A Crown Divided

The House of Windsor is fractured and fragile, and the question that now hangs over it is whether it can remake itself fast enough to survive.

At its centre is a King who waited a lifetime for the Throne and reached it just as his body began to fail him, handing what strength he has to a son with his own firm idea of what a modern monarchy should be. Around them lie pressure points. Two brothers, one holding the line beside his father, the other burning in California, whose estrangement has exposed the institution as no republican campaign ever could. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the late Queen’s favourite son, whose friendship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has become the gravest royal scandal since the abdication. Meghan, the outsider who told the world the Palace had failed her and walked away.

Drawing on decades at the very heart of the story, and on sources inside the palace walls, Robert Jobson traces every fracture back to a single morning in 1997, and to the woman whose absence still shapes everything the Windsors do.

Thirty years on, Diana’s shadow is long, and the Crown she changed is divided.