Mid-way through Omid Scobie’s second book on the British royals he compares them briefly with the Dutch ones. “Change is not impossible,” he writes. “In recent years the Dutch royal family has led by example when it comes to addressing their own uncomfortable histories”.
King Willem-Alexander has hired three historians and a human rights expert to spend three years tracing his ancestors’ ties to the Dutch West India Company and slavery. The Dutch government has earmarked €200 million to promote awareness of this history and the king has apologised unreservedly. Charles, Scobie makes clear, is playing catch-up. Chatter about Endgame has naturally focussed on the Scobie-palace row over who said what about Archie’s skin colour (see nib above).
There’s also been more of the unpleasant dissection of Scobie’s journalistic pedigree that accompanied his first, less worldly volume on Harry and Meghan, Finding Freedom. Yes, he started out writing extended picture captions for US Weekly. Yes, his readership has always been mainly American. Yes, low expectations for Endgame are lowered further by a worshipful, source-free prologue about the Queen’s death.
But this book grows on you. Scobie takes his preposterous subject seriously. His reporting is as granular as it gets on 21st century Ruritania. His anger at the spectacle of the royals’ “ugly, systemic racism bubbling to the top” is as genuine as his sympathy for one of the very few people to have joined the family having made it in the real world on merit, and in an exceptionally competitive part of the real world at that. Scobie means it about the royals being in their endgame.
And if you end up sharing his take on the evidence, much of which he’s mined himself, you’ll probably join the plurality of Brits who reckon the time has come, at the very least, for a decisive downsizing and a big dose of Dutch honesty.
