Prince Harry has doubled down, via a conveniently placed “friend,” 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 which ended as I exclusively revealed with the couple leaving their final event 15 minutes early enabling them to collect their children from school.
The question of whether or not 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 Sunday Times, a source described as a friend (but who anyone who has worked this beat for any length of time will recognize as 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.”
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.”
What we are looking at is a defiant rejection of the very modest attempt by the King, via his Lord Chamberlain, Lord Benyon, to clarify the couple’s position a fortnight after they landed back in the country. A letter was sent at the King’s direction (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, and it stated that the Sussexes’ position was “akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests.”
The couple went into paroxysms of fury when the letter came out. Their side pushed back, via the Telegraph, that 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 to them and generally an outrage. What this weekend’s briefing shows is that the anger has not gone anywhere. They did not accept what was said in the letter then, and they do not accept it now. They are determined to go on being perceived as current members of the royal family, which is precisely what the Palace does not want, because it leads 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, and she continued that work, maintaining their exile for the rest of their lives so they never could. The context was, obviously, very different (before the war the Windsors were attempting to set up an alternative power base that was sympathetic to the Nazis, and there is nothing remotely comparable going on here), but the principle was the same, and it 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 clapback to the Queen in 2021 when she told them it was not possible to step away from the work of the royal family and continue with the responsibilities and duties that come with a life of public service, as if a woman who had by then spent seven decades devoting herself to public service required a lecture on what public service was from Harry and Meghan. They have now rejected the King’s position in equally open terms, and the whole experience of Nottingham demonstrates what that rejection looks like in practice.
I was there on the ground, and it was shambolic. The first event, at the Community Recording Studio, was actually quite well organized, but there were almost no members of the public there. Some people had been invited to come, but in terms of actual passers-by turning up to see them, I counted perhaps half a dozen. The second event, at the Himmah Hub, was on a busy street, so plenty of people stopped to see what was going on when they saw the cameras, but they were not really there for the couple, and it all spilled chaotically onto the road. The third, at Epic Partners, was complete chaos, culminating in a teacher from the school next door coming out to beg the crowd to part so that the children could get out of the building. To imagine that happening at a royal engagement, to cause that kind of disruption to a local community and a school, would be completely unthinkable.
The walkabout at the first engagement, meanwhile, was more or less fake. Everyone taking part in it had been invited. There is video of mine online in which you can see the kids being brought in from the neighboring school and the young adults being brought in from the local Mencap, and in which you can also see that the rest of the street is entirely empty and the cameras have been positioned to capture the scene looking busy.
If they are going to insist on going around doing public events, presenting themselves as members of the royal family, when the King has specifically asked them not to represent themselves in that way, that is a pretty serious problem. Nor does the Sussex camp’s elaborate distinction between a member of the royal family who is part of the institution and a member of the royal family who is not cut through with an actual crowd. They are well aware that the idea that normal people standing on a street in Nottingham understand that distinction is complete fantasy. When I spoke to people there they all said the same thing: yes, Harry is a member of the royal family.
The Palace, from what I am hearing, is in a state of dismay. They do not know what to do. The feeling is that there is nothing further they can do without the King giving the authority to come down harder, to let it be known to the Sussexes that they are risking their titles. But the Palace is very nervous about even modest steps such as removing them from the royal website, because they do not want to look vindictive, and they are worried that it will stoke the flames and make things worse.
I actually don’t think you can make it worse. Harry and Meghan are profoundly unpopular. They are using the accidnent 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, and I think it exposes the foolishness of the olive branches the King has been extending to Harry over the past few years: inviting him back, the tea and cake, making Buckingham Palace available to him, the meetings, the phone calls. 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 would not have been very hard for the Palace to make it clear that charities and institutions who chose to embrace them and give them a public platform were acting against the interests of the King.
The King has not seen them since they came back to the United Kingdom, 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 absolutely incredible state of affairs. And yet, having been told earlier in the week that Meghan was not planning to do many more of these events, we now hear from the Sunday Times’ friend (and who else but their office would know this?) that “they might do one or two more things together before the end of the year.” Two more of these? When? I’ll bet: Remembrance, the most solemn fixture in the royal calendar. Something that disrupts the most sacred day of the royal family’s year? It is mind-boggling.
Then there is an extraordinary story in the Telegraph in which friends of Meghan accuse Netflix of “using” her to promote The Gentlemen by leaking her rumored casting. I can tell you for an absolute fact that her side hyped up The Gentlemen story. That is simply the fact of the matter. Why they want to drag that embarrassment back into focus in the same week as Nottingham is anyone’s guess, but it speaks to the same thing: an operation that is wafer-thin, totally overextended and chaotic, as anyone who watched the organization (or lack of it) in Nottingham on Thursday will have seen for themselves.
The truth is that anyone could have seen this coming down the track. I suspect that is what Sir Clive Alderton saw, and why he announced in July that he was stepping down as the King’s principal private secretary. He knew this was coming, and he evidently felt the King had behaved unwisely in encouraging them back. You can only look at the past week and say he was completely right.
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 be in Aberfan, the Welsh mining village where 144 people, 116 of them children, were killed when a coal tip collapsed onto the village school sixty 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, and these comments, make clear exactly why there is no way the Sussexes can be given police security. If police outriders turned up with them at royal-coded events like Thursday’s, they would appear exactly like members of the royal family again.
It is now very obvious to me why they wasted so much money and energy in their efforts to get the security back. It wasn’t to protect them in their private lives. They are totally fine. They go to the pub, they do the school run, and their private security is completely adequate for all of that. What they want is the police escort for the formal events they were always planning to do, to make it look as though they are still members of the royal family, when they are not.
