Announcing My Book!

Just when Prince Harry thought today couldn’t get any worse...

PSA: Valentine Low joins the Royalist podcast tonight (5pm EST / 10pm GMT) to pick through the smoking wreckage of Harry's ill-fated £50 million courtroom adventure.

I’m delighted to officially announce my new book, and reveal the absolutely brilliant jackets.

The title is The Dukes in the US and Dukes of Hazard in the UK and Commonwealth, and I’m hugely honored to have two famous and storied publishing houses behind me: Penguin Michael Joseph in the UK and Commonwealth and St. Martin’s Press in the US.

It’s coming out in February next year!

If you would like to support this endeavor, please pre-order, either by following the links above or alternatively by snapping the clever QR code lower down, which should take you to your local supplier.

This is the U.K. cover…

I’m planning to do events in London and New York to mark the occasion next year, and needless to say, paid subscribers to my Substack will get early-access invites, so please do think about becoming a full, paid-up member of the Royalist club. May I take this moment to remind you that several thousand people who were subscribers to The Royalist back when it was hosted at The Daily Beast received a free one-year subscription when we moved to Substack, and those folks need to renew by The Royalist’s first birthday, which is August 4, to maintain access. You can renew now, and the money won’t be taken until your comp expires.

This is the fancy geo-smart QR code that will take you to your local supplier…

So what’s the book about?

Well, it’s the blockbuster story of how two renegade dukes — Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Andrew, the former Duke of York, collectively known behind palace walls as “the Dukes of Hazard” — have brought the monarchy to its lowest ebb since David, Duke of Windsor (formerly Edward VIII), abandoned the throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson.

It’s a study of the remarkable parallels between these three embittered, infantilized, and naive men and, of course, their wives. On one side, the two American divorcées, Wallis Simpson and Meghan Markle: perceived as adventuresses by their critics, but adored and followed into exile, by their husbands. On the other side are the loyal Windsor wives: the Queen Mother and Princess Catherine(who is pretty clearly this generation’s designated savior of the monarchy).

Packed full of the juicy gossip and sizzling scoops that are The Royalist’s stock in trade, it’s also the story of how King Charles’s appalling handling of the Harry and Andrew crises has triggered a catastrophic meltdown in the monarchy’s moral standing, its global reputation, and its domestic popularity.

And this is the North American edition!

The UK legacy media keeps insisting Charles has done a terrific job as King. The empirical truth, I’m afraid, is that he has made a complete mess of it. Since he came to the throne, support for the monarchy has cratered from 65 percent to 55 percent. These are terrible numbers, and they will only get worse if he persists with his hugely unpopular and misguided efforts to rehabilitate Harry.

I think this week’s events are a pretty good illustration of why the King shouldn’t let Harry anywhere near him. While the fact that he finally told Harry he couldn’t stay at Buckingham Palace was welcome, the truth is he could and should have shut this whole circus down years ago with some well-judged Letters Patent. It remains to be seen whether he will meet Harry, Meghan and their children in person later this week or next. The Sussex camp is still floating it, and the King, incredibly, after all that has happened, has done nothing to rule it out.

One person very much not impressed by his father’s response to the hazardous dukes is Prince William. Their difficult relationship goes all the way back, of course, to William taking his mother’s side during their divorce and in the years after her tragic death.

William was contemptuous of his father’s failed efforts, in the first three years of his reign, to rehabilitate Prince Andrew (a man whose wrongdoing, as I will show, Charles helped cover up) and now he is dismayed to watch his father making what one ally described to me as “the same mistake again” by attempting to bring Harry and Meghan back into the royal fold.

William fears for his own inheritance as much as for his father’s legacy, and the book reveals the extraordinary lengths to which he is prepared to go to ensure that the reign of his son, King George VII, is not capsized by a future generation of disgruntled and vexatious “spares.”

The true story of the meltdown of Charles’ reign is a story that the UK legacy media, terrified of angering the King’s powerful press office, has so far declined to tell.

I can tell it because, in 2025, I was thrown off the international royal rota for reporting (accurately) that the King’s cancer was incurable.

Tobyn Andreae — who, funnily enough, was a few years ahead of me at Eton, and who, despite not even being my fagmaster, still seemed to think he could tell me what to do — informed me that my headline was “tasteless” and that he was withdrawing all cooperation with The Daily Beast and me.

It was a naked attempt to end my 30-year career as a journalist, and my fate was used to intimidate other journalists out of writing anything about the true state of the King’s health.

Unfortunately for the palace, my fearless bosses at The Daily Beast, Joanna Coles and Hugh Dougherty, not only stood by me, they encouraged me to go even harder, not just on the story of the King’s health, but on all the stories protected by this cozy conspiracy of silence at the heart of the British establishment.

That’s exactly what I’ve been doing ever since, with your support. And far from destroying my livelihood, as the King’s operatives had hoped, my expulsion turned out to be a professional rebirth. It freed me to tell — across YouTube, Substack, The Daily Beast, the podcast, social media and now this book — the astonishing story of the damage that the King’s response to the Andrew and Harry crises has inflicted on the royal family, and of the existential struggle between the King and his heir that these Dukes of Hazard have provoked.

Thank you so much to all the supporters of The Royalist. I’d NEVER have got this book deal without you (or my agent Jonathan Conway). I’m so grateful for your support; I don’t take it for granted for one moment, as I hope you can tell from all the work I put into the Substack. I’m determined to make “The Dukes / Dukes of Hazard” the best royal book ever, packed full of juicy stories and exclusive revelations from inside the secret world of the British Royal Family.