Tom Bower Just Published His Second Book About Meghan and Harry

"Deranged Conspiracy." Sure. That's Why It's Number One on Amazon.

Tom Bower just published his second book about Meghan and Harry. The Sussexes called it "deranged conspiracy and melodrama." It immediately went to number one. A totally unexpected sequence of events that has never happened before in the history of powerful people attacking books about them.

On March 15, excerpts from Betrayal: Power, Deceit and the Fight for the Future of the Royal Family by Tom Bower began running in The Times of London. By the weekend, Meghan and Harry's spokesperson had released a statement. By Monday, the book was number one on Amazon.

The Sussexes did this. They did it to themselves. And Tom Bower, who has been writing books about powerful people trying to suppress them for forty years, was almost certainly not surprised.

Writing in The Spectator this week, Bower noted the familiar pattern cheerfully: "My biography of Robert Maxwell also benefited from his endless writs. Similarly, Richard Branson sued twice to prevent publication. He lost." He has been here before. He will be here again. The outraged statement from the subject of an unauthorised biography is not a rebuttal. It is a marketing campaign. The Sussexes, who have spent years in media and communications, appear not to have received this particular memo.

What the Statement Actually Said (And What It Didn't)

The spokesperson's statement, issued to multiple outlets, was long on tone and short on specifics. "Mr Bower's commentary has long crossed the line from criticism into fixation. This is someone who has publicly stated, 'the monarchy in fact depends on actually obliterating the Sussexes from our state of life,' language that speaks for itself. He has made a career out of constructing ever more elaborate theories about people he does not know and has never met. Those interested in facts will look elsewhere; those seeking deranged conspiracy and melodrama know exactly where to find him."

This is a statement about Tom Bower's alleged motivations, his alleged fixation, and his alleged methodology. It is not a statement about whether any specific claim in the book is false.

This is not a small distinction. When a book contains inaccuracies, the standard response from any communications team worth its retainer is to identify the inaccuracies and correct the record publicly. What the Sussex statement does instead is attack the author. His character. His stated opinions about the monarchy. The general vibe of his project.

None of this addresses whether Camilla said Meghan brainwashed Harry. None of it addresses the Sentebale situation or the Invictus Games coverage or the Kensington Palace argument or any of the other specific, detailed claims in the serialised excerpts. The book is dismissed wholesale as "deranged conspiracy," which is a phrase that does an enormous amount of work and carries zero evidentiary weight.

If the claims are false, name the false claims. If they are not named, that is information too.

Who Tom Bower Actually Is (Since His Credentials Are Being Questioned)

The Sussex statement describes Bower as someone who "has made a career out of constructing ever more elaborate theories about people he does not know and has never met." This framing is interesting, because it invites you to imagine him as a tabloid blogger with an agenda — which is, conveniently, the least credible version of the person making the claims.

The reality is rather different. Tom Bower trained as a barrister before spending twenty-five years as a producer and reporter for BBC Television, covering war, politics, intelligence, and finance. He is the author of over nineteen books. He is considered Great Britain's best investigative journalist.

His subjects have included Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Conrad Black, Richard Branson, Gordon Brown, Boris Johnson, and Simon Cowell. Many lawsuits were filed against him over the years, with many of them being dropped after the stories were revealed as substantially true. His work has withstood legal scrutiny, including successful defenses in libel actions brought by Richard Branson, Conrad Black, and Richard Desmond.

He says he has good lawyers and is always careful. This is a man who has been chased, sued, threatened, and legally challenged by some of the most powerful and litigious people in British public life — and whose work has, repeatedly, held up.

This is who Meghan and Harry's team is describing as a conspiracy theorist who constructs "elaborate theories." The description is available for anyone to evaluate against the forty-year public record.

The Streisand Effect, Which Is Not a Theory

The Sussexes' retort may put some off the book while also making otherwise curious readers want to discover what all the fuss is about — a widely acknowledged phenomenon known in PR as "the Streisand effect," after a famous incident in which Barbra Streisand sued a photographer seeking removal of images that featured her home, only to bring more attention to them.

The statement was released to multiple major outlets simultaneously. It used vivid, quotable language — "deranged conspiracy," "crossed the line from criticism into fixation" — that was always going to be pulled and reproduced across every platform that covers the royals. It named the book and the author in terms so dramatic that anyone who had not heard of either was now very interested in both.

The book now ranks number one on Amazon.

We have written before about the mechanics of the rebrand and the consistent pattern of Meghan and Harry's communications strategy producing outcomes that seem to run counter to their stated interests. This is another entry in that particular catalogue. A book that might have received moderate coverage in the royal press cycle has now been amplified, discussed, and purchased by people who heard about it specifically because of the statement designed to discredit it.

What the Book Actually Claims (The Parts They Didn't Dispute)

Among the book's central claims: Meghan told William to take his finger out of her face during a reconciliation meeting at Kensington Palace shortly after their honeymoon. William had warned Harry before the engagement that the relationship was moving too quickly. Queen Camilla privately told a friend that Meghan had "brainwashed Harry." Meghan was allegedly dissatisfied with Harry's limited prospects of becoming king and resentful that she would never be queen. Harry began asserting independence from palace management, changed his phone number without informing relatives, and distanced himself from friends — all, Bower argues, at Meghan's encouragement.

On the Invictus Games, Bower describes the atmosphere at one wheelchair basketball match as subdued, claiming only 43 paying spectators attended and about 100 people were brought in by organisers and "corralled" around Prince Harry and Meghan for photos. He also alleges that videos produced by Archewell and curated social media posts emphasised Meghan's appearances, clothing, and interactions, prompting some observers to nickname the event the "Meghan Games."

The Invictus claims did generate a specific pushback — the US Warrior Games director confirmed that team members "actually had both visible and invisible impairments, including several competitors with below the knee amputations or lower limb function loss,"directly contradicting Bower's characterisation of the American players. This is a legitimate correction to a specific claim. It is also, notably, the only specific correction offered in response to a book containing hundreds of claims.

The rest — the brainwashing quote, the Kensington Palace argument, the phone number, the alleged resentment about not becoming queen — remains unaddressed. Not denied in detail. Not corrected with competing evidence. Simply included in the category of "deranged conspiracy," which is a very convenient category because it requires no evidence to place something in it.

The Pattern, Which You Already Know If You've Been Here Before

We have been covering this particular saga for a while now. Six years of the Sussex story has produced a consistent pattern: criticism arrives, the criticism is characterised as motivated, biased, or obsessive, no specific claims are addressed, and the characterisation becomes the story instead of the underlying information.

This works, up to a point. It works when the person making the characterisation has more credibility than the person being characterised. It works when the audience does not look too closely at the credentials of the person being dismissed. It works when the Streisand effect is not widely understood.

Tom Bower has been doing this for forty years. He has previously described his research method as "find the victims." He is not a blogger. He is not a troll. He is not someone who constructs theories about people he has never met. He is a trained barrister turned BBC investigative journalist with a forty-year track record of writing books that powerful people try to suppress and that courts have repeatedly found to be defensible.

Betrayal publishes March 26. It is already number one on Amazon.

The statement helped with that.

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