Chaos at the King’s Court

Why the Palace Can’t Get Its Story Straight on Harry and Meghan

It’s hard to understand how such chaotic messaging could be coming out of Buckingham Palace this weekend unless you understand that Charles’ court is absolutely riven with factionalism.

When it comes to Harry, the easiest way to divide the court is into hawks and doves.

The hawks, led by Sir Clive Alderton, the King’s private secretary, believe that Harry’s behavior is unforgivable and that the monarchy will be harmed if Harry and Meghan are replatformed by the king. William sides with them. They are described by Harry as the “men in grey suits.”

The doves, led by former diplomat Theo Rycroft, Alderton’s deputy (who is expected to succeed him in the fullness of time) are aligned with the King’s wish to reconcile with Harry and let bygones be bygones in service of the Victorian myth of the model family.

The return of Harry and Meghan with their children in July is shaping up to be a disaster for both sides unless they can find some common ground on which to coalesce.

The story first broke via Bronte Coy, a reporter for News.com.au, who is also closely affiliated with the Sun (she was hosting the Sun’s podcast on Wednesday, on which I was a guest, and on which she broke the news).

Look at the original framing of Coy’s story and it pretty obvious where the story came from. The emphasis was on Harry’s “great sadness” at being unable to bring his wife and children to his homeland, his desire to show them where he grew up and introduce them to his wider family.

It was framed entirely in emotional terms, which is exactly the way the Sussex operation likes to present these things. There was no reference to what virtually everybody else immediately observed: that Meghan’s sudden volte-face seemed a bit desperate, and that without a $100m Netflix deal in her back pocket, she was now ready to forget the alleged horrors of her time in the UK, come back and make nice with the King and the institution in order to get the all-important photographs.

Then on Wednesday evening into Thursday, the Sun reported that the King had personally intervened to make the whole thing possible, offering his own resources to ensure the family’s security during a planned stay in July.

This was a “workaround” for the security problem that Harry has spent years litigating and losing in the courts: although RAVEC (the Royal and VIP Executive Committee, which includes representatives from the Home Office, the Metropolitan Police, and the Royal Household) has not yet decided whether or not to reinstate his automatic armed protection, Charles had stepped into the breach himself.

On Friday, the Telegraph filled in the detail. The workaround was that Harry and Meghan would be given a royal residence to stay in, placing them inside an existing security envelope. The security problem that Harry has described as an insurmountable obstacle to bringing his family to Britain had been solved, not by the courts or the government, but by his own father handing him a set of keys.

Basically, what we were getting was the doves’ and Harry’s take.

On Saturday, as public irritation built, the hawks in Charles’ court launched an extraordinary broadside at the doves in the pages of the Daily Mail.

A source [hawk] described by the paper as being close to the Palace called the trip “emotional blackmail” and an attempt at “manipulation” of the Royal Family.

There was, according to this source [hawk], “no meeting planned” between the King and the Sussexes. The King, the source said, could find himself “very busy” when the Sussexes are in town.

And then comes the key (hawk) quote: that the timing of the announcement “feels like emotional blackmail.”

This is exactly the same phrase that William’s allies have been using to me all week! Find it here and here if you doubt me.

They also allege that the king was “bounced” into meeting Harry when they had tea at Clarence House last September.

Let me be very clear about this: the King was not “bounced” into that meeting. He invited his son to Clarence House and served him his favorite chocolate biscuit cake.

You may remember the hawks didn’t much like that meeting at the time, briefing newspapers that Harry had mistaken a cup of tea for the “treaty of Versailles.”

This peculiar attempt to rewrite history and suggest that Charles was somehow tricked into having tea with his own child, and is now being tricked again into giving him a house, is part of a pattern that has become deeply unconvincing.

If you think someone is emotionally blackmailing you, you don’t tend to give in.

We may think that Harry is emotionally blackmailing Charles, William may think it, Sir Clive may think it, but Charles’s actions, by which I mean giving his son’s family the great privilege of royal lodgings when they are in the UK for their visit, show that he thinks nothing of the kind.

The fact that his own office is effectively briefing against him to the Mail – saying he is weak, being manipulated and the subject of emotional blackmail, is a graphic sign of the massive fissure the failure to coherently deal with the Harry issue is causing at the heart of this monarchy.

The other argument is that the King is trying to have his cake and eat it: whilst mending fences with his son by enthusiastically providing Harry and Meghan with status, security and photos (does anyone really believe a meeting won’t happen?), he is then ordering a cynical briefing operation to undermine his own actions so it looks like he has been “bounced” and manipulated into it by Harry.

As I said, I have been reporting for some time that the “emotional blackmail” framing originates primarily from Prince William’s circle.

Sources allied to William have told me directly that they regard the Sussexes’ use of the children as leverage in the security dispute as emotional blackmail. And if you read the Palace source quotes in today’s Mail carefully, the language maps almost exactly onto what I have been hearing from the Wales camp. That the William faction’s vocabulary is being deployed through ostensible “Palace sources,” is indicative of how much power William now has.

The reality is that the King’s Court is deeply divided on the Sussex question, and the division broadly mirrors the philosophical rift between Charles and William that I am writing about in my forthcoming book.

Charles, for all the frustrations and humiliations he has endured at Harry’s hands, is fundamentally a father who wants his family reunited. This is the same impulse that drove him to spend the first three years of his reign trying to rehabilitate Andrew, inviting him to Christmas, to Easter, to every royal event, until he was finally forced (kicking and screaming, largely under pressure from William) to expel his brother from the family.

Charles’s instinct is always towards reconciliation. It is part of what makes him a sympathetic figure as a man, and a strategically vulnerable one as a monarch.

William’s position is clearer, and far more in tune with public opinion. His household is smaller and more unified. His team reads social media, understands polling, and knows that the overwhelming majority of the British public thinks any reconciliation or re-platforming of Harry is a terrible idea. When Harry came to London last September for tea with Charles, William disappeared to the other end of the Kingdom. That was not a coincidence.

And then you have the courtiers. Harry thinks pretty dimly of Clive Alderton, the King’s principal private secretary, whom he described in Spare as “the Wasp” and whom he regards as the embodiment of the “men in grey suits” he believes have spent years working to undermine his relationship with his father.

Alderton sits on RAVEC, the very body that decides Harry’s security arrangements. Whether you view Harry’s suspicions as legitimate or paranoid, there are powerful figures within Charles’s own household who believe that reconciliation with the Sussexes is a strategic mistake.

There genuinely is a faction within the King’s court that does not want this reunion to happen, does not think it serves the institution, and is actively trying to shape the narrative against it. The “emotional blackmail” briefing in the Mail is evidence of that faction at work.

But in the end, the King’s will is done, and he is handing over a residence and thereby facilitating security. Harry has backed himself into a corner with his wild and public statements about his security, so he cannot bring Meghan and the children to Britain without a massive loss of face without a royal palace to stay in.

The entire visit is predicated on the King’s active cooperation, so it’s nonsense to claim at the same time that he is somehow against it.

A new poll published in the Telegraph today shows that support for the monarchy has dropped to 55%, a decline of eleven percentage points in just three years. Only 60% of the public thinks the King is doing a good job, compared to 71% who approve of William.

That gap tells you something important: people are not idiots. They know Charles made a terrible mess of the Andrew situation and that now he is making a mess of the Harry one.

The idea that you couldn’t get a cigarette paper between William and the King (I believe there is going to be a renewed push on the fiction that their relationship has never been better over the summer) and that they like nothing better than hunkering down together for brainstorming sessions together at Windsor is simply not credible.

The roots of this tension go back to William’s childhood and his feelings about the way his father treated his mother, Princess Diana. It’s well-documented. The Sussex question has brought their ifferences into the sharpest possible relief, because Charles and William want fundamentally different things.

This also explains the absurdity of the Palace’s positioning. In one breath, a Palace source tells the Mail that the trip is manipulative. In the next, another source says the King wants to see his grandchildren. In a third, the Palace insists there is “no meeting planned” and that the King might be “very busy.”

Do they really expect us to believe that Charles would do this much damage to his own reputation (providing a royal residence, facilitating security, effectively reversing the Frogmore Cottage eviction in all but name) and then not even meet the family?

That would be the worst of every possible outcome: all the political cost of enabling the visit, with none of the emotional benefit. It would be strategically insane.

Of course Charles is going to meet them. There will almost certainly be a photograph of the King with Archie and Lilibet. And that photograph will be the thing the Sussexes wanted all along, because it places them back inside the frame of royalty, back inside the institution they left, back inside the one thing that gives their personal brand any remaining commercial value.

One other point that people keep missing when they say it’s all just Sussex pin is that this is not a story about one trip in July. It is establishing the pattern for the rest of the King’s reign.

If Harry is given a royal residence this summer, what happens in September when WellChild comes around and he is back in Britain again? Does he stay in the same place? Does he leave his toothbrush there? Is it, you know, his place?

What about the Invictus Games in Birmingham next year? The soil is being prepared, the seeds have been planted, and the July trip is the first shoot. The infrastructure for regular Sussex visits to Britain is being put in place, and once it exists, it will be very difficult for a future King William V to dismantle.

The Sussexes went to California, monetized their position, made millions, launched a lifestyle brand and are still being invited back to stay in a royal palace.

Meghan has made it clear that the clothes she wears will be available for purchase through affiliate links on her website. The Sussex integration of commerce with the royal institution is happening in plain sight, and the King appears unwilling to make the hard calls that are necessary to prevent it.

The people around William understand how bad this is. Some people around Charles understand it too, which is why the briefings are so contradictory, and the hawks are trying to present the visit as something the King has been pressured into. The other faction is prepared to accept the political damage.

As a father, Charles’s behavior is perfectly understandable. Any grandparent would want to see children they have not seen in four years. But as a king, at a time when public support for the monarchy is declining at an alarming rate, it is a significant strategic error to be seen giving in to the very emotional blackmail your own courtiers are complaining about.