One of this year’s bestselling books will undoubtedly be the latest Tom Bower exercise in reputational demolition. For his latest subject, he has picked a pair who many Critic readers will think richly merit such a demolition, in the form of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. His new book, grandiloquently entitled Betrayal: Power, Deceit and the Fight for the Future of the Royal Family, deals with the last few years in both the royal family in general and Brand Sussex in particular, hence the cover image of the pair. The dustjacket blurb declares that “with inimitable research and exclusive interviews from insiders, Britain’s leading investigative biographer Tom Bower exposes the latest contortions in the explosive Sussex saga of power, bitterness and betrayal”.
It used to be said, grimly, by politicians that the words that they least wanted to hear were “Michael Crick is on his way to see you now”, on account of that journalist’s near-legendary muckraking skills. And much the same might be said of Britain’s leading investigative biographer, who has, over the decades, written critical books about many of this country’s major figures in politics, public life and entertainment. In the past decade alone, he has dealt with Tony Blair, King Charles, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, the Beckhams and Harry and Meghan: the latter being such a rich seam of gossip and scandal that Bower has written two separate books about them.
Betrayal is the successor to 2022’s Revenge, and, presumably in an attempt for book purchasers not to feel conned, there is a prominent sticker on its cover, informing the would-be reader that Bower is “author of the explosive royal biography Revenge”. To be fair, most of the author’s books could be called Revenge in some shape or form, as the wealthy (save Corbyn, anyway) and powerful (again …) subjects might be forgiven for thinking that they have done some personal wrong to the intrepid former Marxist and BBC producer. He began his career with well-received books about Nazi war criminals but catapulted himself into the A-list with scathing biographies of the crooked plutocrat Robert Maxwell (who successfully sued to prevent paperback publication, but the damage was already done) and Mohamed al-Fayed, although the Phoney Pharoah’s true misdemeanours ended up being far more significant, and horrible, than even Bower was able to print.
There has been an increasing sense that his targets have not been worth the effort
Yet as Bower’s successful and presumably lucrative career has continued, there has been an increasing sense that his targets have not been worth the effort that he and, presumably, a team of researchers have put in. His 2024 biography of David and Victoria Beckham, The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power, alternated between tedious chapter-long summaries of the various (legal) offshore accounts that the Beckhams use for their business purposes and prurient, even gossipy hints at David’s rumoured extramarital affairs that gave every impression of being worked over by the lawyers. (One typical paragraph reads “Sitting in the front row, Lady Mary Charteris looked particularly debonaire. Only those who recalled Glastonbury in 2017 would raise their eyebrows quizzically and wonder what precisely her presence meant.”) Perhaps surprisingly, given the damning details about Brand Beckham, the average reader would probably conclude Bower’s book and feel oddly sympathetic towards the pair, who emerge not as monstrous but as a hard-working duo with limited intellectual gifts but a willingness to graft for all they are worth.
Bower has also overreached himself in the past. There is almost certainly a great investigative biography to be written about Boris Johnson, but his strangely sympathetic account of our dismal former PM, Boris Johnson: The Gambler, published in 2020, is not it. While Bower usually seems to approach his subjects with the Paxman-esque attitude “why is this lying bastard lying to me?”, he seemed to be, like so many others, at least half-seduced by Johnson’s blonde charms, and so the book was a frustrating exercise in punches being pulled.
The difficulty that any investigative biographer, from Bower downwards, faces is that they need to obtain exclusive access to high-profile figures who are willing to talk on the record, but that these figures are often muzzled by stringent NDAs. It comes as little surprise that, in the footnotes for Betrayal, articles in the Daily Mail and Prince Harry’s own memoir Spare — itself factually dubious — come up as sources far more frequently than the words “confidential interview”, meaning that the book is best regarded, like so many contemporary royal biographies, as an upmarket cuttings job rather than a genuinely revelatory piece of detective work.
None of this will stop the thoroughly readable book becoming a bestseller, but Bower has the disadvantage that he is publishing Betrayal less than a year after Andrew Lownie’s mega-bestseller Entitled, which managed to destroy what little remained of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson’s credibility and hastened their expulsion from the Firm, with the Epstein files doing the rest. As someone who found Lownie’s book grim, often queasy reading, I cannot say that I enjoyed its literary qualities, but it undeniably did everything that its determined author set out to do, and then some.
I cannot imagine that Betrayal will have a similarly corrosive effect on Harry and Meghan — whose reputations, particularly in Britain, are rather closer to the gutter than to the star. In truth, they are a pair of annoying and self-indulgent publicity-seekers rather than actively wicked. And this, you feel, is the trouble with Bower’s subjects these days. One wishes that he would find a quarry truly worthy of his skills — I can think of a few, off the top of my head — who will thoroughly deserve the spotlight that his investigations shine upon them. Otherwise, we are left with a series of books telling us that A-list celebrities are less nice than they might like to appear. That, I am afraid, does not need Tom Bower, in all his investigative might, to tell us that.
