The Sussex Circus Comes to Town

Is there any plan, project, or engagement undertaken by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex that doesn’t boil over into chaos? For a few blessed weeks, there seemed to be the possibility of royal family serenity. On a visit to England next week to promote the 2027 Invictus Games in Birmingham and to visit their various charitable causes, Prince Harry and Meghan would bring their two children for the first time since 2022 to visit their grandfather, who has graciously offered them a royal residence, which automatically comes with police security. There were many guessing games about which royal residence was offered up for this jolly jaunt, in which Prince Archie, age seven, and Princess Lilibet, age five, would finally be allowed to forge a relationship with their kingly grandpa. Thus far, the faces of Archie and Lilibet have been hidden from the public in their parents’ social media posts. Tactically speaking, for the Sussex children’s faces to be first seen in a royal setting frames them forever as the monarch’s grandchildren.

And then, as usual, it’s all threatening to go tits up.

credit: Meghan Markle/Instagram

As if he has learned nothing in the last six years of battling with Ravec (the Royal and VIP Executive Committee that decides which personages in public life receive an official, taxpayer-funded security detail). Harry went off like an IED when, once again, he was denied official police protection for the family and, as a source close to Harry briefed, the rug “was pulled out from under their feet at the 11th hour.” What rug? The only rug under the Sussexes is a flying carpet on which the two of them circle the globe in a cloud of persistent delusion. Harry is apparently “distraught“ at the development, which isn’t a development at all but the same stance Ravec has taken for the last six years, and was under review again. Until Ravec gives another verdict, the status quo is unchanged.

If Harry thought that bringing his children would force Ravec’s hand he was, as he is so often, hopelessly misguided. Right now, the palace is in a crouch position about increased scrutiny of royal finances, thanks to the Andrew Windsor-Mountbatten scandals. King Charles made an announcement last week that he would henceforth be declaring his tax payments, which allowed the public to know he shelled out £12.9m in 2024-25. Shortly afterwards, Prince William, who, unlike Charles, had declined to reveal what he pays in taxes on his vast Duchy of Cornwall earnings since he became Prince of Wales, rushed out an announcement of his own tax payment of £7.76m. I am told he did so in a sullen frame of mind, as he is at odds with his father on this issue. Even as William positions himself as the monarchy’s future modernizer, “transparency” for William is a word of holy dread, as it is for most people in public life who pretend they are in favor of it. And, just as William feared, ”transparency” about his tax payments generated a rash of headlines informing the public of the uncomfortable fact that the strenuously normie champion of the homeless, who pointedly arrived at his interview with the The Reluctant Traveler on an electric scooter, is a billionaire country landowner. In the paranoid atmosphere of waiting for more Andrew shoes to drop, Ravec and the royals themselves are terrified of public blowback if taxpayers are asked to fund protection for the House of Sussex. The issue is not a hill that either the king or the government wants to die on, and who can blame them?

Shooting from the Hip

The baffling thing about both Harry and Meghan is their repeated tendency to make premature announcements before the underlying facts have been nailed down. Indeed all their troubles of the last six years have stemmed from their magical thinking that something they want will become instant reality, starting with Megxit itself. It was their reckless decision in January 2020 to publish on the Sussex Royal website their bombshell announcement that they were exiting the royal family on the dubious proposition of becoming adjunct royals with lucrative side-hustles, listing terms which had never been presented or agreed to by the palace - rather like demands for a job they hadn’t been offered - which created all the bitter mayhem that followed. Indeed even their chosen brand title, Sussex Royal, was a rude assumption of a prerogative that required royal approval, something they had failed to seek, then suffered the embarrassment of having permission denied and set off scrambling for the Archewell rebrand. They even managed to make the naming of their daughter into a red-faced debacle. The new parents claimed they had received Queen Elizabeth’s full blessing to give their baby daughter her most private nickname Lilibet. But the truth is, they did not ask her, they told her. The cornered queen was “as angry as I’d ever seen her,” according to a royal aide quoted by biographer Robert Hardman, and she allowed the palace press office to do something rare, deny the Sussex’s version of events point blank to the BBC. And so it has continued. Remember the bollixed-up 2024 launch of Meghan’s lifestyle brand with the uncleared title of American Riviera Orchard that had to be rebooted into As Ever ?

The Spencers are a hot-headed clan. You only have to visit the family home of Althorp to see the fluorescent red beards of his ancestors hanging from the walls and read their history of overmighty power grabs to see where Harry’s impetuous temperament originates. When it’s matched with Meghan’s inept strategic instincts which, Harry alas, thinks are genius moves in the entertainment industry big league, it turns into excruciating serial blunders.

What is genuinely sad is Harry’s belated discovery that the one thing he does really well is what he was born to do – and rejected. Unlike Meghan, he really doesn’t want to be a Hollywood hot shot or an amorphous influencer in designer clothes. As one of his ex-employees told me, “he just wants to do public service and be paid for it,” which, in essence, is the definition of a member of the monarchy. I’m told he misses his rugged army and country-based friends who could not be further from Montecito’s precious ethos. Harry doesn’t understand that the family conflict has turned into something more lethal for him than anger — a cold war. Except for his father, who would dearly love to reconcile with his younger son, his relatives have moved on. Earlier this month, there was allegedly no invite for Harry to the wedding of his cousin, Princess Anne’s son Peter Phillips, who had played such a critical consoling role for Harry at Balmoral when Diana died. A person close to Harry told me he doesn’t just desperately miss his father and understandably want his children to know him. He also very much misses William, the only other person who knew what it was to be Diana’s son. Too late. An old friend of William’s shared with me that, whenever he spent time with him in the years since Megxit, William’s sense of betrayal by Harry was a constant theme but, during a recent long conversation, Harry’s name never even came up.