Daily Mail

The Daily Mail functions in the novel as the indispensable engine of scandal, the tabloid through which the private lives of the British royal family and the American First Family are routinely commodified and sold. It is the paper that has "always had a bit of an affinity for airing our dirty laundry," as Prince Henry bitterly observes, and its long history of targeting the royals gives it both the institutional appetite and the editorial machinery to turn stolen intimacy into front-page news. When the novel's central crisis erupts, it is the Daily Mail that delivers the blow, and its pages become the battlefield where the fate of two nations' most powerful families is decided.

A Long History of Royal Exposure

The Daily Mail's role in the novel is established well before the Waterloo Letters scandal, through its treatment of the royal family's most vulnerable members. Henry explains to Alex that the paper gave his sister Beatrice Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor the nickname "The Powder Princess" years ago, a cruel moniker that references her struggles with cocaine and that has followed her ever since. The nickname is a distillation of the tabloid's method: it reduces complex human suffering to a catchy, damaging label and then deploys that label relentlessly. This history of targeting the royals means that when the paper later obtains the photographs and emails that expose Henry's relationship with Alex, it is acting in perfect continuity with its established pattern. The Daily Mail is not an occasional intruder into royal privacy but a persistent, predatory presence that the family has learned to expect and dread.

The paper's methods are also on display in its coverage of Henry's personal life before the affair with Alex becomes public. In a story headlined "WHO IS PRINCE HENRY'S MYSTERY BLONDE?," the Daily Mail publishes three photographs of Henry at a cafe in London, smiling over coffees at an anonymous blond woman, holding her hand as they duck behind the cafe, and kissing the corner of her mouth. The woman is identified as an actress named Emily, and the photos are clearly taken without the couple's knowledge, capturing moments of apparent intimacy that the paper then packages as a salacious mystery. The story is a dry run for the paper's later, far more devastating exposé, demonstrating its willingness to surveil the prince's romantic life and its skill at turning private moments into public spectacle.

The Waterloo Letters Exposé

The Daily Mail's decisive intervention comes in late September 2020, when it publishes the story that detonates the novel's central crisis. Twenty copies of the paper proclaim in gigantic letters: "QUEEN HENRY! INSIDE THE PRINCE'S GAY AFFAIR WITH THE FIRST SON OF THE UNITED STATES!" The cover is splashed with a blown-up photograph of Alex and Henry kissing in the back seat of a car behind a cafe, shot with a long-range lens through the windshield. Two smaller photos are inset on the bottom of the page: one of the couple on the Beekman hotel's elevator and another of them side by side at Wimbledon, with Alex whispering something in Henry's ear while Henry smiles a soft, private smile. The images are a carefully curated sequence, moving from the intimacy of the car to the semi-public spaces of the hotel and the tennis tournament, each one stripping away another layer of the couple's carefully maintained secrecy.

Inside the paper, the story is even more devastating. The Daily Mail prints annotated excerpts of the couple's private emails, labeling one "PRINCE HENRY: SECRET POET?" and beginning with a line Alex has read about a thousand times: "Should I tell you that when we're apart, your body comes back to me in dreams..." The publication of these emails, which were lifted from a private server used by White House residents, transforms the scandal from a mere tabloid gossip item into a national security and political crisis. The full email transcripts are uploaded to WikiLeaks under the moniker "The Waterloo Letters," named for a reference to the Waterloo Vase in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in one of Henry's emails. The Daily Mail's report reveals that the relationship has been ongoing since at least February of that year, and the paper's framing of the story — as a gay affair between a British prince and the First Son of the United States — ensures maximum political damage.

The Political Weaponization of the Tabloid

The Daily Mail's exposé is not an act of independent journalism but the final product of a coordinated political conspiracy. As Nora Holleran later discovers through her own investigation, the Richards campaign hired a firm that hired the hackers who obtained the surveillance tapes from the Beekman hotel, and then hired another third party to buy everything and resell it to the Daily Mail. The paper is thus the willing outlet for a scheme orchestrated by Senator Jeffrey Richards's campaign manager, Nilsen, to surveil a member of the First Family, infiltrate White House security, and induce a sex scandal to win the presidential race. The Daily Mail's willingness to publish stolen material without question makes it the perfect instrument for this conspiracy, laundering what is essentially political sabotage into the appearance of legitimate news reporting.

The paper's role in the conspiracy is confirmed when the Washington Post breaks the story of the leak's origins, with emails anonymously leaked and confirmed by an anonymous source on the Richards campaign showing that Richards or his high-ranking staffers orchestrated the plan to have Alex stalked, surveilled, hacked, and outed. The Daily Mail is thus exposed as having been a knowing or at least negligent participant in a hostile act of conspiracy against a sitting president. The paper's coverage of the affair, which it presented as a scoop, is revealed to be a weapon in a political war, and its credibility is shattered along with the Richards campaign's hopes of victory.

Aftermath and Legacy

The Daily Mail's exposé has profound and lasting consequences for every major character in the novel. For Alex, the publication of the story triggers a communications lockdown, with Zahra Bankston snatching his phone and dumping the magazines on his bedspread as the White House scrambles to contain the damage. For Henry, the exposure of his private correspondence and his relationship with Alex forces a reckoning with his family and his role as a public figure. For Ellen Claremont's campaign, the scandal threatens to derail her reelection just weeks before the vote, with Republican candidate Jeffrey Richards seizing on the story to question her impartiality and the security of the White House email server.

Yet the scandal also becomes the catalyst for the novel's resolution. The exposure of the relationship forces Alex and Henry to confront their feelings publicly, leading to Alex's coming-out speech and the couple's eventual public relationship. The revelation that the Daily Mail was used as a tool of the Richards campaign discredits the conspiracy and contributes to Richards's defeat in the election. And the scandal even produces unexpected good: Beatrice and Henry respond to the exposure of their private lives by creating twin philanthropic efforts, with Beatrice establishing a fund supporting addiction recovery programs across the UK and Henry founding an LGBT rights foundation. The Daily Mail, which sought to destroy the couple, inadvertently helps create the conditions for their public happiness and their charitable legacies. The paper's role in the novel is thus deeply ironic: it is the instrument of destruction that ultimately proves unable to destroy, and its scandal-mongering becomes the occasion for the very openness and acceptance it sought to prevent.