The public agony of the Windsors is likely to be prolonged further next Monday with the accelerated release of a million copies of a new unauthorised biography of the British royal family by the notorious American author Kitty Kelley.
The book, The Royals, is thought to contain such controversial material that it is not being published in Britain for fear of legal repercussions. The Duke of Edinburgh and the Duchess of York have threatened to sue the publishers, Warner Books, if it is published in Britain.
It is six years since Kitty Kelley's last book, an astonishing and unauthorised biography of Nancy Reagan which earned the author death threats as well as glowing column inches for her reporting. The crux of her story was simple: the former first lady was a monster who ruled her husband with a will of steel, thrashed her daughter with a hairbrush and had had an affair with Frank Sinatra in the Oval Office.
The president scorned the book and the former first lady apparently wept with fury. But they never took legal action because it was true. Needless to say, the book sold more than a million copies.
All the more astonishing then, that the queen initially agreed to co-operate when Ms Kelley wrote to her in 1991 to inform her she was planning a vigorous tome about the Windsors.
Had Her Majesty, or any of her advisers, bothered to read one of Ms Kelley's previous books, they would surely have realised she was not planning a cheerful family album. The author, who had just turned over the Reagans and ridiculed Jackie Onassis in another biography, thrives on dysfunctional subjects - who better to start on next?
Two years after Ms Kelley embarked on the project, the queen got an inkling of what was really going on and the gates of Buckingham Palace slammed shut. It was too late. Having been paid an advance of $4 million by Warner Books on the strength of her previous work, Kitty Kelley was not about to give up.
She earned her reputation as America's first biographer the hard way. Although she gets paid enormous sums, she also does enormous amounts of research. More than 600 people have been interviewed for the Windsor book.
"She's a very serious social historian," said the author and critic Christopher Hitchens. "The initial tendency to describe her as tabloid or as simply inventive has gone away. There were huge protests about the Nancy Reagan book but there was the entire Washington press corps who had missed a story right under their nose."
MS Kelley herself has been the subject of an unauthorised biography, which disclosed that her mother was an alcoholic and that the author was sent down from the University of Arizona after stealing jewellery from a roommate.
Voted "friendliest girl" in her school for four years running, she had a spell as an editorial researcher on the Washington Post.
Since Diana's death she has been unusually coy, cancelling planned interviews with the British press and refusing to answer calls from her Washington home. During publication of her biography of Sinatra, her answering machine played My Way. Until Diana's death, it had been playing God Save the Queen. Lawyers have already dubbed the book "the royals' Spycatcher", a reference to Peter Wright's 1986 book about the security services, which was banned in this country despite having been published in the US. The Internet means that it will be impossible to prevent British readers from accessing extensive material from the book almost instantaneously.
Buckingham Palace said it did not wish to speculate on the contents of the book or say what action if any might be taken against the author. "We do not want to add to the prepublicity this book is already generating," a spokeswoman said. One million copies have already been distributed across the US, where it will appear in bookshops on Monday. It is expected to be the year's best seller, outselling any rival by several hundred thousand copies.
The book's publication will be the first real test since Diana's death of how restrained the British press will be in their future coverage of the royal family.
Guardian Syndication Service