remember the Cash For Honor scandal, essentially what it came down to really, the core of it, boiled down to, there were a whole load of allegations, particularly revolving around the former chief executive, Michael Fawcett, who resigned following an internal investigation. But the core of it really was an email that he sent to the aid to a Saudi tycoon, offering help securing a knighthood and peerages in exchange for donations to the charity.

2:38Now, this was kind of investigated by the police, who then, you know, on the advice of government lawyers, the Crown Prosecution Service didn't press charges. But it was reputationally damaging to the organisation, I think, but they basically kind of squeaked through without any kind of fundamentally, you know, unrecoverable ruling or verdict from any particular investigative authority. There was the police investigation, There was a regulatory investigation, but they kind of just about squeaked through. And so the whole thing blew over and it will become in the Long March history, it will be one of those kind of footnotes in royal history that only the geeks remember like myself.

3:23So just going back to this new story, the gardens one. So just first of all, a little bit about what the two sides are saying. so the Sunday Times says that Charles would leave these notes for the gardeners about the performance of different plants and things like that and some of them were really kind of effusively positive but others were kind of searingly negative so one for example which like it's kind of amusing and I can actually understand how it could be quite emotionally difficult for the gardeners but also So if you can kind of step back and outside of their subjective experience and, you know, just looking at Charles, it's kind of like it's not funny if they find it really difficult.

4:09But basically, yeah, so he said that, you know, the failure of these gardeners to cultivate his delphiniums had spoiled one of his favourite moments of the summer, which is just so very Charles. And this is kind of like, it's sort of the Venn diagram between the Megan bullying allegations and then Charles being an eccentric who talks to plants. It's like the weirdest combination of stories you could imagine. But if these allegations are fair and justified, it's very difficult to assess exactly at this kind of early point. But if they are, then my heart does go out to people who get mistreated at work.

4:51So, you know, I think there is a serious point here underneath this story, but it is still a question. We don't have any kind of basis for a definitive answer to that question. But like I said, there was this particular line that the head gardener, deputy head gardener, he had just been employed. So he was still going through his probation period. And Charles kind of spotted him and went over to have a chat with him about a particular flower. Now, we don't know what kind of flower. you know if you went up to a gardener and tried to have a conversation about roses and they knew literally nothing about roses that would probably be an indication that they probably shouldn't be a gardener on the other hand if you went up to them and expected them to know absolutely everything about an incredibly rare barely known about you know species of some plant or another genus of some plant or another then maybe you would be being a bit tough on them we can't really tell Or, you know, in an ideal world, you'd see the bloke's CV and whether he does have the experience to have done the job.

5:50And you would know more details about the exact conversation, what flower it was, what it was specifically that was being asked about in order to have a sense of whether he should have known the answer. But anyway, this quote is quite a quotable line, Charles, saying, don't put that man in front of me again. seemingly spelling the end of that particular person's career with the Royal Foundation. So then there's the question of what the King's Foundation says about all of this. And it is because he's an employee of the King's Foundation. It is the view taken as that it's for them to respond rather than the palace directly because they're his employer.

6:28So a spokesman for the King's Foundation said in a statement to Newsweek, At the King's Foundation, we take staff welfare extremely seriously and strive to be an exemplary employer. We are proud to regularly report very high satisfaction rates in our annual staff survey. Our staff turnover is well below the national average, as is the number of formal grievances raised. For the gardening team at Highgrove specifically, we regularly review guidance from the Professional Gardeners Guild for pay benchmarking. And this is also, I should have said that the Sunday Times reported that 11 out of 12 of the gardening staff who had been employed in 2022 have now moved on.

7:08So, you know, I think the foundation's position is basically they believe that they do treat their staff well and that they try to keep salaries in line with national guidelines and that, you know, they had one grievance among 500 staff in 2024 to 2025, which is obviously a slightly different timeframe to 2022, which is what was quoted by the Sunday Times. so you know it's one of those situations it's very difficult to know like even reading the quotes you would have you would only really know whether it was fair or not if you were actually kind of quite closely involved in the situation which in a way is quite similar to the Meghan situation but with Meghan we did over a number of years piece together a slightly more detailed picture and you know Harry's account in his book acknowledges a lot of the kind of background so this is like Megan this is not the equivalent of Megan being accused of bullying in 2021 right before Oprah this is more, this is closer it's not exactly the same at all but it is probably closer if anything to Megan being nicknamed Duchess Difficult in 2018 so it is very different to the Megan bullying situation where it sits right now but I'm going to get into those comparisons a little bit more later because there's some other questions that I want to look at first.

8:35So the first is, will this damage Charles reputationally? And I think it probably won't if this is the last we hear of it. Because basically, if it continues for years and the allegations don't go away, then that becomes a problem that grows cumulatively with time. But if an allegation gets made once and then doesn't get repeated, then people forget everything. This is the thing. If you just, already they're responding to it in a de-escalating way, whereas not just Meghan and Harry themselves, but actually their supporters made so much out of the Duchess difficult debacle. And also Meghan was, just everything that was getting written about her at that time in 2018 was hitting the front pages.

9:26Charles is the less attention grabbing royal despite actually being king. It might not be fair, but that's the reality. And so I kind of think that they'll just keep their mouth mostly shut about it, except to kind of give this very limited response, and then it will probably blow over. Whereas the Megan situation was very, very different. It was allegations that she was difficult to work for initially and later bullying in relation to staff who were shared with William and Kate. And that is a really, really key factor that this was something that a toxic, in Harry's words, a poisoned atmosphere developed at the shared private office in Kensington Palace, where all four royals were based.

10:11So in other words, this was part of a real rift between the two couples, between Harry and Meghan on one side and William and Kate on the other. So it became a kind of, you know, the issue of Meghan being accused of bullying became a political football in this war fair between the two couples. And that warfare kind of exists irrespective of whether those allegations are fair or unfair. But also, you know, there's another aspect to it, which is beyond the fact that it was like part of a massive falling out between two royal couples. Also, by the time it got to the bullying allegations being made public in March 2021, like that was so damaging to Harry and Meghan partly because they didn't tell Oprah about those allegations having been made against Meghan.

11:01So they came and they presented this whole narrative to the public about how, you know, it was all jealousy because, you know, the royal saw in like how incredible Meghan was at the job was Harry's explanation. and so for them to have hidden the fact that there was this falling out privately over whether Megan was mistreating the staff it was very kind of reputationally damaging because it caused people to question whether they were able or willing to tell the whole truth and Harry got as far as telling more of the truth by the time his book came out and he acknowledged you know so this is now from March 2021.

11:42We're now in January 2023. And he acknowledged that there was this poisoned atmosphere and huge rivalry between the two camps and the private office at Kensington Palace. But he also said that all constructive criticism was taken as an affront and an insult and that feedback became impossible. And that more than once he saw staff members hunched over their desks weeping. So, you know, he kind of stood up the existence of this really kind of deep and traumatic crisis and problem that existed within that shared private office for the first time in 2023, when they hadn't made any reference to it at all in 2021.

12:24And they didn't really talk about it in the Netflix documentary either. So clearly there was something there that really happened. It was real. And actually a lot of their fans had gone to battle, gone to battle on their behalf to say that it was all made up and invented out of thin air by the palace in order to undermine the Oprah Winfrey interview. But there, Harry actually does acknowledge that there was a real crisis and a real thing that happened and that William blamed, whether rightly or wrongly, whether fairly or unfairly, William blamed it all on Meghan. So it exists in the context of the Royal Rift and it was an aspect of the cause of the Royal Rift that Harry and Meghan didn't divulge to Oprah.

13:04And that is a huge part of why it was so damaging to Harry and Meghan reputationally. Whereas Charles, actually, weirdly, this could have wound up creating conflict between him and William because Highgrove is actually owned by the Duchy of Cornwall. It was bought by the Duchy of Cornwall, which is kind of crazy in itself because it's Charles' house. So the Duchy of Cornwall belongs to whoever is Prince of Wales. So it belongs to the office holder rather than the individual. So it was Charles. Charles had control of the Duchy of Cornwall while he was Prince of Wales before succession, before he became king.

13:45And so, but it was used to buy his house. So then it was a weird situation because he was going to pass the Duchy on to William when the Queen passed away. And that would mean that he would be William's tenant, which would be a weird situation. In fact, he is technically William's tenant. But in order to ensure that Charles retained control over what happens at Highgrove, this agreement was developed where the King's Foundation, his charity, runs the gardens at Highgrove. so um actually if that hadn't happened and you know these would have been william's staff like if this was all still run by the duchy it would now be william having to deal with complaints being made about the treatment of staff at a duchy owned house by chart by his father and so he would potentially have had to make like potentially get involved and speak to his father and say, what's going on?

14:41You know, is this fair? And that might have actually sown some discord and conflict between father and son. So in a way, you know, that is a narrow escape, actually. I don't know whether that was partly what they had in mind or whether, like I suspect, it probably wasn't, that it was just Charles wanting to be in control over everything that happens at a residence that's hugely important to him. Like when he, you know, when the Queen did die, and, you know, obviously people might remember he was, you know, traveling around the country every day. He was getting proclaimed in the four corners of Britain and all of these kinds of things.

15:13And he had like one day off. And that one day off he chose to spend at Highgrove. So that kind of tells you how significant this place is to him. It's kind of like his oasis of peace and calm in the Cotswolds and the Gloucestershire countryside. so yeah i mean he's now luckily for him for charles this saga is not going to probably quite probably not going to impact his relationship with william when it really actually could have done but i would just just you know to slightly go back over something i already mentioned um so this is like it took years for the bullying allegations to have a significant reputational impact on Meghan.

15:56If people are sitting there who are Meghan fans, Meghan supporters, thinking it's unfair that I'm saying that Charles is probably not going to be reputationally damaged by this, when in the past I've said that Meghan has been reputationally damaged by the bullying allegations against her. Well, let me just say, for years she wasn't damaged by them. When she got called Duchess difficult, it was wrapped up in a whole load of other stories that were a product of the royal rift, that were a product of the falling out between the couples. It's impossible to completely pull apart which story caused which bit of the media backlash that she then faced.

16:34But basically, the public opinion of Meghan did not hugely change even over the whole course of 2019. Her fan base didn't shrink at the point that Harry and Meghan got engaged in 2017 November, 55 % of the British public liked Meghan. And by the end of 2019, the last set of polling before Harry and Meghan quit the royal family, 55 % of the British public still liked Meghan. Now, her negative opinion, the percentage that didn't like her, did tick up a bit in that time. But she was still comfortably, comfortably, comfortably in positive numbers for her net approval rating, i.e. the balance between the two.

17:15So the British public overwhelmingly liked her more than they disliked her by a really comfortable margin. So, you know, Meghan, if you look back on how Meghan and Harry's reputation disintegrated, it was fundamentally more about what they said in the interviews they gave themselves than it was about the media reporting of them in 2018 and 2019. So yeah, I mean, this is part of why I don't think it's going to be reputationally damaging to Charles. It's because in the short term, if it stays where it is right now, then it will be forgotten about and people forget everything. Actually, especially if you don't fight it, if you don't fight these things, then people forget about them.

17:59But this is one of the things that Harry and Meghan got, you know, they got dragged down by repeatedly was that they wanted to fight every battle. And sometimes the more you fight, the more that conflict and the debate about whether those allegations against you are fair or unfair really embeds those allegations in people's minds. And the fact that, you know, Charles will just shrug this off will mean it will disappear out of the public imagination really quickly. And yeah, an element of that is that people, in all matters, Charles generates fewer headlines than Meghan and Harry have done. When they were popular, they generated way more good, positive headlines about themselves.

18:42And now that they're unpopular in Britain, they generate a bucket load of negative headlines about them. But they've always been really eye-catching, attention-grabbing royals in a way that Charles just isn't at this moment in his life. Because he's in his 70s and people love the younger royals. And it was totally different in the 1990s. In the 1990s, Charles got both barrels over Diana. And he was, you know, he was the one whose love life was creating massive, massive headlines. But he, in his older years, he just doesn't, he doesn't generate column inches in the same way. So on that note, I'm going to take a quick break.

19:22But before I do, please remember to rate and review The Royal Report on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your favourite shows. And when

19:37Hello and welcome back to the show. Prince Harry has visited Angola with the Halo Trust to draw attention to the fact the country still has a major problem with landmines almost 30 years after Princess Diana did just the same. So Diana walked through a cleared lane in an active minefield wearing like this blue bomb vest and helmet. I'm sure many listeners have seen the pictures. It was in 1997, so it was just a few months before her death, and it was one of her most famous moments. So she was still doing incredible kind of, you know, era-defining things right up until the point she passed away, even after her time as a working royal had stopped.

20:18And Harry has been trying to continue that legacy by working with this organisation, the Halo Trust. And so his last visit previous to this one was in 2019, so it had been a few years, and he went out there and he passed on this message basically to not walk into the minefield. So he said in Portuguese, stop, go back and tell your elders. There was like kind of ticker tape or cordon tape with big skulls and crossbones. So hopefully that would also have helped get the message across. And no doubt those children may well have already known what was going on. But, you know, it's about creating a big fanfare gets the message out.

20:57So that was part of what he did. And he also released a statement saying children should never have to live in fear of playing outside or walking to school. Here in Angola, the remnants of war still threaten lives every day. The Angolan government's continued commitment is a powerful testament to Halo's success in saving lives and reducing humanitarian risk. and he thanked the Angolan president, Xiaoal Lorenzo, for his leadership and partnership as well as continued donor support as we work together towards completing the mission of a landmine-free country. So you might feel kind of depressed by the fact that this is still happening so many years after Diana visited the same country, but Angola's civil war did actually continue after 1997 for another five years up until 2002.

21:48but it is obviously still a long time since 2002 and I think mine clearance basically just takes a very, very long time as you might imagine. So it's a huge, huge problem and they're still working away to try to solve it but also there are some other interesting kind of dynamics in the background here. So this trip might well have been in the diary for a long time but obviously I spoke last week on the show about this meeting between the new PR people for the Sussexes and the head of comms at Buckingham Palace. And so we are seeing, I think, a new energy in the Sussex operation, a new kind of enthusiasm and a sign that Harry is, he wants to kind of fight his way back in to the public imagination and the public's good books, I suppose, is a simple way of putting it.

22:37And this is not a bad way to do it. It's probably not enough by itself, but it's a good step. walking in Diana's footsteps never a bad thing this is a great cause and it's charity work which I do think they should do more of and I've been saying that for a long time so I think it's fantastic I think they could also do they do a lot that's kind of large scale every now and again but what they could do with like a little bit more of I think is small scale more regularly so it's absolutely fine to go and see charity projects in California, you know, small things where, you know, like the fact it doesn't create quite so much fuss is kind of half the point that you can sort of see that they're doing charity work for charity work's sake.

23:27You know, you have to believe that they're doing it to do good rather than to get a PR hit out of it. But it's good. I'm not against it. I'm in favour. And it's good to see some energy back on Harry's side, actually, to be honest with you, because, you know, he did, he does tend to get weighed down, Harry, particularly all the stuff with the court cases, they're starting to come to an end as well. He's got one more, which is the Daily Mail one, which is actually probably the most interesting of all of them. And that's coming in November, I believe, if I recall correctly. But the police protection one's over.

24:03So, you know, some of that kind of heavy stuff that was weighing him down is hopefully in the past now and he'll hopefully have a bit more time and energy to put into this kind of thing. Also, I mean, I talk about it in terms of winning back Britain, but the Sussexes in America probably do need to make some inroads into kind of getting people a bit more excited about them again. So just to give a pot of history, obviously America felt very protective of them for a long time. They did Oprah and a chill wind blew across the Atlantic. And then the Queen died and then Netflix came out and then Harry's book came out and put it all together.

24:49And they faced a big collapse in their reputation in America. But that did start to heal relatively quickly. And they got back into a kind of more reasonable place, probably within about six or nine months. But they're not viewed as being these incredibly vulnerable, protected people anymore. And actually, I did an analysis of polling throughout this kind of period this weekend. And it was quite interesting. I mean, Meghan has consistently polled less well than other members of the royal family, even dating back to 2020. So I looked at some, so you got, was a UK polling agency, but they do. And the reason why I've looked at them is because obviously being a UK polling agency, they have a particular interest in the royals.

25:39So I had a look at their US polling. So these are also surveys that were of American voters, usually about 1000 people in each representative sample. so that those 1 ,000 people are picked specifically to try to represent the demographic makeup of the country. Obviously, this is difficult with a country the size of America, but for what it's worth, the surveys that are done with a representative sample of 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 do actually tend to produce the same results as the surveys that have much bigger sample sizes, even like 10 ,000 people. They tend to come out the same when they're done on American politics.

26:17So anyway, let's have a look at what it said. So back in November 2020, bear in mind that Oprah interview hasn't happened yet. They've just gone over to America, a little bit of argy-bargy with Donald Trump, but you know, him saying he's not a fan of Meghan and all that kind of thing. But otherwise, they haven't done anything to really inflame the royal rift yet. So Meghan back then was liked by about 57 % of Americans. That's a strong, healthy number. She was disliked by about 30%. That gave for a net approval rating of plus 27. So it's a little bit behind Harry, who was on plus 40, and Kate on plus 49, William on plus 54.

26:56But, you know, it's ahead of King Charles, who at the time was a prince, and also was a prince on minus 13 in his net approval rating. So, you know, some people at the time probably felt that Meghan was America's favourite royal, and she actually wasn't necessarily, but she did have strong, healthy numbers. Fast forward to March 2021. It's right before Oprah drops. We've had some teasers. The first teasers, I think, are already out by this point. So people have a bit of a sense that it's going to be dramatic, but they have no idea what she's actually going to say. And at that point, 29 % of people backed the Sussexes, 13 % backed the Queen and the Royals.

27:34And most said either, you know, they're sympathetic to both, or they said sympathetic to neither, or don't know, or not applicable. And then after Oprah, YouGov did polling again, and that showed that 68 % of Americans had sympathy for Harry and Meghan compared to 20 % who had either not very much sympathy or none. So that is obviously a huge swing and reflects America just coming in behind Harry and Meghan in the immediate aftermath. March. This is on March the 8th, which I think was one day after Oprah. So, you know, really soon afterwards. Fast forward the clock, though, to May 2022. So this is the same month that Prince Harry and Meghan travelled to Holland.

28:19They had tea with the Queen on the way. They judged it for the Invictus Games, that is. It's before the Queen passed away. But obviously, we are deep into the Royal Rift by this point. The dust has more than settled on Oprah. and it's a useful time, obviously, to consider how America feels about them. So Megan, at that point, was liked by 45 % of Americans and disliked by 36%, giving her a net approval rating of plus 9. So that's quite a significant drop. It's actually an 18-point drop compared to November 2020. Harry also dropped, but he was on plus 18, which was actually a bigger slide of 22 points, but he was higher to begin with.