How the royals plan to survive ‘the Sussex circus’
The Queen will speak to Harry — but will the Sussexes’ whirlwind already have blown itself out by then?
The sense of anger and bewilderment unleashed by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in the wake of their US television interview last week may best have been summed up by a royal insider struggling to respond to a crisis that Buckingham Palace spent much of the past year desperate to avert.
“The question nobody seems able to answer is what are the Sussexes trying to achieve with this?” the Palace source asks.
“We don’t know what they want. If you think the Queen is great, then why are you trying to trash everything she and the family stands for?”
Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan and Harry brought the 21st century crashing through the gates of medieval castles and palaces, pitting the mystique of the monarchy against the boundless reach of modern celebrity.
It was not the age-old concerns of rank, title or the size of the royal purse that resonated most in their brutal remarks but the newer, more dangerous assertions about racism and mental health that now confront the House of Windsor.
All this has unfolded while the Duke of Edinburgh, hospitalised 26 days ago at the age of 99, awaits his release after a heart procedure. The fury within the palaces was palpable at the painful timing of what appalled courtiers described as “Soprah” or “the Sussex circus”.
A treasonous act
One of the Queen’s closest aides described Harry and Meghan’s behaviour as “verging on treasonous”. Another Palace source spoke of “an incredible act of disloyalty” and called the uproar “manna from heaven for republicans”.
Yet behind the widely shared concern at the anguish these upsets must have been causing the Queen, there were signs of contrasting approaches over her family’s response to Harry and Meghan’s claims that a member of the royal family had wondered about the colour of their baby’s skin and that the duchess had been driven to suicidal thoughts. It was not until Tuesday night (UK time) — more than 36 hours after the initial US broadcast — that the Queen’s formal statement was published.
In 61 words, the monarch offered a conciliatory and exquisitely diplomatic reply that expressed sadness for the difficulties suffered by her grandson and his wife, concern for the issues they had raised — “particularly that of race” — and promised they would be taken very seriously.
The only hint of a rebuke was the Queen’s remark that “some recollections may vary”, obliquely suggesting that others with knowledge of the incidents cited by the Sussexes might dispute the couple’s version.
Tackling race head on
Almost all members of the royal family and their advisers agreed the race claims should be specifically addressed in a response. “The younger (in the family) you are, the more you take this view; the older you are, the further away you are from it. Everyone knows this is not for the next five days, it’s for the next 50 years,” says someone who was involved in the discussions.
Two days later, the Duke of Cambridge bluntly declared during a visit to an east London school that “we are very much not a racist family”. He was wearing a mask, so it was impossible to see if his teeth were clenched.
In those two brief but contrasting responses to a two-hour interview, the generational contrast was writ large between a royal tradition of saying as little as possible and a modern tendency to have their say. There were some areas of the Queen’s response, a Palace source acknowledged later, “where members of the household felt there could have been a stronger, firmer rebuttal. But it is the Queen’s family, after all”.
If the Queen and her senior advisers had hoped the row might settle down after her public commitment to dealing with Harry and Meghan “privately”, they were quickly disappointed.
Within hours of the Palace statement, Meghan’s friend Janina Gavankar, who had watched the interview with the Sussexes in California, appeared on ITV’s This Morning show with Meghan’s blessing. She arrived with a quiver of darts — and sprayed them in all directions.
She said the Sussexes were “feeling free” after spilling their beans. As for the Queen’s statement, she added: “Although their recollections may vary, ours don’t, because we lived through it with them. And there are many emails and texts to support that.”
In a flash, the Palace’s longstanding policy of refusing to engage publicly with critics made perfect sense. It responded publicly to Meghan and Harry, and good intentions got them nowhere. “There’s a clear threat that if you challenge (Harry and Meghan’s) narrative, they’ll release more (allegations),” a Palace source says.
Rumbling away in the background are equally inflammatory allegations of bullying made by former members of the Sussexes’ staff. “A lot could come out in the wash that hasn’t been told,” one royal source warns.
Meghan and Harry have strongly denied the allegations, which appear yet another obstacle to any kind of negotiated reconciliation.
In short, what a mess they are all in. It’s tempting to conclude that honour, prestige and tradition are diminished weapons in the age of Twitter, TikTok and Oprah. That spells trouble for an institution that relies on echoes of a glorious past to preserve its place in the hearts of Britons. No one under the age of 69 has known another monarch. Elizabeth’s reign has lent Britain a stability that was sorely tested by the abdication crisis of 1936 and World War II.
“There’s still an Edwardian character to so much protocol and routine,” one source says. “They still migrate from residence to residence, castle to palace, as they did with Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.”
It was surely no surprise that Meghan should have stumbled upon entry to such a fabulous but regimented family, yet what she and Harry have done, consciously or otherwise, is pick the worst possible moment for the monarchy to challenge its regal heritage.
Operation Protect Elizabeth
Until last week, the rest of the Queen’s family and staff had one objective: to protect her from any kind of harm. Senior courtiers are concerned that the Oprah affair has placed huge pressure on the Queen and have privately made clear that Prince Charles and Prince William cannot expect her to thrash out a rapprochement during a video call to California. The Palace has indicated she will speak to Harry and Meghan imminently.
“She’s a very alert and on-the-ball 94-year-old but she is 94,” a source close to the Palace says.
“She’s going to be speaking to Harry but there is a recognition that it isn’t going to be her brokering a peace between William and Harry.”
As a senior aide puts it: “The Queen will lead, looking at the issues, supported by the family.”
In moments of constitutional crisis, there exists a “golden triangle” of politically astute advisers who go into action to ensure the monarchy and the government are on the same page. They are currently the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Edward Young; Simon Case, the cabinet secretary; and Boris Johnson’s principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds.
Links are particularly close at present because Case used to work in Kensington Palace as William’s private secretary. This time David Porter, the chief of staff at Lambeth Palace, was also part of the discussions, thanks to Meghan’s startling but inaccurate claim that Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had staged a secret wedding three days before the world watched her get hitched to Harry at Windsor. The first ceremony was merely a private exchange of vows.
The dead bat strategy
The royal household, No 10 and Lambeth Palace agreed that the best thing to do was run what is known to cricketers as a “dead bat” strategy, minimising their response so as not to fuel the furore.
Johnson repeatedly declined to make any comment and ministers were told to do the same. Lambeth Palace refused to correct Meghan’s mistake about the fake wedding, leaving Team Sussex to clarify their error.
The dead bat strategy was derived from a view long harboured by the Queen, other senior royals and courtiers that the handling of Diana, Princess of Wales’s death in 1997 had only served to intensify public controversy.
While then British prime minister Tony Blair is seen in political circles as having “saved the monarchy” by urging the Palace to do more to show it cared after her death, his decision to describe Diana as “the queen of hearts” was seen by the royals as throwing petrol on the fire.
“The Queen has never forgiven Blair and nor have the others,” says one source close to senior figures in the royal household.
“They accept that they should have come down from Balmoral sooner and that lessons needed to be learnt, but they think Blair dialled the (Diana) temperature up, not down. They were determined not to do that this time.”
Instead, the source adds, “They wanted to dead-bat it until it falls off the agenda.”
As the wording of a Palace statement was under discussion on Tuesday, a shell-shocked Prince Charles, 72, carried out two engagements in London, the first at a vaccine pop-up clinic at Jesus House, a black majority church in Brent Cross. This was no scrambled response to racism allegations: it was planned long before Oprah, as were other forthcoming visits to minority communities.
Charles: I did fund Harry
Hours earlier, Harry had described his relationship with his father as “a lot of hurt” and how he felt “really let down” when Charles at one point “stopped taking my calls” and “financially cut me off”. When Charles was asked by a reporter what he thought of the interview, he played the deadest of bats, but a source close to him says: “He’s very upset and cut up ... but he’s keeping his private life private and getting on with the job. It was a surprise to hear he’d been cut off, given the bank statements.”
On a point of fact, the source adds, Charles continued to provide Harry and Meghan with private financial support after their move to America, “while they found their feet”.
A friend of the prince was less diplomatic: “Harry said his father financially ‘cut him off’. What f..king hypocrisy. When Harry and Meghan left last year, they wanted to become ‘financially independent’.”
Other aides apparently unaware of the dead-bat strategy disputed the Sussexes’ recollections — and a string of ‘she cried, no, she cried’ disputes unfolded.
Meghan told Oprah that a widely reported story of her making Kate cry over a flower-girl dress disagreement days before her wedding was the “turning point” when “everything changed”. She said “the reverse happened”, that Kate had made her cry and suggested that Palace aides deliberately failed to correct the story. Royal sources insisted last week that their “recollection” of the event had not changed.
Meghan said that while feeling she “did not want to be alive any more” during her pregnancy because of the pressures of royal life and negative media coverage, she sought advice from the Palace HR department about professional help, but was told they could not assist because she was not “a paid employee of the institution”. She also said she later sought help from a friend of Diana’s, believed to be the psychotherapist Julia Samuel, who is Prince George’s godmother.
“The HR team are slightly incredulous about that,” says a Palace source. “Why would you not contact Tim Evans (apothecary to the Queen) or the medical household?”
A friend of Samuel’s said: “Why does Meghan claim that she could get no help with her mental health, a very serious matter, when Harry speaks with Julia all the time? It’s a sad scenario.”
Further upsetting household staff was their inability to reply to the Sussexes’ criticisms. Bound by the discretion that royals depend on, “they feel frustrated their story is not being told”, a royal source says.
Another Palace insider adds: “People in the households feel they can’t say anything because if they do, they’ll be accused of not taking the issues of race or mental health seriously. They are aggrieved and bewildered because they know what they know, but they are being portrayed in a way that they don’t recognise — as racists.”
Courtiers left fearful
Senior royal sources say the Sussexes’ portrayal of “the institution” has created “a culture of fear” among royal staff. “There are people, including young women in the households, who are now feeling nervous and afraid about going out on (royal) engagements because of what might happen due to what has been said. Staff are fearful of attacks on social media and what bomb might land next.”
Another source says: “Harry was worshipped by most people in the household; now most people are horrified by him.”
Meghan also told Oprah that aides had once advised her not to go out for lunch with friends to minimise her exposure. A senior aide says Meghan’s claim was an outrage. When her mother, Doria Ragland, was over for Archie’s birth, she was in Windsor keeping a low profile. “It was Meghan who wouldn’t let her mother go into Windsor,” they claim.
Those who defended the Windsors include Peaches Golding, who as the lord-lieutenant of Bristol has worked with members of the royal family for years. Golding, previously appointed by the Queen as the city’s first black female high sheriff, told the BBC: “I have never worked with a kinder, more respectful group of people. I have never encountered racism at all.”
Neither side can hope to emerge well from this kind of carping crossfire. The palace appears to have been betting that Harry and Meghan will eventually run out of interesting things to say and their television exposure will soon be reduced to worthily “woke” documentaries. Certainly the royal exiles’ poll ratings have nosedived, although their support among the young remains strong.
A source close to the royal household says: “There are now a limited number of claims in their arsenal. Once you’ve accused people of racism and ignoring a suicidal woman, what else can they say? There will be a law of diminishing returns for Harry and Meghan.”
That may not happen as quickly as the “golden triangle” of advisers expects. The relationship between the occupants of Buckingham Palace and the royal residents of Montecito, California, seems certain to continue enthralling or appalling a wide audience for some time, not least because Meghan is pregnant with the couple’s second child, a girl.
One royal source concludes that the Oprah interview “has done real harm to the family, the individuals, the institution and the country”.
In the battle between an ancient institution and its most modern members, Buckingham Palace may need to adjust its reliance on mystique, tradition and the popularity of the Queen.
The royal aide concluded: “The institution needs to look hard at itself and listen.”
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