Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are coming home. Archie and Lilibet have been enrolled in British schools. A private residence is being readied for their arrival in a matter of mere days.
A friend of Harry’s told me back in March that their house search has been focused on the Cotswolds, specifically the countryside around Highgrove where Harry grew up, where he knows the people, the roads and even the more discreet footpaths, so let’s wait and see, but I suspect he won’t be far from Pa.
The return of the Sussexes is being presented in some quarters as a humiliation for the couple.
I’ve no doubt that the money is flowing less freely than before, but if your definition of failure is banking somewhere north of $100 million from Netflix and Spotify over six years for a vanishingly small amount of actual work and then returning to the English countryside with your royal titles and place in the line of succession intact with no official duties, being subject to no collective discipline and with a clean run past HMRC’s temporary non-residence rules, meaning that all those lovely gains realized while abroad, then it’s the sort of calamity I could easily live with.
This is a tremendous victory for Harry and Meghan, won at the expense of the dignity and credibility of the monarchy and the Prince and Princess of Wales, who must be feeling as if they have been kicked in the groin by the King.
It aligns with everything I have written on this Substack for the past year: that Charles prefers Harry over William, as a man is ruled by his heart rather than his head and as a monarch puts personal desires before the wellbeing of the institution he was entrusted to protect.
The Sussex return is a ghastly rerun of a film we have seen before. For three years Charles doggedly tried to rehabilitate his brother. Andrew, excluded by his mother, was waved into the Christmas church walk at Sandringham. He was at Easter services at Windsor. He was granted a special dispensation to wear military uniform at the vigil for his mother when he was no longer entitled to it. Sarah Ferguson was back at Sandringham and at the Coronation concert.
In the end Charles, weakened by cancer, had to bend to his heir’s will and Andrew was defenestrated.
A source who knew the late Queen’s thinking on these matters made a point to me recently that Elizabeth II was head of the family, but she was also head of an institution. When the interests of the two collided, the institution won, every time.
Don’t underestimate how much that cost her with Andrew, the source said. He was her favorite child. She would light up, the source said, when he walked into a room. And yet she stripped him of his patronages and his military titles, removed his HRH from public use and banished him from public life.
She saw the Harry problem in the same light. When the Sussexes sought the freedom to make money in America while retaining the trappings and access of royalty, she said: not bloody likely.
Elizabeth forbade the “half-in, half-out” arrangement to protect the reign of King William V from exactly what King Charles III is now enabling: the rival court of Prince Hal.
Keeping Harry in California was working as she intended until Charles started offering up tea and cake and apartments in Buckingham Palace. Six years of distance had done to the Sussexes what it did to the Windsors: the public had almost stopped caring.
Now Harry will have the patina of royalty without a single one of its obligations.
The King’s office is briefing the royal rota (the officially sanctioned press pool) that Charles only learned of Harry’s move on Sunday and was taken completely by surprise.
This is a frankly insulting claim.
Harry is fifth in line to the throne. He is obliged to inform the UK’s Home and Foreign Office of his movements and residence. His security arrangements, the subject of years of litigation and lobbying, are being reorganized around a permanent UK base. The government would have known.
In March, a friend of Harry’s told me he was looking for a house in the Cotswolds, with the process beginning in July last year. Then came tea at Clarence House. Then the oddly synchronized statements from father and son on everything from Ukraine to antisemitism. Then the offer of accommodation at Buckingham Palace on an ongoing basis. Then Highgrove in July.
And we are expected to believe that the King’s own grandchildren were being enrolled in English schools without the King being told? Pull the other one, Your Majesty, it hath bells on.
If the palace is telling the truth, Charles is a father held in such low regard by his own son that Harry did not even bother to mention he was moving his family back to the country Charles reigns over. Or the palace is being economical with the truth, in which case we are once again being misled about the real nature of Charles’s dealings with Harry, and the King does in fact want his son back, on any terms, with no apology for Spare, which painted Charles as a weak and absurd figure who carried his childhood teddy bear into middle age and depicted Camilla as cold, calculating, ruthless woman who wanted the crown and briefed against children to get it. It painted the Waleses as a dog-bowl-busting bully and a woman who made his wife cry. Not a word of it has been withdrawn, only doubled down on.
Which brings us to the real loser in all this.
Paul Burrell’s account has a young William putting his arms around Diana after she was stripped of her HRH and promising he would give it back to her when he was King. The jealousy running the other way is just as well documented. Harry’s own book recounts Catherine being forbidden from posing with a tennis racket in case she knocked Charles and Camilla off the front pages.
William has been loyal. He has never said a word against Camilla in public.
To be repaid like this?
Little surprise, perhaps, that one source says that the King and William’s relationship is “as bad as it has ever been.”
I think we now know why.
Want more royal gossip, scoops and scandal? Follow all Tom Sykes’ reporting at The Royalist on Substack or listen toThe Royalist podcast on YouTube.
