FEARS OF A CROWN

Harry and Meghan Cook Up Trouble for King Charles

The monarch does not want the couple to present themselves as working royals. The Sussexes seem to have other ideas.

The question of whether the Sussexes should be described as “working royals” has become a strange new battleground in Harry and Meghan’s campaign to re-establish themselves as “public figures” in Britain.

In comments to the London Sunday Times, a source described as a friend (likely a member of their press office) said, “‘Working members of the royal family’ is a really lazy phrase. He hates it, she hates it. They are not ‘working’ for the institution, but they are members of the royal family, and they work. Their days are built around their family life and their work. She’s running a business seven days a week.”

Prince Harry has doubled down on his claim to be a member of the royal family in the wake of his and Meghan’s shambolic charity visit to Nottingham on Thursday, a day of royal-coded engagements that ended, as The Royalist exclusively revealed, with the couple leaving their final event 15 minutes early to collect their children from school.

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The friend went on, “Things like Nottingham aren’t done in the name of the institution or the crown, but Harry is the son of the king, he is still a member of the royal family, he’s just not a member of the institution. It’s misleading to call them ‘former royals.’ It has an impact on how they’re perceived and the way people talk about them.”

This position defiantly rejects King Charles’ modest attempt, via his Lord Chamberlain, Lord Benyon, to clarify the couple’s position two weeks after they returned to Britain. A letter was sent (the palace was at pains to make clear this was the king’s wish) to government departments, military officials and the lord lieutenants, who are the monarchy’s local representatives in the shires, stating that the Sussexes’ position was “akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests.”

The letter sent the couple into paroxysms of fury. Their side pushed back via the Telegraph, saying they were not private citizens but “public figures,” that they should have been consulted on the contents of the king’s letter, and that it was very damaging.

This weekend’s briefing shows that the anger has not gone away. They did not accept what the letter said then, and they do not accept it now. This is precisely what the palace does not want, because it could lead to the establishment of a rival court.

Queen Elizabeth II understood exactly what damage a rival court could do, because her father’s entire reign was devoted to preventing Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson from establishing one in Britain. This was the principle the queen applied at the Sandringham Summit in January 2020 when she told the Sussexes that if they wanted to do commercial work, they could not represent the crown in any way. Do not muddy the waters. Do not confuse things.

It is also deeply reminiscent of “service is universal,” the Sussexes’ famous 2021 clapback to the queen, as if a woman who had spent seven decades devoting herself to public service required a lecture on the subject from Harry and Meghan. They have now rejected the king’s position in equally open terms, and the whole Nottingham sideshow demonstrates what that rejection looks like in practice.

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I was there, and it was shambolic. The first event, at the Community Recording Studio, was well organized, but attended by very few members of the public. Some people had been invited, but I counted just half a dozen passers-by who turned up to see them.

The second event, at the Himmah Hub, was on a busy street, so plenty of people stopped when they saw the cameras, and it all spilled chaotically onto the road.

The third, at Epic Partners, was complete chaos, culminating in a teacher from the neighboring school coming out to beg the crowd to part so the children could exit the building. To imagine that happening at a royal engagement would be completely unthinkable.

If they insist on going around doing public events and presenting themselves as members of the royal family when the king has specifically asked them not to, that is a pretty serious problem. The Sussex camp’s elaborate distinction between a member of the royal family who is part of the institution and one who is not doesn’t land with an actual crowd. When I spoke to people there, they all said the same thing: yes, Harry is a member of the royal family.

The palace, I hear, is dismayed. They feel they can do nothing further without the king giving them authority to come down harder and make it clear to the Sussexes that they are risking their titles. But the palace doesn’t want to seem vindictive or stoke the flames and make the situation worse.

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The Royalist wonders how it could be worse. Harry and Meghan are profoundly unpopular. They are using the accident of Harry’s birth to masquerade as members of the institution while insisting they are doing no such thing, and they are doing it because they want to be seen as royals.

It is a perilous moment for the real royals. I have reported that the king encouraged Harry and Meghan to come home. Even if you don’t accept that, the simple fact is that nothing was done to discourage them. It wouldn’t have been very hard for the palace to make clear that charities and institutions that embraced them and gave them a public platform were acting against the king’s interests.

King Charles has not seen them since they came back to the U.K., which tells you a good deal about the extent of his buyer’s remorse. The next king, Prince William, has not spoken to them since 2022. It is an absurd state of affairs.

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I suspect Sir Clive Alderton saw this train wreck coming when he announced in July that he was stepping down as the king’s principal private secretary. He evidently felt the king had behaved unwisely by encouraging them to come back.

Next week will show the contrast between working and cosplay royals in the starkest terms. On Wednesday the king, Queen Camilla, and Prince William will go to Aberfan, the Welsh mining village where 144 people, 116 of them children, died when a coal tip collapsed onto the village school 60 years ago. It will be a somber, dignified occasion, and I will be there covering it (please tune in live on my YouTube and on Substack). You will see how different the tone is.

Nottingham made clear why the Sussexes can’t be given police security. If police outriders showed up with them at royal-coded events like Thursday’s, they would look exactly like members of the royal family again.

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It now seems obvious why they wasted so much money and energy trying to get the security back. It wasn’t to protect them in their private lives. They are totally fine. They go to the pub, do the school run, and their private security is more than adequate for all of that.

They wanted a police escort for the formal events they’ve always planned, to make it look like they are still members of the royal family, when they are not.

Want more royal gossip, scoops and scandal? Follow all Tom Sykes’ reporting at The Royalist on Substack or listen to The Royalist podcast on YouTube.

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Tom SykesEuropean Editor at Large

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