A confession: I’m enjoying the “secret peace summit” storyline. I trust the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to make the correct choices for themselves and their children, so I’m not worried that they’re about to get shanghaied back to the UK. I pretty much take the “peace summit” at face value – there are conversations happening between representatives for the Sussexes and King Charles, a formal thawing of the relationship between father and son. That’s it. There’s no promise of anything more, but the speculation about the peace summit and what it all means is actually a perfect summer storyline. This is going to be a multi-month back-and-forth narrative and I’m looking forward to it. Anyway, the Sussexes want everyone to know that they didn’t leak any part of the story to the Mail. Duh. The story was leaked to the Mail by their former deputy editor Tobyn Andreae, who attended the peace summit as King Charles’s representative and communications director.
Team Sussex is understood to be frustrated after details of a “peace summit” were revealed in a newspaper, denying it was behind the leak. Senior aides working for the King and Prince Harry took the first steps towards rapprochement by holding sensitive talks last week. The meeting, at a private members’ club in central London, was an extraordinary development in relations between the two Royal households, which have been almost non-existent in recent years.
Details including the venue, timings and nature of the talks were leaked to the Mail on Sunday. This led to the aides being “papped” outside the club and even during the meeting as they enjoyed drinks on a balcony.
The leak has jeopardised the fragile peace operation, creating further suspicion and distrust on both sides and potentially sending them back to square one.
Sources close to Prince Harry insisted that the Sussexes were not responsible, and acknowledged that having the details of the meeting on newspaper front pages was hardly an ideal way to start what they had hoped would be a new period of peace. Buckingham Palace declined to comment.
Meredith Maines, the Duke’s new chief communications officer, based in California, was joined at the meeting by Liam Maguire, who runs the Sussexes’ UK-based PR operation, and Tobyn Andreae, the King’s communications secretary. The meeting was orchestrated in a bid to start afresh, with both sides recognising that an open communications channel would benefit them all.
I assume this is Prince Harry publicly underlining everything for everyone in the cheap seats: he didn’t leak this, he didn’t set this up. You can tell that this whole thing is a Buckingham Palace operation because A) other media outlets refuse to acknowledge that Andreae was a long-time Mail editor; B) Harry is currently suing the Mail and he would never “leak” sensitive details to the Mail; and C) it was all perfectly timed as a screw-you to the Waleses, who are being punished by Buckingham Palace and D) the way the photos were set up, it was clear that a photographer had been told the exact time of the meeting and where to set up the camera IN LONDON!
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Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
