‘I put my arm around my brother all our lives,’ he said, ‘and I can’t do it any more. We’re separate entities.’
The inference of this apparently kindly remark was that William could not deal with his brother as a separate entity – or did not choose to. The new Meghan-fired Harry clearly flummoxed him. William’s ‘arm around my brother’ – his lifelong care for Harry – had always been based on some element of control, and that had now surely vanished.
William maintained his distance for the Sandringham Summit. The Queen had suggested that the family should gather for lunch before their big pow-wow in the library that afternoon, but he refused his grandmother’s invitation. He would obviously turn up at 2 p.m. for the meeting, he said, according to one source, but he only wanted to talk business. The prince himself has not confirmed his friends’ speculation that William was so furious with his younger brother that he would not be able to endure the hypocrisy of smiling at him over lunch.
When a story broke in that morning’s Times, however, that Harry regarded himself ‘as having been pushed away from the royal family by the “bullying” attitude of his brother, the Duke of Cambridge’, the two princes reacted in concert at once. In a matter of hours, before lunchtime that Monday, their two press offices had got together to put out a joint statement angrily refuting the allegation and making it clear that, on this issue, the brothers stood side by side.
‘Despite clear denials,’ ran the rebuttal as early as 12.09 p.m., ‘a false story ran in a UK newspaper today speculating about the relationship between the Duke of Sussex and the Duke of Cambridge. For brothers who care so deeply about the issues surrounding mental health, the use of inflammatory language in this way is offensive and potentially harmful.’
The speed of the combined response partly reflected the brothers’ joint disdain for the press – ‘The buggers have got it wrong again.’ But it indicated a more profound truth as well – the underlying strength of their long-term commitment to each other. William and Harry might not be lunching together that day for some sadly bitter and fractious reasons, but it was still Diana’s two sons against the world. This current disagreement would eventually get sorted out somehow – and that proved to be the conclusion reached in the family meeting in the Long Library in Sandringham that afternoon.
According to Scobie and Durand’s impression, which could only have come from Harry, the four members of the royal family, headed by the Queen, adopted a ‘practical workmanlike approach’ when they sat down together. They agreed that it was in everyone’s interest to work out a deal as soon as possible, and that Harry should marshal his aides to confer with their aides in the next few days back at Buckingham Palace in order to hammer out a compromise.
Hammer, sadly, was the operative word. The Sussexes’ tough tactics in giving the palace so little notice when they activated their provocative website the previous Wednesday had come straight from Rachel Zane’s maxim, ‘Never Underestimate the Power of a Good Slap – or Two’. And having administered one good slap, Meghan had prepared another. ‘Prince Harry and Meghan Markle May Threaten Queen With Tell-All Oprah Interview to Get Their Way at Today’s Royal Summit,’ Emily Andrews had revealed in the Sun that Monday morning.
‘Perhaps Harry and Meghan will use this as a negotiating tactic,’ speculated Andrews, ‘as there is no way the royals want their dirty laundry out in the open. It is believed Meghan’s team has been in contact with ABC, NBC and CBS and celebrity chat show hosts such as Oprah.’
To threaten press exposure was just part of the Sussexes’ approach in the five days of negotiations that followed the Sandringham Summit.
January 2020: Harry and Meghan forfeit their styles as ‘HRH’
‘It was like dealing with a hard-nosed Hollywood lawyer,’ says a senior palace source familiar with the negotiations. ‘The Sussexes wanted guarantees on every single point as if it were a contractual negotiation.’ Robert Zane again – ‘Don’t sign anything unless you can get something in return.’ Meghan may not have been physically present in Buckingham Palace from Tuesday to Saturday, 14–18 January 2020, but her spirit reigned – while Harry, square-jawed and bubbling with anger, played her loyal proxy.
Even the normally sympathetic Scobie and Durand admitted that the fast and aggressive Sussex approach ‘created a complete headache for everyone’, and generated ‘a lot of ill will in the household and especially in the family’.
‘They totally misplayed the negotiations,’ says the palace insider, ‘but then so did the palace.’
Directing the palace strategy was private secretary Sir Edward Young.
‘The trouble with Edward,’ says the source, who worked with Young for many years, ‘is that he is not very good at doing humans. He is incredibly difficult to read – impossible to fathom. And he has these nervous tics. He has a funny high-pitched “tee-hee” laugh that makes him sound insincere. He is also deeply cautious and non-creative. He’s a letter-of-the-law kind of man.’
Rachel Zane had been confronted by the post-office clerk. It was a transatlantic cross-cultural conflict that pitted the stereotypical all-American superwoman against a Monty Python parody of a toffee-nosed royal sucker-up – and it left little room for outside intervention. The Queen had asked her trusted long-term aide Samantha Cohen, a cheery and no-nonsense Australian who had worked with Meghan for a
