Endgame: Prince Williams press secretary leaked the Sussexit news to Dan Wootton

As we covered previously, Omid Scobie’s Endgame had a pretty good rundown of how the Prince William-Rose Hanbury story played out from a media perspective. As in, Dan Wootton (then the Sun’s entertainment editor) broke the “rural rival” story, then Wootton also broke the story about William and Rose’s “private dinners,” a story which was quickly edited and eventually erased completely. Throughout the months the Sun was hotly pursuing the story, William’s press secretary Christian Jones was freaking out about Wootton’s exclusives… until Jones suddenly wasn’t freaked out at all. The spring/summer of 2019, the Sun suddenly buried the Rose story and had a rash of negative Sussex stories. A deal had been made, and Christian Jones threw the Sussexes to the wolves, all to protect William. William knew exactly what was being done too. Thus began the blatant transactional deal between Kensington Palace and Dan Wootton, which led to Wootton breaking the “Sussexit” story in January 2020.

Christian Jones was desperate to stop the Rose rumors: When rumors about Prince William and gossip about Kate’s “fallout” with Rose Hanbury flooded social media feeds and American tabloid magazines in 2019, Kensington Palace press secretary Christian Jones…pulled out all the stops to get The Sun—the first outlet to allude to the gossip—to stop poking around in the detritus of the rumor and back off. Crises such as these require more than just strategic briefing, which drops us right into the third media relationship: tactics that teeter on the edge of ethical boundaries, and in some cases run right past them.

Jones tried to rope Omid Scobie into the dealmaking: “Christian was desperate to stop [the rumor] and made it his mission to do so,” a former courtier told me. Jones even tried to include me in his attempts. While the tabloid continued to dig around on the story, even sending a reporter to canvass Hanbury’s home in Norfolk, Jones—who had already admitted to me that the paper’s persistence was stressing him out—suggested that I connect with the journalist behind the initial reports—The Sun’s “showbiz” editor Dan Wootton. Christian clearly wanted to give Wootton something in exchange for standing down on the rumors. If he promised Wootton scoops from elsewhere, maybe The Sun would do him a solid. As for my supposed gain from this, Jones claimed, it would be a “great move” to help promote Finding Freedom before it was launched in August. “He would be helpful,” Jones wrote in a late-night text. “I reckon a story [from your book] to Dan that goes in The Sun, and then he goes on [morning TV show] Lorraine [to talk about it].”

Scobie was already aware of Jones’s relationship with Wootton: At this point I was already aware and dubious of the triad relationship between Jones, Callum Stephens (his partner and PR executive), and Wootton. I had zero interest in collaborating with the tabloid and Wootton, let alone with a notorious hack best known for bullying and hounding celebrities, including the late Love Island UK host Caroline Flack (who Prince Harry was romantically linked to in 2009), as well as a long list of worrying allegations, including blackmail, coercion and other repulsive acts…

The shift in coverage at The Sun: It was soon clear my book was not the only carrot Jones would dangle in front of his pal at The Sun. In late June the paper suddenly pulled reporters off the hunt and then dropped digs into the story entirely. “Christian helped make it end,” one high-level courtier told me. Curiously, Wootton and the paper—which does not have a reputation for giving up on potential scoops—shifted their focus to a series of revealing stories about the Sussexes. For Prince Harry and some other Palace staff, including one who was confiding in me at the time, the timing of this shift was dubious.

Jones blatantly leaked the Sussexit story to Wootton: For this book, several separate sources—including two Sun staffers—confirmed that Jones helped provide details to The Sun about the Sussexes’ move to Canada and their decision to step back from royal life. “Leaks got really obvious toward the end,” a senior ranking courtier confided to me. When Harry and Meghan’s head of communications Sara Latham sat down with Jones and Prince Charles’s press secretary Julian Payne in January 2020 to prepare a joint statement from Buckingham Palace confirming the couple’s official departure, details about it leaked to the newspaper while they were still working on the draft. “They hadn’t even spoken to anyone at that point and Dan [Wootton] was already calling her to ask for comment about details in the statement . . . It felt like Christian had literally been texting him under the table.”

[From Omid Scobie’s Endgame]

That last quote made me shudder – “It felt like Christian had literally been texting him under the table.” The way Charles and William have always operated, it’s like Harry never had anywhere safe. This was arguably one of the most tense, heated and delicate situations the Windsors had faced in several decades, and instead of doing a close-hold lockdown on information, the then-second in line to the throne had surrounded himself with the sleaziest opportunists out there and everything turned into a clownshow. Jones utterly f–ked it up, and even worse, Jones never really had to face any accountability for it.

Scobie also pieces together this Christian Jones information with Prince Harry’s story in Spare, where he and William went off and had a big talk after the Sandringham Summit, and Harry told William about his concerns about a member of William’s staff selling information about the Sussexes to the tabloids. Harry claimed that William was receptive to what Harry said and William said “Yeah, we’ve also got our suspicions.” Three months after that conversation, William promoted Christian Jones from press secretary to personal private secretary.

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Photos courtesy of Getty, Cover Images.

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