Something really weird is happening with the Daily Mail’s Ephraim Hardcastle column. For more than a year now, the guy (?) behind the column has been fact-checking the Windsors and their sycophants on a regular basis. I’m not ready to call this Hardcastle guy part of the Sussex Squad yet, but the column has broken some interesting news here and there. The columnist spilled the tea about Prince William fighting his father over the Prince of Wales investiture. The columnist recently pointed out that despite Buckingham Palace’s briefing spree over the Royal.uk updates removing the Sussexes’ HRHs, the Sussexes still very much have their HRHs. The columnist also recently broke the news about Mohammed Bin Salman’s upcoming visit to the palace. What I’m saying is that this guy (?) loves to fact check and spill some matter-of-fact tea. Recently, Andrew Morton suggested that the Duchess of Sussex wouldn’t return to the UK because she didn’t want to curtsey to Kate. Well, Hardcastle had something to say about that:

Princess Diana biographer Andrew Morton commits a faux pas, telling Sky News that Meghan may not be keen on visiting her estranged in-laws as she would have to curtsy to Kate, now Princess of Wales.

The old rules of who should bow/curtsy to whom are old hat.

The late Queen abandoned much of the protocol in homage to both changing times and the arrival of a greater number of commoners into the family (among them Kate, Sophie, Tim Laurence, Mike Tindall, Jack Brooksbank and Camilla herself).

The only requirement now is for the King himself to be acknowledged and Meghan might feel herself even exempt from that.

It was noticeable that amid the sea of dips and bows as the King left his coronation, Harry didn’t join in. Perhaps his view was obscured by Aunt Anne’s plume hat.

[From The Daily Mail]

In Spare, Harry recounted his directions to Meghan about who she needed to curtsey to – basically, only QEII and Harry’s father (but notably not Camilla). In the Netflix series, Meghan talked about and around the “formality” which exists within the royal family behind the scenes, and many were left with the impression that William and Kate were probably mega-salty that Meghan treated them like her peers and equals rather than bowing and scraping as soon as she was in the presence of the “future king and future queen.” Basically, this whole story is just another huge projection by the Windsors and their people: they do care about the bowing and scraping and they’re incandescent with royal protocol that Meghan can’t be forced back to the UK and made to curtsey to Princess Karen. As I said in the opening, it’s interesting that there’s one Daily Mail columnist who comes along and gently shreds the royalist talking points.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.