Real reason Prince Harry turned down King Charles’ offer for room at Buckingham Palace

The King offered the Duke of Sussex a room at Buckingham Palace, which he declined because it reportedly lacked one thing.

Last year the Times ran a piece entitled “London’s £1,000-a-night hotel boom”.

The moral of the story was that a nice, cushy stay in the British capital is not for the financially faint-hearted or those whose credit cards are anything less than platinum.

Thus, what would you say if someone offered you a free room in London? And not just any free room but a stay at the most famous address in all of Great Britain, thus saving loads of cash and ensuring one woke up to a view that no amount of money could buy?

The answer, it seems, depends on whether or not you are Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex.

It has now come to light that when King Charles offered his son a royal place to stay last month he was not suggesting a fold away sofa in some St James’s Palace broom cupboard but was willing to let him stay at Buckingham Palace.

But, Harry said no... “because of security concerns”.

King Charles reportedly offered Prince Harry a room at Buckingham Palace. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

You read that right. It wasn’t the shockingly low thread count of the Palace sheets that turned the duke off, or the fact that there was no dedicated yoga studio. Oh no. The reason that the 39-year-old currently making a TV series about horsey sport for Netflix declined a stay at the emblematic and literal headquarters of the British monarchy was “because of security concerns”.

Here’s the situation. Last month Harry returned to the UK for a St Paul’s Cathedral service to mark 10 years since that lightbulb pinged over his head in 2013 and he sketched out his idea for the Invictus Games. (The first Games was held in 2014 and over the course of the next decade the sporting event for wounded and serving veterans has only gone from strength to strength, changing an untold number of lives and proving the duke is good at more than just being able to carry large rounds of drinks through crowded pubs without slopping them once. Kudos.)

The question for a Britain-bound Harry was, where to stay? Last year Charles, in what looked like something of a retributive strop, turfed out he and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex from Frogmore Cottage. (Odd that his son spending 400-pages largely making him out to be a dud parent didn’t go down well with the King.)

So, it’s May. The duke is heading back to his homeland to think wistful thoughts as he sits in the traffic on the M4 out of Heathrow and he needs somewhere to rest his weary head and to recharge his Oura ring, which is when His Majesty stepped in. .

According to the Sunday Times’ Roya Nikkhah reported, the King had okayed Harry’s “request…to stay in a royal residence.”

Buckingham Palace, not for Harry.

Here comes the surprising bit: Harry then declined his father’s generosity because, as the Telegraph reported, “he would have been staying in a visible location with public entrance and exit points and no police protection”.

It’s here that we need to pause for a quick spot of caveat-ing, because the threats faced by the duke and duchess are not something that can or ever should be waved off.

After Harry wrote about killing 25 members of the Taliban in his book, Spare, the repressive regime denounced him, hardly the sorts you want as your enemies.

In November 2022, Neil Basu, the former counter-terrorism chief in the UK, revealed that Meghan had faced “disgusting and very real” threats from the far-right and that there had “absolutely” been genuine threats to the duchess’ life on multiple occasions which had lead to prosecutions.

“If you’d seen the stuff that was written and you were receiving it …you would feel under threat all of the time,” Basu said. “We had teams of people investigating it.”

In the Sussexes’ Netflix series, the duchess broke down discussing death threats she faced.

The possible danger the couple may be in is not up for debate, discussion or even polite disagreement, however, the Palace would surely have to be one of the most closely guarded and protected buildings in the UK aside from the Prime Minister’s residence, 10 Downing Street.

Harry and Meghan have faced very real threats to their safety. Picture: Daniel Leal/AFP

And was whatever hotel he ended up staying in that much more secure than the vast 700-room property? Would a five-star, ultra-luxurious joint, even one that caters to Middle Eastern sheikhs and sketchy oligarchs actually be safer than the most symbolically important building in the entire country?

To be fair, whatever sort of ring of steel the Palace might have in place, it’s not perfect. In late 2022, a man was handed a suspended prison sentence after scaling the fences to get into the Palace gardens twice and last year a man was sent to jail for nine years after having broken into Windsor Castle with a crossbow to kill Queen Elizabeth in 2021. (He was foiled far, far away from Her late Majesty too.)

Last year Harry told ITV’s Tom Bradby that he had “fled my home country with my wife and my son fearing for our lives”.

In court documents relating to his case against the Home Office regarding the removal of his taxpayer funded security, Harry said he had been “ambushed” by the paparazzi while in London in June 2021 for a charity event. He has told the court via statement that he wants his kids to “feel at home” in the UK but “that cannot happen if it’s not possible to keep them safe when they are on UK soil”.

Prince Harry and King Charles.

“I cannot put my wife in danger like that and, given my experiences in life, I am reluctant to unnecessarily put myself in harm’s way too.”

So, to summarise: Harry can attend the Super Bowl in the middle of Los Angeles or the Formula One in Texas or fly to Las Vegas for a Katy Perry concert in a packed casino but cannot stay at Buckingham Palace because of “security concerns”.

Meanwhile, there is another layer to all of this, to Harry living the suite life over a Palace stay, with implications that go beyond whatever damage he and his bodyguards might have done to his credit card bill. (Just imagine how many bags of mini-bar macadamias those beefy sorts would get through…)

As friends of the King pointed out to the Sunday Times’ Nikkhah, if the duke had chosen the palace it “would have made visiting his father logistically easier, given the competing pressures on Charles’s diary”.

Not only did the duke have to foot the bill for his time in London but His Majesty was not able to make time to see him. Ouch. Sounds like Harry really might have needed the consolations of the mini-bar after all.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.

Originally published as Real reason Prince Harry turned down King Charles’ offer for room at Buckingham Palace