Harry’s Enemies in King Charles' Court Have Lured Him Into Their Trap

Andrew just got purged. Harry is next on the list. He needs to stop reacting every time his enemies prod him if he is to preserve his fragile reconciliation with his dad.

I said in my Live yesterday—recorded in the admittedly unsatisfactory lighting conditions of the gloaming outside Slane Castle in Ireland and with way too many ‘ums’—that I believed that the palace had set a trap for Harry when insiders planted a story in the Sun saying that Harry’s meeting with his father was a distinctly chilly affair, more like an official audience than a father-son reunion.

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I noted that I felt Harry had walked right into its jaws by taking the bait, and issuing one of his trademark angry outbursts at palace operatives, accusing the “men in grey suits” of leaking “pure invention” to the media with the aim of “sabotaging any reconciliation between father and son.”

I suggested that Harry was pointing the finger at his great foes in Charles’ office, Sir Clive Alderton (“the wasp”) and Tobyn Andreae.

Live with Tom Sykes

I also said that having provoked a response, anti-reconciliation courtiers would now be able to say that Harry had betrayed his promise not to re-escalate tensions with the family or stoke controversy around the September 10 meeting which saw Harry meet the King for “a private tea” at Clarence House, the first time that the King had met with his younger son for 19 months.

And lo! The trap just snapped shut. My point has been proven (rather quicker than I anticipated, I must confess) by a wounding story in the London Times saying that “the palace” (the Times’s careful choice of words) has been left “saddened and perplexed” by Harry’s claim that “the institution” (more careful syntax) is “sabotaging” his attempts to reconcile with the King.