Lindsey Graham’s Exit and the King’s Capitulation

It’s sad for Senator Lindsey Graham that the last person he spoke to on this earth was the president who stole his soul. Graham’s full-on embrace of Trump, the man he once called a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot,” was shocking to all those who remembered Graham’s 20 year closeness with and reverence for the American war hero and fellow defense hawk Senator John McCain. McCain enjoyed his company so much he requested his desk be moved next to Graham’s on the Senate floor. When the Arizona senator died, Graham declared “If I had to pick one person in this great land to explain to someone from a different planet who are these Americans, it would be John McCain.”

The Two Amigos: Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham (2004)

If McCain had lived, and surely fought Trump’s undermining of democracy, his gargantuan grift, and his Caesar-like obsession with personal iconography, would Graham have had the character to join him as a dissenter? Or would Graham’s lust to be in the inside circle of power have led him to repudiate his Senate mentor and go with Trump? Everything points to the latter. It’s one thing for Graham to have said, as he did in 2018, “The American people have spoken and they rejected my analysis (of Trump).” It’s another to have become Trump’s panting fan boy, golf buddy, and trusted political enabler. In a sense, Graham was the canary in the coal mine of Republican surrender. In the hours after the January 6th insurrection, he declared from the Senate floor, “Enough is enough. Count me out.” But, a month later, he was back kissing Trump’s ring at Mar-a-Lago, rallying his support for the ‘22 midterms. Thanking the president for his South Carolina primary endorsement last month, Graham swooned, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”

So, now that the celebrated senator has passed at the untimely age of 71, in the spirit of charity, I prefer to remember him as the pungent prophet of 2016 who tweeted, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…and we will deserve it.” Alas, he was right. RIP Lindsey Graham.

One of a Kind

Last week, I was in London to attend the sublime memorial celebration of Tom Stoppard at the National Theatre, which turned out to be the perfect antidote to the mortifying crassness of what Trump did to America’s 250th anniversary. An audience of the myriad brilliant creatives who were Stoppard’s friends was treated to two glorious hours of extracts from his plays, performed by England’s finest actors and interspersed with speeches by a few giants who worked with him, including a spry Mick Jagger, who was funny and modest about their time collaborating on the film Enigma, when it amazed him that a mind that played around with Fermat’s theorem and quantum physics could engage so deeply with his three-minute song lyrics.

Literary Lion: Tom Stoppard in 2006

King Charles and Queen Camilla slipped in privately to sit in the front with Stoppard’s last great love and widow Sabrina Guinness (who dated Charles in her youth). The inimitable, voluptuous voice of Tom, cut from his multiple interviews over the years, provided a running commentary of self reflection, getting raspier with the passing of time. The last of these was from an interview with his biographer Hermione Lee. “Civilization is only savable on the level of the axis between individuals who love each other… I have an admittedly idealistic attachment to kindness, because kindness and kindliness means that you’re acting on a natural instinct towards your kin… I think one has to really hang on to that.” Kindness: such an unexpectedly humble word that’s running through me still, as perhaps it is for the king who chose the following day to welcome his yearning, errant son, his complicated daughter-in-law, and his small bewildered grandchildren for tea at Highgrove.

Hurricane Harry Turns it Round

Just a few days before, that royal family reunion felt as improbable as Count Binface, the comedian who runs in British by-elections with a trashcan over his head, becoming the next Prime Minister. The British press had been trashing Prince Harry all week. His will-he/won’t-he-bring-the kids-to-London antics before he returned to big up the lead-in to the 2027 Invictus Games in Birmingham became a festival of finger pointing. If Harry’s communiques were chaotic, the palace’s pomposity was at its most high-faluting. Two days before his arrival, the hot-head prince rejected an invite to stay at Buckingham Palace on the grounds this fortress wasn’t “safe” enough, then changed his mind, whereupon the palace pronounced that it was now too late. (As the Telegraph said, Buckingham Palace is not available on lastminute.com.) Even though BP is still disordered with renovation, this seriously lame excuse wasn’t a good look for the monarchy. One could imagine laughter in pubs across the nation that, in a palace with 240 royal and staff bedrooms, there wasn’t one measly turret, one bunk in a butler’s pantry, where the king’s younger son could lay his churning ginger head. The palace cited consideration for staff, the same staff perhaps who for many a year had been tasked with picking up Prince Andrew’s underpants.

The palace was on more solid ground with the inappropriateness of the king’s son staying in the sovereign’s property when a verdict was being handed down on Harry’s final phone hacking lawsuit, this one against the parent company of the Daily Mail. What if he lost and trashed the king’s own court? (He did and he did.) In fact, Harry didn’t just lose; he was pulverized.The judge went out of his way to praise the testimony of each one of the accused snoopers. The single word VINDICATED was the withering front page on the next day’s Daily Mail. In two weeks, the court will determine how much of the $67 million in legal costs Harry and the other claimants, including Elton John and Elizabeth Hurley, will have to fork over. That’s a lot of jam sales in Montecito.

But kudos where it’s due. Despite the gloating humiliation of the verdict, Harry went on to perform his princely role of bringing comfort to sick children and wounded veterans with inspired gusto. The exiled son does Heartwarming better than anyone in his family since his mother. And the camera knows it. It could not have passed unnoticed in the Prince of Wales’ household that Friday’s Daily Telegraph featured a gigantic half-page picture of Harry at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, wrapping a patient in a bear hug, at an event for WellChild, where the prince has been a patron since 2007. Buried inside the text was a small stiff picture of Prince William, on his own royal round, playing mini golf in Hastings.

Harry on top: The Daily Telegraph (July 10, 2026)

The Harry drama culminated on Friday when he was finally granted his most passionate wish to bring Meghan and his two children to Highgrove, his father’s country estate, to see Grandpa for the first time in four years. Doing so took an ingenious decoy operation. That same day, there was a Chanel-hosted lunch at Highgrove for 150 guests to celebrate crafts people funded by the king’s foundation. The Sussex car slipped in amongst the stream of arriving vehicles and pulled up at another entrance. “It was like being at Waterloo, but the wrong end of Waterloo,” one of the lunch guests told me. It didn’t seem to occur to Harry that the fact that the two children could touch down in the UK, undetected from their holiday home in Portugal, was proof positive that secret, safe visits, conducted without all the whirling swords, are perfectly manageable.

Juicy trivia indeed. But what elevates our fascination with the royals is the perennial tension between the institution of monarchy and the all too fallible humans who live inside it. The king knows that Harry and Meghan can never again be trusted with a full return to royal duties. But Charles’ alienation from his exasperating younger son is a constant heartache, made more painful by the fact that his paternal relationship with William, who was staunchly against this visit, is civil at best. Harry haters and many in William’s camp considered the Highgrove rapprochement a reward for Harry’s manipulation and emotional blackmail. Others labeled the king as weak. But I suspect the longing of a 77-year-old man battling cancer to see his young grandchildren resonates more deeply with the rest of the human race. And the monarchy has another 1,000 years to get over it.