Serving as Prince Charles’s representative, and trying to mediate between the two sides, was his private secretary Clive Alderton, an experienced diplomat who had been ambassador to Morocco. Charles felt sympathetic to his younger son and gave Alderton the brief of trying to bring the two sides together. But over the years Harry had come to distrust the man who organised so much of his father’s life – and hence aspects of his own life too.
William was represented in the room by his private secretary Simon Case, a high-flying Downing Street official who had previously worked with both David Cameron and Theresa May and was developing close links to Boris Johnson. But Case was not able to bring his political gifts into play – the basic dynamic was so confrontational.
‘The tragedy,’ says the palace insider, ‘was that the Queen’s broader objective was actually to bring everyone back together, not to split them apart. There were obviously points of principle to defend, but Edward got stuck in the detail. He could not see the bigger picture. This sort of family negotiation requires trust, along with the accepting of uncertainties and ambiguities. There can be no absolute guarantees for either side. Christopher Geidt would have handled it so differently – he had the skills. Geidt might even have landed that classic royal compromise in which nobody loses.’
That man Geidt again. When the Queen had brought back her dismissed private secretary the previous year to try to help Meghan and Harry, Christopher Geidt had, with David Manning, picked up her suggestion that the couple could benefit from some time abroad, as she had done in Malta. The Sussexes’ entire in-out project of settling in Vancouver had developed from that original suggestion – from the Queen herself – after Cape Town had proved to be unfeasible as a home or HQ.
Presumably the next stage would have been to tackle the thorny question of how the Sussexes could support themselves financially in the New World while staying royal. Windsors from Edward and Sophie Wessex to Princess Anne’s children had successfully managed the trick of mixing commerce and royal connections. It was by no means unprecedented or impossible. But somehow the potential sources of the Sussexes’ income became the issue on which the whole project foundered.
Meghan and Harry had rushed in so impetuously – and they had over-prepared. Edward Young had dug in his heels so fiercely. Both sides were to blame and now this week of ill-natured, on-the-brink negotiations had turned the Queen’s positive suggestion of a foreign base for the couple’s Commonwealth work into a querulous and rather grubby ‘exile’.
It was too late for a Geidt-style intervention. The settlement that was wearily announced by telephone to royal correspondents on Saturday 18 January proved a succession of negatives. The deal was dressed up with talk of it being ‘a constructive and supportive way forward’, but it involved Meghan and Harry being ‘required to step back from royal duties’. Harry would lose his beloved military appointments and his role as Commonwealth youth ambassador too. The Sussexes could no longer represent the Queen and ‘will not use their HRH titles as they are no longer working members of the Royal Family’.
The fact that the Sussexes themselves had volunteered to forgo all access to the Sovereign Grant and public funds as their own proposed price for freedom – along with paying off the costs of Frogmore Cottage’s renovation – was presented as a punishment: ‘They will no longer receive public funds for royal duties.’ And when it came to their plans for earning their own money using the name of Sussex Royal, that decision was delayed ‘pending further palace deliberations’.
January 2020: Harry and Meghan say they wish ‘to step back’
On the face of it, Rachel Zane’s tough tactics had backfired disastrously. The Sussexes could still call themselves ‘Duke and Duchess’ if they chose and they had the right to go on living in Canada as they were at that date – but not much more. Small wonder that when Harry was offered the possibility of a review of the whole arrangement after twelve months, his first impulse was to refuse. He wanted no more to do with the royal family.
As for Sir Edward Young, his dismissal of the Sussex demands had won his Queen a short-term victory. But his critics complained that he had fatally holed the monarchy below the water in racial terms for generations to come. Sussex Royal may have represented a commercial and reputational risk. But the British crown has risked worse in the past – and in terms of modern inclusivity the exclusion of the mixed-race Meghan and her descendants from the official face of the royal family is a priceless opportunity spurned.
And so Prince Harry came to my neck of the woods – St John’s Wood to be precise, a leafy neighbourhood in north London just round the corner from the Abbey Road Studios where in 1969 the Beatles had recorded their famous LP of that name, then walked out across the white-striped zebra crossing to pose for the picture on the cover that became even more famous.
Here in the summertime I can scarcely leave home in the morning for tourists parading in smiling, waving foursomes across that famous pedestrian crossing. We locals wait politely in our cars and taxis and buses for all these visitors from around the world as they take their photographs of each other – and today, Friday 28 February 2020, it was Harry’s turn. He was coming with Jon Bon Jovi and a wheelchair-bound ex-serviceman to raise funds and create publicity for his Invictus Games for disabled veterans.
Things had not looked up greatly for the prince since those dour five January days of haggling with Sir Edward Young & Company
