You can count on Omid Scobie to be an unreliable narrator

The author’s new palace potboiler, Endgame, is full of inaccuracies and misrepresentations, says royal biographer Hugo Vickers – but, then, he has built his reputation on getting things wrong…

What is quite remarkable is Scobie’s track record for getting things wrong (Calder Publicity/HarperCollins/Getty Images/Luke Fontana)

As a longtime scourge of inaccuracies in The Crown, I feel it is my moral duty to issue a warning about misleading royal drivel whenever it comes my way. Which is why I say under no circumstances should you stoop to buy, least of all read, Endgame by Omid Scobie.

For those somehow unscathed by the ongoing publicity onslaught this week – which included an appearance by Scobie on today’s edition of This Morning in which he attempted to defend the book – Endgame is the latest salvo from the author who gave us Finding Freedom, the myth-building 2020 biography of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Scobie, having made his name unearthing “the unknown details of Harry and Meghan’s life together”, has returned to chart the “devastating” impact that Megxit has had on the royal family as an institution, as well as on key individuals, notably, the King.

Endgame’s overarching contention is that the monarchy finds itself in mortal danger, that King Charles is a mere “stopgap” monarch, and that Prince William “craves” the throne. And the prose is as desperate and divisive as you’d expect. The Dutch version of the book has already been pulped after its translation reputedly unmasked two members of the royal household whom Meghan suggested had aired “concerns” about her unborn son’s skin colour – which is as careless as it is cruel. But, then, Endgame is full of inaccuracies, misrepresentations and casually snide asides.

As the late Queen herself said, recollections may vary. But, in the round, it adds up to a troubling picture of Scobie’s attention to detail and accuracy

Scobie’s selling point has always been that, as a longtime favourite of Harry and Meghan’s, he is well-positioned to detect bristling tensions within the royal family. But, far from being a trusted palace insider, he is, at best, a journalist on the outside, his nose pressed against frosted glass, giving him a self-distorted vision of what lies within. And with the Sussex camp not exactly a temple of truth, it makes it doubly confusing whenever Scobie writes.

What is quite remarkable is his track record for getting things wrong. Some telling examples. In Finding Freedom, Scobie writes how Prince Harry finally met Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, over “delicious sashimi” in Los Angeles – except the Sussexes visited the city together for the first time in 2020.

Scobie writes how Harry texted his father after the birth of his first child, Archie. But Charles doesn’t keep a mobile phone, and famously never has.

Another chapter, said to offer an in-depth account of the Sussexes’ third date in 2016, on a Botswana safari – he misidentifies the camp where they stayed – seemed to me to be drawn from insights already in the public domain, or invasively personal, such as Meghan’s bathroom routine.

We can’t say we weren’t warned about Scobie. When Meghan had court papers issued on her behalf ahead of a privacy hearing in 2020, they contained a damning assessment of Finding Freedom, describing passages as “either extremely anodyne, the product of creative licence, and/or inaccurate”.

Remember the “bombshell” Oprah interview in March 2021, in which Meghan put to bed the rumour that she had made Kate cry in the run-up to her wedding, during a fitting for Princess Charlotte’s bridesmaids dress? “The reverse happened,” Meghan told Oprah – it was in fact she who had been reduced to tears by the then Duchess of Cambridge…

And yet, in Finding Freedom, published the previous year, Scobie dismissed the notion of any such wedding-related dramas. “There were no tears from anyone,” he declared.

As the late Queen herself said, recollections may vary. But, in the round, it adds up to a troubling picture of Scobie’s attention to detail and accuracy.

And so to Endgame, which was only published on Tuesday, but whose errata are already piling up.

Raking over details of the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, Scobie trots out the line that Henri Paul, the chauffeur, had been blinded by the white flash from a photographer’s camera. Not so, according to the official 2008 inquest – this is an invention from a discredited account given by the late Mohamed al-Fayed.

Scobie says the Queen met Camilla for the first time at Highgrove House, the venue for Camilla’s 50th birthday party, in 1997. The Queen had, of course, known her for years – but the first meeting with her as Charles’s partner was at King Constantine’s 60th birthday party, again at Highgrove, but in 2000.

Scobie writes later that Queen Camilla once “quietly thanked” Piers Morgan for defending the royal family after Harry and Meghan’s departure. The TV host has been quick to correct an error. On his Talk TV show earlier this week, Morgan said: “On one occasion, he states as a fact that I had regular phone conversations with Queen Camilla. For the record, I have never had a single phone conversation with Queen Camilla. Now he says as a fact in this book, that we had regular phone conversations that, I personally know, is an absolute lie.”

The book’s vicious sniping at the Princess of Wales will not earn the author much sympathy. Scobie says Kate went through five private secretaries in six years; in fact, there were three.

Of the late Queen’s death, Scobie writes how the world was “informed of the sovereign’s passing at 6.10pm” – when, in fact, it was announced at 6.30pm…

I could go on. If such mistakes were not enough for the reader to begin to doubt what they’re reading, even the book’s premise barely holds up to scrutiny. A simmering tension exists between the King and his heir, insists Scobie – but it is he who then creates the faultline in his own argument, implying that Charles and William have actually bonded in their despair about Harry and are now working closely as a team.

I fear Endgame’s only saving grace is that it will stand as a monument to quite how unreliable a royal biographer Scobie actually is.