On Saturday morning in California, barely 20 hours after the Sussex office sent out a minute-by-minute rundown of everything Meghan and Harry were planning to do on their U.K. tour, news leaked to the Sun that, actually, Meghan and the kids might not be coming after all.
The reason the prince’s team gave for (maybe) pulling the plug is that they have been denied a security package by RAVEC.
However, Harry hasn’t had any security package for well over half a decade, and in the very same operational note the Sussexes sent out to the media on Friday, they themselves acknowledged that they did not have RAVEC security, and that they were going ahead with the tour anyway.
It was right there, in their own document, sent under their own authority. No security, no problem, we’re coming.
Whatever caused a switch to flip in Harry’s troubled head between Friday afternoon and Saturday, his response was a childish fit of self-pity. His voice was “breaking” on receiving the news in his Montecito mansion, I can reveal, and he then began raging, as usual, at the Palace functionaries he has previously described as “men in grey suits” for “keeping him” from his father.
It is now blatantly apparent what this whole exercise was about. The tour, the announcement that Meghan and the kids were coming, the whole carefully choreographed media rollout: it was a naked attempt to bounce his poor, weak, loving father into intervening in the government’s security decision-making to see his grandchildren—something Charles, to his eternal credit, has refused to do.
This is now the high-water mark of Harry’s emotional blackmail: to weaponize his father’s love for his son, to seek to exploit the King’s emotional vulnerability, his desire to heal his family. It is sickening to think it may all have been done to pressure him into intervening with the RAVEC committee on his behalf.
When it didn’t work, when Charles did not pick up the phone and override the security apparatus of the British state to give his boy what he wanted, Harry blew the whole thing up.
Harry is not getting security from RAVEC. He has been told this over and over again. The idea that the continuation of the status quo represents some sudden and dramatic development is absurd.
But the real victims here are the people Harry, 41, and Meghan, 44, say they were coming to support: the wounded veterans.
This tour was supposed to be about Invictus, wasn’t it? About the men and women who have sacrificed their bodies and minds for their country? Think about the people who have spent the past two years working to put the Invictus events together.
Think about the staff at the Chelsea Hospital who had prepared for a visit, who had organized their schedules and their patients and their plans around the expectation that the Sussexes were coming.
Think about every charity, every organization, every volunteer who rearranged their lives on the strength of Harry and Meghan’s promises, now revealed to be false and conditional on their own status. All of them, discarded because Harry didn’t get his security reinstated!
As Tom Bower said on my show the other day, the Invictus Games have become the Meghan Games. How right he is.
Either Meghan gets what Meghan wants, or everybody gets nothing.
Naturally, none of this is Harry’s fault. Bafflingly, it all seems to be the fault of the King’s private secretary, Sir Clive Alderton, an affable, public-spirited man trying to do his best to look after the interests of the King in the face of a series of horrific betrayals by a money-hungry, failing Sussex organization.
Alderton is probably on about £100k a year, tops. Harry and Meghan made over $100 million dollars by betraying their family.
Everything is always someone else’s fault. None of this should surprise us. We saw this pattern over and over again in “Spare.” When Harry decided to wear a Nazi uniform to a costume party, whose fault was it? William’s and Catherine’s, because they laughed at it.
When he shaved his head at Eton, whose fault was it that he looked ridiculous? William’s, for telling him it wasn’t a great idea.
When Harry wanted to wear a beard at his wedding, in violation of an Army regulation (that dates back to World War I, when facial hair prevented gas masks from forming a proper seal) and was told he couldn’t, who did he blame? William, naturally. Every single time, with every single grievance, it is never Harry’s fault.
And that is exactly what happened here. Harry knew he didn’t have security. He organized this entire tour anyway, spinning along everybody in the media, his charities, and in royal service for over six months, telling them it was happening, that they needed accommodation, that Meghan and the children were coming. Apartments were made ready. Plans were drawn up. People went out of their way to make it work.
I think people can see now why the British public, William, former employees and Netflix feel the way they do about the Sussexes. Harry has gone from a 70-plus per cent approval rating to the 20s. Meghan’s brand is utterly toxic. That is what happens when people watch you claim to care about wounded veterans while using them as leverage in a family argument about your status, and watch you shamelessly lecture people about service while treating every person and every institution around you as an utterly disposable means to an end, given none of the respect or consideration you so volubly demand for yourself.
This is a man who is willing to let down and betray every single person foolish enough to give him the benefit of the doubt (I include myself here in the matter of this tour, but, more notably, the veterans and the king) rather than accept a reality he doesn’t like.
Incredibly, Harry’s office is still saying the family might come to the U.K., potentially only for a single day (the duration of Harry’s own visit is unaffected). They are so shameless and cynical, that is a real possibility.
I think Harry is genuinely having some kind of breakdown and has lost touch with normal codes of respect for others, fed by his obsession with therapy (including the drug-based therapy he has boasted of using).
As for Meghan, she has shown us over the years who she is and that she delights in attention. I don’t think she will care too much how it is generated. The fact that her children are the ancillary weapon in this attempt to blackmail the British state is par for the course.
The people that this incident shames are the grasping, venal Sussexes themselves.
But this is also a grotesque humiliation for a king who has tried to be fair in a really difficult situation, at considerable personal cost to his relationship with his other son.
I said hosting them would end badly and that the king was making a mistake, but even I could not have predicted it would have turned into this circus before they had even landed.
Charles must now learn his lesson, like his other son has, and like the rest of us. The olive branch must be withdrawn. The insane and unpopular plan to bring the Sussexes back must be abandoned.
Sadly, knowing how much Charles wants this reconciliation, I have a fear it will not.
If the king still agrees to meet them after this display, or still elects to honor them with accommodation at a royal palace, I think his subjects will be utterly appalled.
Want more royal gossip, scoops and scandal? Follow all Tom Sykes’ reporting at The Royalist on Substack or listen to The Royalist podcast on YouTube.
