Less than a month ago, “royal expert” Tom Bower said the quiet part out loud: that the future of the monarchy depends on “obliterating the Sussexes.” Prince Harry and Meghan cannot be allowed to live, work and thrive outside the institution because they will expose the uselessness of the whole exercise. Bower has targeted Meghan for years, using vile, dehumanizing language, but here’s something new. This week, Bower appeared on TalkTV and he claimed that he actually knows what’s going on with the Princess of Wales and that it’s pretty serious. While he hasn’t turned on the Waleses, we’re going to see more of this in the coming days, weeks and months:

On Kate’s surgery & recovery: “We’re not being told what the surgery was. As I understand it, it was very serious. I won’t reveal what I’ve been told it was, but she is seriously ill. It is not fatal. She will recover, but it’s a long healing process and that’s why she’s disappeared from view.”

It’s not a PR problem, it’s an illness problem: “It’s far worse than news management… we have a crisis for the monarchy at the moment. The king is ill, probably more serious than we realize, the Princess of Wales, who is the future of the monarchy… is seriously ill too. We have the constant problem of Harry and Meghan, the reappearance of Andrew is catastrophic, it’s a very bad time for the monarchy and a bad time for Britain…it’s not so much the news management, it’s literally the facts. The facts are that the royal family at the moment is besieged by bad health and unfortunately by scandal too.”

The timeline for Kate & Charles’s recovery: “I think it’s months rather than weeks. I think Kate’s recovery will be much longer than they originally anticipated, and I think the king is rightly taking his cancer treatment very seriously.”

[Transcribed from TalkTV video]

While Bower talks out of his ass a lot of the time and he’s truly one of the most vile people I’ve ever seen, he often gives a glimpse into the general mindset of the royalist media. Between Bower’s statements and the Daily Mail’s columnists freaking out all week, it definitely seems like there’s a lot of panic going around the royal establishment and their media handlers. All of this to say, I actually think Bower has got it right in this narrow instance, that Kate’s condition is much more serious than the palace has led people to believe, and that she’s not going to pop up on Easter Sunday with a fresh wiglet and a BBL. We probably won’t see her until Trooping the Colour in June, if that.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.