ROYAL SPARK

Harry and Meghan’s Mystery Billionaire Connection Finally Explained

Why would a random hedge funder give shelter to a renegade prince and his wife?

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The mystery behind Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s connection to their billionaire host has finally been solved.

Why a hard-nosed billionaire would offer a renegade prince and his wife an English hideaway has puzzled the public ever since Harry and Meghan returned to the U.K. over the summer.

Well, The Royalist can now reveal the answer: Harry and Meghan bonded with their current Cotswolds host after the private jet carrying them was hit by a “terrifying” lightning strike.

The strike happened on board the hedge fund manager’s Dassault Falcon 7X in September 2018, as the three of them plus the businessman’s model wife (who he has subsequently divorced) flew from London to Amsterdam for the celebrity-studded opening of that city’s branch of the members’ club Soho House. The hedge funder, who has been widely identified by other outlets but the Royalist is not naming, had been asked to give the couple a lift by a mutual acquaintance. They had not met before the trip.

A Cotswolds source told The Royalist that the terrifying incident “bonded” Harry and Meghan and the billionaire, on whose estate, The Royalist understands, the couple are now living. Meghan appears to have filmed the video she posted yesterday of Archie and Lilibet walking through a deer park on the property.

The lightning strike was reported by the Mail on Sunday three weeks after it happened, although the identity of the couple’s host has not been revealed until now. Harry and Meghan, who were then renting a holiday house at Great Tew, boarded the aircraft at London Oxford Airport, about twelve miles from their holiday home. En route, a bolt of lightning hit the nose cone of the $53 million jet, sending 30 million volts through the fuselage. Meghan, it emerged a few weeks later, was in the early weeks of her pregnancy with Archie.

The jet did not perform an emergency landing. It landed safely at Schiphol. A lightning strike has to be entered in an aircraft’s technical log and triggers a mandatory inspection before it can fly again, and in this case the checks and repairs kept the Falcon on the ground for more than a week; a plane-spotter at Schiphol photographed it days later with a brand-new white nose cone where the old gray one had been. The party had been due to fly home on the same aircraft two days later. Instead, the jet’s Swedish operator, Industriflyg, flew a second jet down from Stockholm to collect them.

Aircraft are struck by lightning regularly. A commercial airliner takes a hit on average once or twice a year and a Falcon 7X is built and certified to the same standard as an airliner: the skin of the aircraft acts as a Faraday cage, the bolt strikes at an extremity (usually the nose or a wingtip), the current runs over the outside of the fuselage and exits at the tail, and nothing passes through the cabin. The fuel tanks and the avionics are shielded accordingly.

On a wide-body airliner most passengers are a hundred feet from the strike point and notice, at most, a flash and a thud; many strikes are only discovered when the engineers find the scorch marks afterwards. However the effect is unpredictable and can still be terrifying: one Delta passenger on Reddit describes being hit descending into Atlanta: a “huge boom and white flash, screams, then silence from the cockpit;” he said he and his wife texted their children “I love you” and the pilot afterwards was “white as a ghost.”

In a small jet the experience is no more dangerous but it can be considerably more intense owing to the simple fact that in an eight-seat cabin, the nose is just a few feet from your seat. The flash fills the cabin and the bang is enormous. Harry, a former Army Air Corps Apache pilot and, ahem, “legend of aviation” (snigger) would doubtless have been aware what had happened but the others are likely to have received a tremendous shock.

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After landing, the couple went on to a three-day party at the new club, which doubled as Soho House founder Nick Jones’ 55th birthday celebration. Other guests included Eddie Redmayne, Jenna Coleman, Stanley Tucci, Michael McIntyre, and Nick Grimshaw. There was lobster spaghetti at Cecconi’s, a performance by Tinie Tempah, a boat trip on the canals, and treatments at the in-house Cowshed spa. (The couple declined the guided tour of the red-light district.)

Neither Harry nor Meghan has ever spoken publicly about the lightning strike, and Kensington Palace declined to comment when the Mail on Sunday reported it in October 2018.

The Sussexes’ office declined to comment.

Want more royal gossip, scoops and scandal? Follow a 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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