One might have expected Harry to have consulted his father when it came to going into business himself. Duchy Originals had been bailed out by Waitrose when the company got into difficulties after the 2008 financial crash. And, like the initiation of court cases, the starting of any commercial activities by a member of the royal family required liaison with Buckingham Palace – depending, again, upon the ultimate approval of the Queen herself.
But as 2019 wore on, family consultation was ceasing to be Harry’s style. The prince was sensitive to the coldness that his father and brother had displayed during controversies like ‘Forces for CHANGE’, and he was even more suspicious of the palace aides who handled the family’s emails – their contents seemed to get leaked so frequently to the press. The young couple became more and more determined to find some new way ahead for themselves, and that simply increased family indignation when their activities on the blindside were discovered.
Listed under Class 45 in Sussex Royal’s June 2019 trademark applications, for example, were ‘social care services, namely organising and conducting emotional support groups; counselling services; emotional support services; provision of personal support services to help, care for and support persons in need … Mentoring and personal care services.’
Duchy Digestives were one thing – but Sussex Royal personal therapy sessions? It was beyond parody.
The family finally hit back. As the Christmas holidays approached, Harry and Meghan snubbed the Queen for a second time. They had not gone to stay at Balmoral with her in the summer, and they decided that they couldn’t join her at Sandringham for the New Year break either. In August their excuse had been Archie. Now they didn’t even bother with an excuse.
‘Spending [Christmas] at Sandringham surrounded by members of the royal family,’ explained Scobie and Durand, ‘did not sound like a holiday.’
That suited Charles and William just fine – and the same went for the Queen. As we approach the climax of this family crisis, we must imagine a grandmother who was deeply torn by the bitter divisions she could see developing in her clan. Elizabeth II had always had a soft spot for Harry, and she had been delighted by the arrival of Meghan whose personal energies seemed to complement her grandson’s so well. As Head of the Commonwealth and reigning over an ever more multicultural society in Britain, the Queen had especially welcomed the exciting new dimension that a mixed-race recruit brought to the Windsor identity – and we have seen how Elizabeth herself had spotted when things were going wrong. At the beginning of 2019 she had brought back Christopher Geidt to work with David Manning on devising the fresh Sussex strategy that followed her own Malta model.
But there were some matters on which Elizabeth II would not compromise – and chief among them was the authority of the crown. By failing to seek permission for their lawsuits, Harry and Meghan had trespassed dangerously on that authority, and now their undisclosed plans to market merchandise under their own royal trademark took their rebellion one step too far. To commercialise the crown required the crown’s consent – and the Sussexes had not sought that.
It has become normal in the Queen’s Christmas broadcast for the sovereign to deliver her annual message of goodwill from behind a desk on which recent photos of her family have been placed looking outwards so that they can be studied by her audience. Harry and Meghan had featured smiling in a silver frame in 2018. But there would be no sign of them in 2019, nor any mention of the name of Sussex – since that name was, apparently, now to be used to sell merchandise for which permission had not been asked from the Queen.
Who does and who does not feature on the royal Christmas desk has always been like the changing panorama of faces on the historic balcony of Moscow’s Kremlin. It showed who was in favour and who was not – and at Windsor in December 2019 this even extended to babies.
It was unheard of for the royal Christmas desk not to feature a cosy image of the latest royal grandchild or great-grandchild. But in 2019 there was no sight of Archie. A brief video clip flashed onscreen during the broadcast showing the Queen and Doria cluck-clucking over the little boy, but there was no name check. The Queen simply acknowledged the arrival of her great-grandchild in passing, without mentioning his name or his parents, then moved straight on to the baby who really mattered – the Christ child and his entrance into Bethlehem.
Take a second look at the epigraph at the head of this chapter. No, I will save you the trouble, here it is again: ‘Prince Philip and I have been delighted to welcome our eighth great-grandchild into our family.’ Study it closely – do you detect any trace of the word ‘S-U-S-S-E-X’ in this? Any H-A-R-R-Y or M-E-G-H-A-N, let alone the name of the little boy himself? This is the Queen’s only reference to the new arrival and his parents in her 2019 address to the world – an anonymous ‘eighth great-grandchild’. The Sussex family had been ‘non-personed’ as effectively as the Soviets non-personed Trotsky and Khrushchev – another charming custom, of course, that had been developed by the Kremlin.
Elizabeth’s beloved father King George VI; her husband Prince Philip, recently retired from royal duties; the smiling William, Kate and their three little Cambridges; plus Prince Charles with Camilla beaming beside him – all in different frames. That was the limit of the images to the right of the Queen’s shoulder in front of the Christmas tree in December
