As book rollouts go, the one for Omid Scobie’s latest offering about the British royal family, “Endgame,” has been a hot mess — splashy, gaudy, tantalizing but ultimately a bit withholding — which is to say, par for the course for a putative tell-all account of the world’s most covered, least decoded family.
The withholding part involves an unconfirmed, thoroughly radioactive nugget that turned up in the Dutch edition of Mr. Scobie’s book, published on Tuesday: the identity of two members of the royal family who once reportedly expressed concerns about the skin color of the unborn child of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan.
Mr. Scobie’s Dutch publisher, Xander, quickly withdrew the book from shelves and online sites in the Netherlands at the behest of the author and his agent, citing an unspecified “mistake” that it said would be corrected in time for the book to go back on sale on Dec. 8. The family members are not identified in either the British or American editions, which were published by imprints of HarperCollins.
But the uncorrected version of “Endgame” was out long enough in Amsterdam and other cities for readers to buy it and for one name to circulate widely on social media (the second royal name appeared elsewhere in the book, though it was less directly attached to the reported incident). It all led to a nursery school’s worth of peekaboo headlines in London tabloids on Wednesday.
“Book Names ‘Royal Racist,’” said The Daily Mirror. “Scobie Book Pulled for Naming ‘Royal Racist’ by Mistake,” added The Daily Mail. “Royals United Against ‘Mischief Making Smears,’” proclaimed The Daily Express, helpfully adding a photo of King Charles III and his elder son and heir, Prince William.
None of the British papers initially published the name, referring only to a “senior royal.” But anyone equipped with an iPhone and Google could figure it out in less than 30 seconds. On Wednesday evening, the broadcaster Piers Morgan finally spilled the beans on his aptly named show, “Piers Morgan Uncensored.” The royals in question, he said, were Charles and Catherine, Princess of Wales.
Mr. Morgan said that British taxpayers, who support the royal family, deserved to know what Dutch readers knew, expressing hope that his disclosure would prompt “a more open debate about this whole farrago.” Mr. Morgan, whose antipathy for Meghan is well-documented and was on display again on Wednesday, said he did not believe that “any racist comments were made by any member of the royal family.”
On Thursday afternoon, The Guardian became the first British paper to publish the names on its website. The fact that the British press has been so reluctant, despite the names being broadcast on TV and all over the internet, attests to both Britain’s stringent libel and privacy laws and to the leverage that the royal family exerts over the press. The Mail said on its front page on Thursday that Mr. Morgan’s unveiling would cause “outrage.”
Buckingham Palace declined to comment, as did Kensington Palace, where William and Catherine, his wife, have their offices.
The tempest is a revealing media story but it is also the long tail of a family psychodrama that stretches back to the sensational interview Harry and Meghan gave to Oprah Winfrey in March 2021. In it, Meghan, a biracial, American former actress, said Harry had been in conversations about his future son, Archie, in which family members voiced concerns about “how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”
Meghan declined to say who, though Ms. Winfrey later ruled out Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip. In a carefully worded response at the time, the palace said “recollections may vary,” and promised to address Meghan’s concerns privately.
The couple has seemed eager to play down the incident ever since. It was not mentioned in a six-part Netflix documentary, “Harry & Meghan,” that aired plenty of other dirty laundry. Harry steered clear of it in “Spare,” his otherwise unsparing memoir, and he denied suggestions of racism in his family. There is a difference, he said in an interview last January, “between racism and unconscious bias.”
This latest eruption captures one of the odd paradoxes of royal coverage in the social media age. While Harry and William have lashed out at relentless, often inaccurate, coverage by the tabloid press, some of the ripest morsels about the House of Windsor never surface in the papers. They lurk in the murky depths of Facebook or X, formerly known as Twitter, widely shared and easily accessible, but lacking the Fleet Street imprimatur that the royal family both loathes and covets.
In this case, the story is further complicated by Mr. Scobie, whose previous book, “Finding Freedom,” which he co-wrote with Carolyn Durand, earned him a reputation as being very close to Harry and Meghan. Meghan, it emerged later, had authorized an aide to brief him about her side of the couple’s bitter rupture with the family.
In “Endgame,” Mr. Scobie styles himself as a lone wolf who operates outside what he calls the “self-regulated pack of journalists, who just like the White House press pool, shadow the family on their various endeavors.” He added, “Parts of this book will burn my bridges for good,” which seems like a good bet.
Mr. Scobie did not answer two requests for comment.
In an interview with Dutch television, he said he did not identify family members as making comments about skin color and had no idea how the names wound up in the Dutch translation. The book does refer to letters between Meghan and Charles, then the Prince of Wales, in which the two discussed the issue, and which Mr. Scobie said resulted in the couple not raising it again.
The publication of the names was brought to light by Rick Evers, a Dutch royal reporter, who said he came across them as he was reading the book. He posted a screenshot of one page, along with an English translation, on his X account, which refers to letters between Meghan and Charles. A later reference to the Princess of Wales being involved in conversations about Archie is less specific.
The managing director of the publisher, Anke Roelen, said it would investigate how the names ended up in the book. “It was an extremely precise process that took months,” she said. “So, we are very careful with drawing any conclusions.”
Dutch publishing executives were skeptical that a translator would have added the names. “The only thing I can think of that could have happened is that the translator translated from an early pass” of the manuscript, said Willem Bisseling, a literary agent at Sebes & Bisseling. “But that’s just a guess.”
Some speculated that the libel laws had handcuffed Mr. Scobie as tightly as the press. Daniel Taylor, a media lawyer at the London firm Taylor Hampton, said the author and his publisher were at risk of a defamation suit if the people who made the comments “were deemed to be racist in posing the question” about the child’s skin color.
“If the names were included in the book by mistake without sufficient evidence to back up who made the allegation or the circumstances in which it was made,” Mr. Taylor added, “that may have led to a decision to pulp the copies.”
Legal peril aside, the hubbub is a bookseller’s dream for Mr. Scobie, especially after his book received a ho-hum critical reception.
“Readers hoping for a final death blow of gossip will be disappointed,” The New York Times said in its review. “We’ve heard much of it before. From Fergie, from Diana, from Charles, from Harry, from Harry, from Harry again.”
Claire Moses contributed reporting
