Jeffrey Richards

Jeffrey Richards, the Republican senator from Utah and the presumptive frontrunner against President Ellen Claremont in the 2020 general election, stands as the novel's central political antagonist. His campaign's orchestrated conspiracy to surveil, hack, and publicly out Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry constitutes the book's primary crisis, converting a private romance into a weapon of electoral warfare. Richards's actions — and their eventual exposure — reshape the presidential race, the fate of the First Family, and the public understanding of what constitutes a political crime.

Identity and Political Background

Richards is introduced as a figure of formidable political lineage. Alex Claremont-Diaz, attempting to unravel the senator's history, describes the Richards family as "one of the most complex bits of history" he has tried to understand. On a Post-it note stuck to his laptop, Alex writes a formula: "KENNEDYS + BUSHES + BIZARRO MAFIA OLD MONEY SITH POWERS = RICHARDSES?" This shorthand captures the family's peculiar blend of dynastic political power, old money, and an almost sinister capacity for concealment. Richards has served as a senator for Utah for nearly twenty years, a tenure that provides ample voting history for his opponents to study. Yet Alex is more interested in what is harder to uncover: generations of Attorney General Richards and Federal Judge Richards have created a family network capable of burying anything inconvenient. The senator's public persona is that of a standard conservative campaigner; at a College Republicans of Vanderbilt University event, he speaks of encouraging young people to get involved in government, praising a student organizer named Brittany for securing "this amazing turnout." Alex, watching the live feed in the campaign office, pretends to vomit onto his policy draft — an early signal of the contempt that will define their conflict.

The Orchestrated Conspiracy

The core of Richards's role emerges through the investigation that follows the scandal. Nora Holleran, analyzing a cache of hacked emails, discovers the full architecture of the plot. "Richards outed you, Alex," she tells him. "As soon as you left the campaign, it started. He hired a firm that hired the hackers who got the surveillance tapes from the Beekman." The scheme was layered and deliberate: Richards hired a firm that employed photographers to follow Alex and hackers to breach the private email server used by White House residents. He then engaged a third party to purchase the stolen material and resell it to the Daily Mail. Nora's analysis reveals a digital paper trail of pay stubs, invoices, and requests for service, all routed through back channels, go-between firms, and fake names — enough, she believes, for a federal investigation to subpoena the financial records. The operation's goal was explicit: to induce a sex scandal and win a presidential race. An internal email between two operatives, attached to a blurry long-range photograph of Alex in Henry's bedroom, shows the campaign's exacting standards. "Negative. Nilsen says that's not nearly clear enough. You need to tell the P we're not paying for Bigfoot sightings." The reference to Nilsen — Richards's campaign manager — confirms the conspiracy reached the highest levels of the campaign.

The Scandal and Its Public Face

When the plot succeeds, Richards becomes the public voice of the scandal. The Daily Mail's report, published under the headline "QUEEN HENRY!" with the subheading "INSIDE THE PRINCE'S GAY AFFAIR WITH THE FIRST SON OF THE UNITED STATES," includes photographs of Alex and Henry kissing in a car, captured through the windshield by a long-range lens, alongside images from the Beekman hotel elevator and a private moment at Wimbledon. The paper also prints annotated excerpts of the couple's emails, including one labeled "PRINCE HENRY: SECRET POET?" that begins with a line Alex has read a thousand times: "Should I tell you that when we're apart, your body comes back to me in dreams..." 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. Richards seizes on the affair to attack the president's impartiality. At a press conference, he declares himself "extremely concerned about this private email server," asking what kind of information was being disseminated on it and insisting that American voters have a right to know everything for which the server may have been used. His framing — linking a personal romance to questions of national security and presidential fitness — sets the agenda for the news cycle, forcing the White House into a defensive silence.

Exposure and Collapse

The conspiracy unravels when Rafael Luna, a senator who had joined the Richards campaign, leaks the incriminating emails. The Washington Post breaks the story, confirming through an anonymous source on the Richards campaign that the senator — or at least high-ranking staffers — orchestrated the plan to have Alex stalked, surveilled, hacked, and outed. The podcast host Oliver Westbrook summarizes the revelation: "Jeffrey Richards committed a hostile act of conspiracy against a sitting president, and I am eagerly awaiting the federal investigation that is coming to him once he loses this election." Westbrook also notes that Luna tweeted he was parting ways with the Richards campaign roughly forty minutes before the podcast recording, speculating that Luna may have infiltrated the campaign precisely to expose its crimes. The exposure transforms Richards from a legitimate political opponent into a figure of national disgrace, and the federal investigation he once demanded of the White House now awaits him.

Narrative Role and Significance

Richards functions as the novel's clearest embodiment of political corruption — a figure whose ambition justifies any means, including the surveillance of a First Family member and the weaponization of another person's sexuality. His conspiracy provides the structural engine for the book's climax, forcing Alex and Henry to navigate a public crisis that threatens their relationship, their families, and the presidency itself. Yet Richards's scheme ultimately backfires: the exposure of his plot, rather than destroying the First Son, galvanizes public sympathy and clarifies the moral stakes of the election. His role as antagonist is thus not merely to create obstacles but to illuminate, by contrast, the integrity of the characters who oppose him. In the novel's moral arithmetic, Richards represents the cynical calculation that love is a vulnerability to be exploited; the story's resolution insists, against him, that love is indomitable.