Omid Scobie’s book is expected to blame embattled Cabinet Secretary Simon Case for deepening the rift between William and Harry.
Mr Case, who is on medical leave from his job as the country’s most senior civil servant, is understood to have been warned that the book will accuse him of planting negative stories about Harry when Mr Case was Prince William’s Private Secretary.
It is the latest drama to engulf Mr Case, 44, who has been criticised over his role in Partygate and for sending controversial WhatsApp messages to Matt Hancock, the then Health Secretary, during the pandemic.
Mr Scobie’s book, Endgame, is understood to claim that Mr Case placed stories in the Press such as Harry and Meghan’s use of private jets – in contrast to William and Kate’s patronage of budget airlines – as part of a campaign to portray William as the responsible heir compared with Harry the dissolute ‘spare’.
A Whitehall source said: ‘Simon comes across as a scheming careerist. It is the last thing he needs after the year he has had.’
Omid Scobie ‘s book Endgame is expected to blame embattled Cabinet Secretary Simon Case for deepening the rift between William and Harry
Omid Scobie’s book, Endgame, is understood to claim Simon Case placed stories in the Press such as Harry and Meghan’s use of private jets – in contrast to William and Kate’s patronage of budget airlines
In his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry nicknamed the three top palace advisers the Bee, the Wasp and the Fly – believed to be Sir Edward Young, Private Secretary to the Queen, Clive Alderton, working for Prince Charles, and Mr Case.
Harry wrote: ‘I’d spent my life dealing with courtiers, scores of them.
‘But now I dealt mostly with just three, all middle-aged white men who’d managed to consolidate power through a series of bold Machiavellian manoeuvres . . . The Fly had spent much of his career adjacent to and, indeed drawn to, s***.
‘The offal of government and media and wormy entrails, he loved it, grew fat on it, rubbed his hands in glee over it.’
It was reported yesterday that Mr Case’s absence on medical leave has left the civil service as ‘leaderless’ with senior officials ‘jockeying for position’; Mr Case took four weeks of medical leave last month, but doctors have now advised that he will not be able to return until some point in 2024.
He had been due to give evidence to the Covid inquiry this month, where he would have been asked about WhatsApp messages in which he said he had ‘never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country’.
Mr Case was also criticised in Nadine Dorries’ book The Plot: The Political Assassination Of Boris Johnson, which the former Culture Secretary declined to show to the Cabinet Office in advance on the grounds that Case would have had the power to veto its contents.
The Cabinet Office declined to comment on behalf of Mr Case last night.
Simon Case is understood to have been warned that the book will accuse him of planting negative stories about Harry while he was Prince William ‘s Private Secretary
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