It's A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood...

Or is it? In a land of fairytale castles, garden parties, and pheasant shoots, royal rumors have cast a dark shadow.

- Simon Usborne

It was a procession of awkwardly matched dignitaries. They walked two by two, in their tiaras and white ties, into the state dining room at Buckingham Palace, where the 1990 Château Lafite Rothschild would perhaps flow more freely than the small talk. President Trump and the queen, Princess Anne and Jared Kushner, the Duke of Cambridge and Theresa May, the departing prime minister. Then, down the line came a particularly intriguing pairing. Sarah Vine, a columnist at the Daily Mail who had been invited because she is the wife of Michael Gove, a minister in May’s cabinet, joined Rose Cholmondeley, a former model whose grandmother had been bridesmaid to the queen.

Cholmondeley, who is 35, was there because her husband David, the Marquess of Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumley”), has a ceremonial role as Lord Great Chamberlain. But weeks earlier Vine’s newspaper had breathlessly reported rumors about Rose, the Marchioness at Houghton Hall, the absurdly grand Cholmondeley seat in Norfolk, a county in the east of England. In that strange rural enclave of castles and the royal-adjacent characters who inhabit them—now gleefully dubbed “Turnip Toffs” by the press—there was talk of a dramatic falling out between Rose and her neighbor and friend Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge. Headlines suddenly proclaimed Rose to be Kate’s “rural rival.” Despite the three miles that separate Houghton and Anmer Hall, Prince William’s home on the royal Sandringham estate, had a boundary been crossed? Kensington Palace slapped back against the gossip and intimations; lawsuits were threatened. At the state dinner the couples wouldn’t get close at all—after the awkward procession they were scattered across long tables. Instead Rose sat next to perhaps the only man who might know the official version of events: Britain’s spy chief, Jeremy Fleming.