The photographs from Leicester Square might look, at first sight, like a pretty standard royal engagement: the Prince and Princess of Wales walking into a movie premiere alongside Tom Cruise, still one of the biggest movie stars on the planet at the ripe young age of 64.
But given the incredibly fraught situation inside the family generated by Prince Harry’s return to the United Kingdom, nothing is that simple. And if you compare this appearance with the Duke of Sussex’s fortnight of big “public engagements,” well, Harry’s events look pretty boring.
The big celebrity he was able to land for the inaugural Invictus Spirit Awards last week? James Corden, who opened the evening with a joke about Mounjaro. Corden is a famous name, but his fat jokes are hardly a match for an elegant Tom Cruise, are they?
Even more fascinating is that, when Harry turned up at a school in Birmingham last week to launch an Invictus education program, The Royalist has been told by people there that their overall impression was of a room full of kids who had only a slight idea who Harry was—or what he was doing there.
Harry and Meghan only have one weapon over William and Catherine, which is the ability to distract. Whenever the Waleses are doing something, the Sussexes can do something else, or create some conflict. But it would be a huge mistake to disregard the massive, structural, systemic advantage William and Catherine have, which is that one day they are going to be King and Queen.
Ultimately, if you are a big, powerful movie star, who do you side with? The King’s court, or the knock-off version being run out of a pub in the Cotswolds?
It is in moments like this that you see Harry’s court for what it is. For all its ability to disrupt and capture headlines, it is a tiny skeleton operation with very few staff, very little logistical organizing power, and fundamentally at risk of biting off more than it can chew.
The thing about a divorce, royal or otherwise, is that sooner or later everybody has to pick a side.
Who have Harry and Meghan got? Well, they’ve got Ellen DeGeneres, whom Meghan went for a coffee with the other day. And it looks very much to me like they are trying to get Charles Spencer.
Harry and Meghan have spent the past week conspicuously aligning themselves with the Earl. There was the swan emoji that As Ever posted on Sunday, in the very week that the biggest royal story on the planet was Spencer’s incredibly negative book, Swan Song.
Then we had Spencer telling People magazine that Harry was totally fine with the book. Would Spencer have left himself so exposed to a credibility-denting denial was he not sure Harry wouldn’t dissent? I doubt it.
When you put last night’s pictures next to that, the strategy makes perfect sense, because it makes you realize that Charles Spencer is the only game left in town for the Sussexes.
Much of Swan Song is a statement of Spencer’s own superiority. How marvelous and brilliant and clever he thinks he is, and how dense and superficial the House of Windsor is. There is no doubt Spencer felt belittled by them, felt that the treatment he and his sister got from the Palace was not befitting his status, and has written this book, at least in part, to settle that score.
That makes him a very attractive target for Harry and Meghan, the king and queen of grievance, hunting for another person who feels he has nothing to lose by attacking the royal family.
Harry’s whole argument was that he and Meghan were going to build something more compassionate and more modern than the stuffy old institution that couldn’t contain them.
It is actually pretty pathetic when you think about what they had, what they could have been, and what they threw away.
Meanwhile, the future King and Queen have the great advantage of never having to consider a profit motive. So there they are, being walked up the stairs by Tom Cruise, with Diana’s pearls in Catherine’s ears. They have the actual, physical inheritance, worn in public, on the biggest red carpet of the year, by the woman who will one day be Queen.
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.
