It’s without a doubt THE  most unlikely coupling of the decade. What His Royal Highness Prince Edward could possibly see in Esme Platt’s plain little sister has been the source of much conjecture. A Masen Palace insider gave us the exclusive scoop—and it’s better than anything we could have come up with. Apparently, she cured him of his terrifying fear of responsible people.

Spit your beer out onto your keyboard? Yeah. That’s exactly how we reacted here at Royal Bitch.

According to our source, “His Royal Highness has never reacted well to the idea of toiling away at a profession, and being around productive members of society only aggravates it further. It goes back to when His Royal Highness finished university and arrived at the Royal Military Academy for Officer Candidate School. Less than six hours into orientation, he became so panicked that medics had to remove him from base. That’s how intensely he fears people who work for a living. It was easier for him to bear the shame of being the first male issue of the Masen Dynasty not to serve in the military than face his fear head on.”

What happened that day is legendary. Who by now hasn’t heard all about how after five minutes in fatigues, His Royal Highness had a massive anxiety attack and broke out in hives?  At the time, a Royal Family spokesperson claimed it was because of Prince Edward’s well-known polyester allergy, but no one made any attempt to secure uniforms made entirely of cotton. Instead, the  Prince was given an Epi pen and sent on a humanitarian visit.

Our source went on to explain, “Isabella Swan has changed all this. She doesn’t freak him out the other people with jobs do. He started off slowly, only being around her. After all, she’s where she is in life because of her father, and he can certainly relate to that. After experimenting with various sessions of carefully controlled exposure to other employed people, His Royal Highness felt confident enough to visit Isabella at her place of employment. He didn’t stay long, but his visit was without incident. Since then he’s visited Dot Swan’s national headquarters many times. On his most recent excursion, he didn’t even have to pop a benzo. It’s a huge relief to him, the idea that in time he may be able to stop being a drain on our country’s resources. And he owes it all to her.”

Okay then.

We take journalistic ethics very seriously here at Royal Bitch. Being the first with a story is important to us,  but we’d never risk our reputation by posting something we weren’t 98% sure was true. More than that, we don’t like to get sued. Though the Royal Military Academy incident is well-known and seemed to corroborate our source’s claims, we remained unconvinced and hit the photo archives. Surely there are pictures of Prince Edward standing there in one of the bespoke suits he wears around town surrounded by smallfolk doing their jobs. Finding one would blow a huge hole in the Not-a Swan-saved-him-from-himself theory our usually reliable Palace insider seems desperate for us to believe.  Much to our surprise, we could only find one—a pap photo snapped of him entering Dot Swan last week.

“Her Majesty says she’s a keeper,” our source said,  “and if he does anything to sabotage this relationship, she’ll cut off his allowance.”

We’re thinking an engagement is imminent.