Just as I have always admired the seamless way the Duchess of Sussex’s truth has sometimes clashed with fact, so too do I have a grudging respect for Omid Scobie.
Lest we forget, this is a man who spent a decade raking over celebrities’ private lives for US Weekly, only to brazenly tweet in 2021: “Privacy means freedom from *unauthorised* intrusion. It is the right to choose what you share with others and what you don’t. That’s it!”
At the time, such outbursts left journalists like me in disbelief. Wasn’t this the guy whose entire career was built on analysing snatched paparazzi images of the rich and famous?
Imagine our incredulity when Scobie launched into repeated attacks on the very royal press pack he followed around like a puppy. I saw with my own eyes how he tried to muscle in on the rota system in a bid to gain access to the very members of the Royal family he now seeks to trash in his second book, Endgame, which hit bookshelves on Tuesday.
You have to admire the brass neck of the bloke, you really do.
I remember one incident on a royal tour when he was literally begging me to tell him the sources of my various royal scoops. And to think he’s now so reluctant to discuss his own!
Who on Earth could they be, I wonder?
Perhaps the most amusing thing about Endgame is how much this fearless journalist gets wrong in his tireless pursuit of Meghan’s truth.
As my colleague Hannah Furness (back from maternity leave as Royal Editor) points out: “The world was not told about the late Queen Elizabeth II’s death at 6.10pm but 6.30pm. The funeral on Sept 19 2022 was that of the Queen, not Prince Philip.
“Palace aides were racking their brains to remember the ‘five’ private secretaries who have come and gone from the Duchess of Cambridge’s office (there have been three). And contrary to the claim ‘you’d be unlikely to read about it in any British newspaper’, The Telegraph reported on exactly that staffing issue last week.”
Hey, but why let facts get in the way of a good story?
In one passage, I am described as The Telegraph’s Royal Editor – which I’m not and never have been. Referring to a piece I had written about the now infamous dog bowl incident, in which I suggested that it showed how much love William has for his little brother that he felt the need to physically wrestle him to the ground, Scobie comments that I sound like the “excuses of domestic abusers everywhere.”
Domestic abuse? Is that what we are calling sibling rivalry these days?
In another passage, he suggests that the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, AKA Edward and Sophie, were “casually bigoted” for saying “Oprah who?” in response to a question about the US TV supremo’s bombshell interview with the Sussexes.
Since I was the one who asked them the question, in an interview for the Telegraph Magazine in June 2021, I wish Scobie had bothered to call me for clarification. I’d have told Montecito’s answer to Walter Cronkite that they were actually joking, as if to say… we deny all knowledge of the Oprah interview.
Sadly, getting both sides of any story has never been Scobie’s forte.
We are now being asked to believe that it was a “translation error” that the names of two “alleged” royal racists had been left in the now-pulled Dutch copies of Endgame – even though they were completely absent from the English version.
And we’re supposed to accept this narrative even after Scobie had bragged on US television that he knew the names of both alleged racists?
You know, I really thought I’d seen it all when Meghan told Oprah, with a straight face, that the Archbishop of Canterbury had married them three days before their official wedding ceremony; that she’d had her passport confiscated only to jet off on multiple holidays; that Kate had made her cry and not the other way round.
I thought I’d heard it all when “sources” close to these two multi-millionaires (who were still receiving a £700,000 allowance from the King after Megxit) revealed the couple were so “desperate” they had no choice but to sign deals with Netflix et al – even though we know they were speaking to streaming companies as early as 2018, a whole two years before they stepped down as “working” members of the Royal family.
I thought I’d heard it all when Scobie, of all people, claimed to be both a champion of privacy and an accountable press, only to publish not one, but two completely unauthorised intrusions into the lives of the Royal family so lacking in balance as to be laughable.
We must believe all victims of bullying, insists Scobie (who was comforted by Meghan when he copped the kind of flak we all get, day in and day out on social media), except when they’re accusing the Sussexes of it.
You really couldn’t make it up.
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December 01, 2023 at 12:50AM
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Sadly, getting both sides of any story has never been Omid Scobie's forte - The Telegraph
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