GleamVibe

While Omid Scobie’s Endgame doesn’t have any kind of confirmation about Prince William’s alleged affair with Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, Scobie does include the story and all of the reporting at the time from the Sun. What was fascinating about the way Scobie covered it was that he confirmed what many of us had always believed: that Kensington Palace was able to successfully “bury” the affair story short-term by feeding Dan Wootton and the Sun all kinds of information about the Sussexes. Meaning, William threw his brother under the bus, all to protect himself from the affair rumors. The Rose story, more than anything else, was the reason why things fell apart so spectacularly between Harry and William in 2019 – Harry understood (and had evidence) of the Christian Jones-Dan Wootton connection. Well, the British media has barely touched that part of Endgame, but at least Entertainment Tonight asked Scobie about it:

An alleged affair between Prince William and a former bestie of wife Kate Middleton, is picking up steam once again after royal expert Omid Scobie brought up the subject in his new book, Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy’s Fight for Survival. But it’s exactly that, alleged. And Scobie’s not buying that anything ever actually went down between William and Rose Hanbury, though he can understand why the rumor spread like wildfire when it first surfaced.

“Unfortunately, if a rumor’s left to kind of do its own thing it can run 20 laps around the world before you even think about what, how you want to kind of address it,” the royal expert and author tells ET’s Kevin Frazier in an exclusive interview. “They never addressed it, so those rumors will never go away even though there’s no truth to suggest that they are true.”

“I was very careful in the book to really focus on this, as the allegations against William, Kate’s and their fallout with Rose Hanbury,” he said. “For legal reasons there are so many things that one can’t go into but I thought it was really important, even if a rumor is a rumor. And I really don’t see proof that there is more to this than just a tittle-tattle, you know.”

But while Scobie says he sees no truth to the rumor, he concludes the palace addressed it indirectly — by offering Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as sacrificial lambs amid their fallout with the palace.

“I thought it was really interesting to analyze how the palace dealt with that,” the author says in reference to U.K. journalists digging around for any shred of evidence that might suggest the extramarital affair was true. “The worst case scenarios that they feared would happen, you know, just those rumors themselves were going to have enough impact, negatively, on William’s reputation. We still see them [the rumors] trend on Twitter on a regular basis … that’s something that’s incredibly damaging, I think, for William. It probably looks even worse, actually, that there was a kind of willingness to throw Harry under the bus simply to make these things disappear.”

[From ET]

LMAO. “We still see them [the rumors] trend on Twitter on a regular basis.” I wish Scobie had gotten a chance to mention the “Prince of Pegging” rumor, because that trends on Twitter all the time too. “I really don’t see proof that there is more to this than just a tittle-tattle, you know.” Over the years, I’ve developed and added to the theory about how it all went down – the affair, then Kate found out and tried to pull rank on Rose, and then Rose outed the affair as a way to put Kate in her place. I genuinely think that’s how it happened. It also feels like there was a real lack of discretion among the aristo set – they were openly gossiping about the affair during dinner parties and such. It probably would have stayed that way – an exclusively aristo story – if Kate hadn’t tried to snub Rose. That being said, Rose and Kate did make up and it seems like Kate learned her lesson on that count. It’s sad when your husband’s former mistress invites you to pity dinners at her house, but that’s the way these people roll.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

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