King Charles’ huge Meghan Markle, Prince Harry mistake exposed
King Charles’ double standard when it comes to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry has been exposed in new bombshell documents.
COMMENT
The Groundhog Day sequel is here. The stars? Gone are Bill Murray doing deadpan misanthrope and Andie McDowell as his drip of a love interest and all that grey snow.
Instead, step forward the leading man no one asked for, King Charles, trapped in a very bad, horrible day of his own.
Exactly this time in January 2023, a royal spare (Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex) was creating merry hell for Buckingham Palace, specifically in the form of his best-selling memoir My Todger, Myself. (Or, more accurately, Spare.)
And now, here we are, a year to the day later and we have another royal spare (Prince Andrew, the Duke of York; odious turnip of a man) creating not-so-merry hell for the Palace.
As the second week of Great Andrew Debacle begins, one person who would have every right to be spitting chips, or at least gluten-free soy slivers, is Harry.
Because the return of Andrew and his decades long willingness to sponge off a man who was subsequently convicted of underage sex crimes, has thrown into sharp relief the vastly different ways that the King has handled the crises of Spare One and Spare Two.
The Duke of Sussex is now a persona so non grata that the only way he can get inside Windsor Castle is probably by booking a general admission £33 ticket. While Andrew was most recently seen gobbling down thirds of plum pudding while dining only feet away from the King over the holidays.
Seems fair.
Charles seems to have spent the last year tap-dancing around the Andrew issue like a nervous chorus girl still learning the steps while simultaneously going full Raging Bull on Harry.
For example, within a day, reportedly, of the Duke of Sussex’s tell-all hitting shelves, the King expressed his extreme displeasure not through the power of interpretative watercolour
daubing or going on Lorraine but by promptly evicting the duke and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex from their Windsor Home Frogmore Cottage.
It was a swift, painful and public bit of what looked like punitive kingship.
And Andrew? What punishment is Andrew facing for bringing one of the most sordid and upsetting scandals in modern history down on the heads of the royal family? What price is he being forced to pay for having a dearth of scruples and good judgement and his willingness to spend holidays on three continents with a man that the world now knows abused and trafficked underage girls?
The King might write a strongly worded letter and ask him to consider moving into a smaller house. Golly, that’ll really show ‘em.
Last week, a New York judge unsealed nearly a thousand pages of court documents relating to financier and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The documents revived the mucky tale of the aimless duke, who despite being a full-time working member of the royal family in the aughties, still spent weeks staying at Epstein’s Miami mansion allegedly getting daily massages.
The documents were unsealed following a 2015 civil defamation case by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, an American-born Australian woman, who launched the action against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
The documents allege Prince Andrew groped a 20-year-old while at Epstein’s house in New York, as well as sexually assaulting Virginia Giuffre when she was 17 on three separate occasions.
Recent days have seen the 63-year-old royal reported to the Metropolitan Police for the accusation in the documents and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer having said that authorities should be willing to look at any allegations made about Andrew. The Met said it’s not investigating allegation against the Duke of York and would assess “new and relevant” information should it be brought to its attention.
So, what response have we seen from the Palace? ‘Sources’ and ‘insiders’ popping up in UK reporting claiming that the King is finally going to get around to seeing what he can do about winkling his brother out of Royal Lodge, his sumptuous $57 million, 31-room, 98-acre estate that is so large it has its own chapel in the grounds.
For years after his Newsnight interview debacle it was the overly-lenient late Queen who managed the Andrew situation, allowing her useless blob of a son to continue living a life of untold extravagance. With her death and the accession of Charles, it looked like a comeuppance was imminent, and that the King would acquire an artisanal, handmade broom to clean up the Yorkist Augean stables.
Except, he didn’t.
In the past 15 months, Harry and Meghan have been afforded one humiliation after another, from the Duke of Sussex being dumped in the third row at the coronation, to them being publicly blanked on their and their childrens’’ birthdays, to Harry being denied the chance to wear any sort of official garb or uniform for his grandmother’s funeral or father’s crowning, to them being turfed out of Frogmore.
And Andrew? In the same period of time, the duke was given the thumbs up to join the King and the royal family for the high-profile Easter service; permitted to wear his Order of the Garter robes to Charles’ coronation; given tickets to the Coronation Concert; has managed to keep the keys (so far) to Royal Lodge; was pointedly driven to church by William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales; is reportedly still being allowed to host a shooting weekend at Windsor; was welcomed to join the King and Queen for the formal swearing in of the new Dean of Windsor in November, driving himself there in his $420,000 Bentley; was still receiving meals sent over from Windsor Castle; and handed a starring role in the royal family’s Christmas Day walkabout for the second year in a row- even though the world knew that this Epstein document dump was incoming.
Charles has seen fit that to ensure that Harry and Meghan are being forced to take their lumps for having staged an on-camera coup while Andrew is pottering around Windsor in a car that costs only marginally less than the average UK house price (truly) and lint-rolling his Garter robes, his membership of the most prestigious and hallowed chivalric order never in doubt.
The vast difference in the approaches that the King has taken when it comes to handling his son versus his brother would seem to suggest that in His Majesty’s book, betraying secrets and badly embarrassing the royal family on Netflix and in airport bookshops are far greater sins.
(To be clear, Andrew has always vehemently denied Virginia Giuffre’s claims, made in a New York civil court case, that he sexually abused her on three occasions nor has there ever been
any suggestion that the duke could be charged with any crime.)
Sure, we are now seeing reports suggesting that Andrew might finally be about to get the Harry treatment and that Charles will move to turf him out of Royal Lodge and maybe even, golly gosh, make him pay for his own security.
The Daily Mail has reported that the unsealed court documents have ‘crystallised’ the King’s “determination to solve the ‘Andrew problem’ decisively.”
Really? A ‘Prince of the Blood’ being sued in a civil court for alleged sexual abuse and paying out $22 million to settle the case wasn’t enough? Or Andrew giving an hour-long interview in which he claimed he didn’t sweat and making himself out to be the real victim? Or that 85 per cent of the British population, according to the most recent YouGov polling, think that Andrew is a boil of a human being?
The King’s efforts to sort out the ‘Andrew problem’ so far are pathetic.
Moreover, his it is now making the King’s handling of the Sussexes look petty and retributive while betraying just how weak he has been on the Duke of York, choosing filial appeasement over leadership.
In the original Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character is doomed to keep repeating the same day and night until he makes things right. Maybe someone at Balmoral should hastily hook up the VHS and put the 1993 hit on for His Majesty for some informative after-dinner viewing. There’s a lesson in there that a certain someone with a crown badly needs to learn.
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.
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