King Charles is a man whose hand-stitched loafers have regularly ended up in his mouth over the years.
In 1981, His Majesty had barely been publicly engaged to fawnlike teenage aristo Lady Diana Spencer for a matter of hours when he managed to bugger things up when – attempting to seem profound – he wheeled out the line “whatever ‘in love’ means”.
The hits just kept coming with him caught on tape in 1993 joking about ending up as a tampon (organic cotton, I’m assuming) and then a year later deciding to tell the world he had done some extramarital shagging.
In 2005 Charles was caught on tape griping about the press, calling them “bloody people” and “awful”, and then last year, only days into his accession, he had not one but two pen-related temper tantrums.
Words have been getting His Majesty into trouble for decades and now, a few little words are making his life even harder.
No, I don’t mean the words ‘Camilla, feet off the Biedermeier’ or ‘George! Crowns are not for news days!’, but three very particular ones: His/Her Royal Highness.
The ability to use their HRHs was one of the many things that Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were forced to relinquish back in 2020, and at the time, Her late Majesty and Charles compelling them to ditch the designation seemed the smart move.
But oh so very much can happen in a few years and today Charles is paying a high price for the Sussexes’ HRH-lite existence. (Officially, they still possess their HRHs, however, they are not allowed to actually use them, with the same going for the defenestrated Prince Andrew).
Cast your mind back to January 2020 when the great Megxit eruption happened via that Vesuvius of an Instagram post.
The late Queen, faced with the Sussexes’ harebrained half-in, half-out fantasm of a working model, ruled they had to choose, one way or the other.
Deciding to try their luck outside the royal tent, they were forced by Her late Majesty and Charles to mothball their HRHs. The Palace thinking: Take away this privilege and it would create something of a firebreak between their money-making gambits and the monarchy.
That rationale was sound given the couple then hared off to the US, found they would have to fund their own lives (oh, the humanity!) and thus proceeded to sign commercial deals with the enthusiasm of Harry circa 2012 at a Vegas all-you-can-chug margarita night.
But now, after having essentially cut the duke and duchess loose and, along with his Mummy, having denuded them of their HRHs, then proceeded to boot them out of their UK home, Charles no longer has any real leverage.
The loss of those three words may have been something of a blow to just how marketable a prospect the Sussexes might be, but it has also liberated Harry from the royal yoke and the conventions that governed the first 35 years of his life.
Last week in a London court, the duke became the most senior member of the royal family since Charles I took on parliament to take a belligerent, vocal pop at the government, labelling things as being at “rock bottom”. (Clearly Meghan has finally given Harry her Economist login and he’s embraced that most dangerous of pastimes, reading).
It was another headline-making first after so many headline-making firsts I have genuinely lost track of all of them.
As the Sunday Times’ royal editor Roya Nikkhah wrote this week: “To many, his comment was woefully misjudged, others saw it as unconstitutional”.
Does anyone think Harry might just for a single second lose a moment of sleep over this?
I’d wonder if, rather, the clucking tongues of Westminster and Fleet Street might only rile him up a tad; to galvanise him to go even further down the off-piste path he has chosen.
In hindsight, the late Queen and Charles, in taking steps to protect the monarchy and depriving them of the HRHs for day-to-day use, has turned out to be quite the double-edged sword. (Thank god for small mercies. ‘Double shot oak latte for Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Sussex?’ doesn’t really roll off the tongue now does it?)
As Nikkhah reported this week: “If the past three years have shown anything since the Sussexes stepped down from royal duties, it is that banning them from using their HRH titles has only emboldened them to take on all the battles that royal life once prevented them from entering”.
In the last seven months, Harry has been on a ‘truth’-telling spree, attempting to hold both The Firm and the British press to account for a variety of sins, ranging from leaving he and Meghan to buy his own sofa to allegedly being repeatedly, egregiously hacked.
Given Spare and his three major cases against UK publishers (among other lawsuits), the duke is clearly willing to wage battle on numerous fronts and to pursue the course that he believes is right and just. (Would anyone be surprised if Harry has been practising that most famous of lines from Julius Caesar – “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war” – in front of the mirror of late?)
So, for better or worse, Aitch seems intent on fighting his various fights until the cheques for his slick London lawyers start to bounce or all those silks can no longer take all of his righteousness and the made-by-Meghan granola bars he keeps trying to share. (Well, I’m guessing. I’m not sure Oxford graduates who probably read Pericles in the original are that big on goji berries).
However, we may still be in the opening chapter here.
Besides his case against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), which brought him to the UK last week, he also has legal efforts against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), the parent company of the Daily Mail, and News Group Newspapers (NGN), the publisher of The Sun and the long-shuttered News of the World, which are all at various stages before British courts.
(NGN is owned by the same parent company as News Corp Australia, publisher of this masthead).
The duke has penned tens of thousands of words via his three witness statements, already revealing that his brother Prince William privately settled with NGN in 2020, receiving a “very large sum of money”, and claimed that Charles had intervened when the late Queen had decided to pursue legal action.
Who knows what other Molotov cocktails Harry might be getting ready to chuck, with all the precision of Shane Warne in full flight, at the media, the government and the royal family?
(Might be worth someone seeing if the Palace bomb shelter is still habitable? Charles and Camilla should consider heading down there with a fresh crate of Tanqueray and staying put waiting things out with all the out-of-date tins of baked beans).
Then there is the issue of Harry the Author, a man who has proved that the Macbook can be mightier than the crown at times.
Royal biographer and writer Christopher Wilson, talking to the Daily Mail, has reported that the duke’s deal with Penguin Random House, “worth upwards of £22 million ($40,960,000), requires him to produce at least one more book, and soon”.
In January, the Telegraph’s Bryony Gordon interviewed Harry for his memoir’s release, with her revealing that “the first draft was 800 pages, whereas the finished manuscript is just over 400” and that Harry had said, “it could have been two books, put it that way”.
While some episodes were cut because of space, there is clearly a hell of a lot more our man in Montecito has to say.
The duke told Gordon: “There are some things that have happened, especially between me and my brother, and to some extent between me and my father, that I just don’t want the world to know. Because I don’t think they would ever forgive me.”
Beware the ides of book two, I say.
And in all of this, Charles is about as hamstrung and lost as Princess Anne in Harrods. (I don’t think she has bought a stitch of new clothing since Britain entered the common market).
With the Sussexes’ HRHs now stashed somewhere in the Palace attic alongside all those van Eycks that come from some unmentionable German relations, the King can’t use them to yank Harry and Meghan back into line.
Charles & Co, having done their darnedest to distance the Palace from Harry and Meghan, has incidentally relinquished any means of exerting pressure on them. They are now free to be the thorniest of thorns in his bespoke side as long as they fancy and until Oprah calls to invite them over for Taco Tuesday.
As Nikkhah writes, “however unconstitutional [the Sussexes’] words or deeds, the punishment is unlikely to be heavier than fiddling with seating plans for the occasional state occasion”.
Harry has gone to war – twice – and is pretty much the first senior member of the royal family to skip out on the monarchy since Edward II’s wife Isabella of France ditched him and moved back to Paris in the 14th century.
Somehow, I don’t think threats of being left in the third row for some church service down the track is exactly going to bring him into line.
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and freelance writer with 15 years’ experience who has written for some of Australia’s best print and digital media brands.
