In the past week, we’ve heard multiple stories about Prince Harry’s plans to bring his wife and children to the UK in July. My guess is that Harry and Meghan plan to attend the Invictus One Year to Go events together, and that Harry and King Charles have worked out some kind of arrangement where Charles will probably get to spend some time with the Sussex fam in London or Sandringham (or maybe even Windsor) for a day or two. I also think a family trip to Althorp is on the agenda, with the Earl of Spencer playing host to the family too.
As we’ve seen, Prince William is basically having a very loud crashout about all of this. I think part of it is that William has been cut out of most of the planning – he clearly doesn’t know the Sussexes’ schedule, nor does he know where Charles plans to meet the Sussexes and for how long. His ignorance is on full display with all of these enraged briefings from Kensington Palace. As I noted in my coverage of the Daily Mail’s piece, William is clearly behind almost all of the nastiest and most negative commentary about the Sussexes’ visit. What’s crazy is that Tom Sykes also admitted as much in his weekend Royalist Substack, “Chaos at the King’s Court.” An excerpt:
On Saturday, as public irritation built, the hawks in Charles’ court launched an extraordinary broadside at the doves in the pages of the Daily Mail. A source [hawk] described by the paper as being close to the Palace called the trip “emotional blackmail” and an attempt at “manipulation” of the Royal Family. There was, according to this source [hawk], “no meeting planned” between the King and the Sussexes. The King, the source said, could find himself “very busy” when the Sussexes are in town. And then comes the key (hawk) quote: that the timing of the announcement “feels like emotional blackmail.”
This is exactly the same phrase that William’s allies have been using to me all week! They also allege that the king was “bounced” into meeting Harry when they had tea at Clarence House last September.Let me be very clear about this: the King was not “bounced” into that meeting. He invited his son to Clarence House and served him his favorite chocolate biscuit cake. You may remember the hawks didn’t much like that meeting at the time, briefing newspapers that Harry had mistaken a cup of tea for the “treaty of Versailles.”
This peculiar attempt to rewrite history and suggest that Charles was somehow tricked into having tea with his own child, and is now being tricked again into giving him a house, is part of a pattern that has become deeply unconvincing. If you think someone is emotionally blackmailing you, you don’t tend to give in.
We may think that Harry is emotionally blackmailing Charles, William may think it, Sir Clive [Alderton] may think it, but Charles’s actions, by which I mean giving his son’s family the great privilege of royal lodgings when they are in the UK for their visit, show that he thinks nothing of the kind.
The fact that his own office is effectively briefing against him to the Mail – saying he is weak, being manipulated and the subject of emotional blackmail, is a graphic sign of the massive fissure the failure to coherently deal with the Harry issue is causing at the heart of this monarchy.
The other argument is that the King is trying to have his cake and eat it: whilst mending fences with his son by enthusiastically providing Harry and Meghan with status, security and photos (does anyone really believe a meeting won’t happen?), he is then ordering a cynical briefing operation to undermine his own actions so it looks like he has been “bounced” and manipulated into it by Harry.
As I said, I have been reporting for some time that the “emotional blackmail” framing originates primarily from Prince William’s circle.
Sources allied to William have told me directly that they regard the Sussexes’ use of the children as leverage in the security dispute as emotional blackmail. And if you read the Palace source quotes in today’s Mail carefully, the language maps almost exactly onto what I have been hearing from the Wales camp. That the William faction’s vocabulary is being deployed through ostensible “Palace sources,” is indicative of how much power William now has.
It might sound like the most obvious thing in the world, but that’s the point I’m trying to underline: William is openly and blunderingly briefing against his father and his father’s courtiers in an attempt to make it sound like Charles’ court is “divided.” Sykes even lays out the lies being told by the Scooter King court, pointing directly at William and his camp for all of the nonsensical “emotional blackmail” briefings, not to mention all of the BS last September, when Harry and Charles met. This is the heir openly at war with his father and his father’s operations. It’s a really dangerous game he’s playing, and it also shows how shortsighted and childish William still is.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
