A Showgirl’s Secret Romance, Harry’s Football Stand-Off, and Camilla’s Birthday Gift to Britain’s Children

Tea, Titles & Tiaras with Emily Darlow

This week has delivered something for everyone. A West End star has published a memoir about her secret five-year romance with a duke, King Charles has met his fourth prime minister in four years with the patience of a man who has genuinely seen everything, Harry corrected James Corden on live television about the word “soccer,” Princess Anne met a K-pop group in Seoul, and Queen Camilla marked her 79th birthday by giving books to every eleven-year-old in the country. We begin, naturally, with the showgirl.

The Showgirl, the Prince and the Balmoral Test

The most entertaining royal read of the summer has arrived, and it is Ruthie Henshall’s memoir, The Showgirl and the Prince, published this week by Pan Macmillan. Ruthie, a five-time Olivier Award nominated West End star, dated Prince Edward, now the Duke of Edinburgh, from 1988 to 1993, meeting him when he was working as a production assistant for Andrew Lloyd Webber while she was in the chorus of Cats. They were both in their early twenties. The romance was kept secret. Ruthie made covert visits to Buckingham Palace and took tea with the Queen at Windsor. At some point, she was invited to Balmoral.

The Balmoral Test, for those unfamiliar, is the royal family’s informal but very real process of assessing whether a partner of a family member is a suitable fit. Meghan has spoken about the experience. Ruthie, with the confidence of someone who has been performing in front of audiences for four decades, has published her version, and it is delightful.

She describes upon arrival being greeted by her own personal maid and being asked if she would like her bath drawn now. Then, later, they all had martinis. At which point Charles apparently took up his position behind the bar and began serving drinks. This is the detail that has been shared by everyone who has read it.

She also recalls being taken to a cookout without any security and performing for the family after getting rather merry on the martinis. She has not gone into specific details about what was performed or how the evening concluded, but the Palace, according to reports, is watching events closely and hoping no more is revealed.

Ruthie is at pains to present the royal family as warm, genuine and considerably less formal behind closed doors than their public image suggests. She has said the relationship ended naturally rather than acrimoniously, their lives moving in different directions as she began She Loves Me and Edward met Sophie. They have remained friends and Edward still calls her on her birthday every year, his falling two days after hers. The memoir is, by all accounts, not a hatchet job but rather a love letter, written by someone who found the situation and the family genuinely remarkable and wanted to document it before too much time passed.

The Hello! A Right Royal podcast interview with Ruthie is, I can personally tell you, a genuinely wonderful listen – open, funny, revealing, and kind in the most disarming way. Find it and put it on. You will not regret it.

The King’s Fourth Prime Minister in Four Years

On Monday, King Charles greeted Andy Burnham – the former Mayor of Greater Manchester, known across the north of England as the King of the North, now the 59th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – in the Chinese Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace. Burnham spent 35 minutes with the King. He then drove to Downing Street and gave a speech standing in the middle of the famous pavement without a lectern, which seemed to say a great deal about the kind of prime minister he intends to be.

Burnham is Charles’s fourth prime minister in under four years, following Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer and the fifth person to hold the office in just four years if you count Boris Johnson, who was on his way out when Charles acceded in September 2022. By comparison, Queen Elizabeth II received just fifteen prime ministers across her entire seventy-year reign. At the current rate, Charles will exceed that number somewhere around 2037. If he is still on the throne and if UK prime ministers continue falling this frequently.

To be precise about it: if Charles maintains the same rate of four prime ministers per four years and the past few years offer no reason to assume he won’t, he will match his mother’s fifteen by 2037, fourteen years into his reign.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVOUdEzyfm0

Harry’s Verdict on the Word “Soccer”

Now for the most quintessentially Harry story of the week.

Harry appeared on James Corden’s post-World Cup nightly show, After Hours with James Corden, following England’s agonising last-minute semi-final loss to Argentina, a match in which England were a goal up with fifteen minutes to go and somehow, as Harry told the panel, “there was this immediate temptation to fall into defence” that cost them the game. Rio Ferdinand was also on the panel. Harry was thoughtful and clearly felt the loss personally.

Then Corden said the word “soccer.”

“Football,” Harry immediately replied. “We’re in the United States, baby!” Corden fired back. Harry held firm. It was, a perfect portrait of a man caught between two countries who knows exactly which side of this argument he stands on.

The segment then arrived at a debate Corden had been having all tournament: who is Britain’s greatest Harry? Corden ranked them aloud – Styles first, Kane second, Harry Potter third and Harry The Duke of Sussex fourth. Harry was invited to weigh in, laughed and said there was an obvious conflict of interest, then agreed Styles should be first. He tied himself with Harry Potter for third. “We’ll have a Quidditch-off,” he said, which the audience found entirely charming.

He also admitted that in prep school he had been in the first football team, dropped to the E team upon moving to a larger school, and that this “didn’t feel very good.”

Nobody asked him to elaborate and he did not volunteer anything further. The E team revelation lives rent-free in the imagination.

Princess Anne Meets K-Pop. South Korea Was Not Ready.

While all of this was unfolding at home, the Princess Royal was on a five-day tour of South Korea and Thailand that gave us several of the most unexpected photographs of the royal year.

In Seoul, Anne laid a wreath at the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Busan, the only UN cemetery in the world, holding 2,300 graves from eleven nations, and a particularly significant site this year as it marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Imjin River and the Battle of Gapyeong, both involving British forces. Anne met Korean War veterans, visited a Hyundai manufacturing facility, and had an audience with President Lee Jae-myung at the Blue House.

And then she attended a British Embassy reception and met NMIXX.

For those not keeping up with the K-pop landscape – NMIXX is a six-member South Korean girl group formed in 2022 by JYP Entertainment, known for pioneering a genre they call MIXX POP, which blends multiple musical styles into high-energy single tracks. They serve as promotional ambassadors for the British Embassy’s Girls’ Empowerment initiative. They bowed respectfully and shook Anne’s hand. Anne, in a cream ensemble, regarded them with the same steady equanimity she applies to everything from Olympic medals to forty-two-year-old gowns. The photographs are extraordinary.

It continues a wonderful pattern of royal engagement with Korean music: the King awarded MBEs to Blackpink at Buckingham Palace in 2023.

From Seoul, Anne and Sir Timothy Laurence travelled to Bangkok for two days. She paid her respects to Thailand’s late Queen Mother, Queen Sirikit, met with King Rama X and Queen Suthida, and visited a Bangkok school supported by Save the Children, a charity with which Anne has been associated for more than fifty years. Her fourth visit to Thailand, her first since 1987. The woman does not stop.

Happy Birthday, Queen Camilla – Here’s a Book for Every Child in Britain

And finally, the nicest birthday gesture in recent royal memory.

Queen Camilla celebrated her 79th birthday on 17 July and marked it not with a state celebration or a balcony appearance but with an announcement through the National Literacy Trust, of which she is patron, that every Year 6 child in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and every P6 pupil in Scotland, will receive a special edition copy of Katherine Rundell’s bestselling fantasy novel Impossible Creatures in time for Christmas. The books will carry a distinctive royal stamp and a handwritten message from Camilla inside: “Impossible Creatures, by one of my favourite writers, is a brilliant fantasy that will introduce you to a host of mythical friends and terrifying enemies and I hope that you will love it as much as I do.”

Research from the National Literacy Trust reveals that reading enjoyment drops by thirty percent between ages eight to eleven and eleven to fourteen, making Year 6 precisely the moment when a gift of a book chosen with this much care could make a genuine difference. The initiative is part of the National Year of Reading 2026, the most ambitious reading campaign in a generation.

When asked about her looming 80th birthday next year, Camilla waved the question away with characteristic elegance, saying she was “not going there yet.” Fair enough. She is seventy-nine, she has given books to hundreds of thousands of children, and she has earned the right to defer that particular conversation for twelve more months.

William and Kate led the birthday tributes with a warm portrait on their official account. Kate and Camilla have long had an easy and genuinely affectionate relationship , something that has only deepened since Kate’s cancer diagnosis, during which Camilla, who has watched her husband navigate the same territory, has been a steady presence.

Happy birthday to the Queen. She is living her life, as a close friend put it this week, entirely in reverse.

A showgirl and a secret romance, a new prime minister in a familiar room, a duke who will not let “soccer” go unchallenged, a princess in Seoul doing what she always does with impeccable equanimity, and a Queen who marked seventy-nine years by giving every eleven-year-old in the country a book. The Crown, at full stretch, doing what it does best. Until next week, keep the tea piping hot and the tiaras polished.