Hello Dear Readers,

So here’s something we’ve clocked. For no particular reason, obviously.

Ever since Jason Arday died, a certain crowd, you know the one, deeply, movingly loyal to an ex-Montecito pair, has been absolutely first out of the traps to hold him up as Exhibit A for why the British press is rotten to the core. Dozens of stories. A hounding. A man hunted to his grave by Fleet Street, while Cambridge just... stood there, apparently.

Now, we’re not here to relitigate the Arday case. People closer to it than us can do that. Though for what it’s worth, our money’s on Cambridge and other universities for the lion’s share of the blame here, given they’re the ones who put the man on television and handed him honorary doctorates without checking his CV first. But that’s not actually what’s caught our eye. What’s caught our eye is who rediscovered their principles about press conduct last month, and the very obvious fact that they didn’t have them two years ago.

Because in early 2024, Catherine, Princess of Wales, went through what might be the nastiest few weeks any royal has had in living memory. And this same crowd? Barely a peep out of them.

Remember Kate-gate? If the answer is no, please see our newsletter below.

It’s worth a quick refresher, because it’s the sort of thing

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Hello Dear Readers,

The original People Magazine story breaking the news about the Sussexes moving back to the UK contained a curious little detail. We meant to mention it in last week’s newsletter, but decided it really deserved a post all of its own.

The comment in question?

“Those close to the Sussexes believe they have successfully executed the “half in, half out” model Harry and Meghan proposed to the royal family in 2019. With a base in Britain, Harry will be able to spend more time with charities including Scotty’s Little Soldiers and WellChild, as well as the Invictus community, while Meghan continues leading her lifestyle company, As Ever, and pursuing future projects.”

“Half-in, half-out” is one of those phrases that gets trotted out whenever Team Sussex wants to sound reasonable about the past six years. But pause for a second and think about what that actually means: that Harry and Meghan are somehow balancing official royal duties with private commercial deals. It implies there’s some ongoing dual existence being maintained.

The truth? There

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Hello Dear Readers,

When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle travelled to the UK with their children last month, something curious happened: they proved that they could do things quietly if they wanted. They proved they could enter the country and none would be the wiser.

During their visit, they popped over to Althorp, went house-hunting and school-viewing in the Cotswolds, and even took themselves off to a private island owned by a billionaire in Scotland while they were at it.

Not a single photograph was taken of them the whole time.

They moved about in relative secrecy. No one knew when Meghan and their children arrived. No one knew when or where they were travelling. And no one knew when they left back to America.

We apologise for labouring the point, but it’s an important one. It can be done. Privacy is perfectly achievable. But judging from the BREAKING NEWS alerts cluttering our phones today, it seems Harry and Meghan want nothing to do with a quiet approach. Not only did they make a grand, noisy arrival by private jet (faithfully reported by every journalist with a laptop it was conveniently “leaked” ahead of time so photographers could snap their plane as it circled the runway.

And the briefing began almost immediately.

So, not only do we know when they landed, we know where, at what time, and that they were “given no police protection upon arrival”. Thanks ever so much for keeping us posted, Team Sussex. Whatever would we do without you?

Dear Readers, Harry and Meghan won’t be doing a single shred of this quietly.

This is all Classic Sussex behaviour. In the dead of summer, maximum drama always follows them like clockwork as they take advantage of the seasonal lull while the King and his family are enjoying their summer holidays and the papers don’t have much to cover on the Royal Beat. Harry and Meghan are returning precisely as they left: with

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Hello Dear Readers,

Well, well, well. Isn’t this interesting.

The story above was published in The Telegraph today but has since vanished entirely from their website. We’ve tried every trick we know to track down an archived copy, but no such luck. It’s been well and truly wiped from existence.

Prince Harry, as we all know, has form when it comes to whinging publicly (and privately) about his security arrangements, which makes the disappearance of this particular article all the more curious. We can’t help but wonder: did Harry, or someone on his team, overstep the mark somewhere along the line?

You can all give the link a try here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2026/08/21/harry-pleads-mahmood-answers-security/

See, it doesn’t work, does it? No matter. We have a selection of the article here. Lets go through it shall we?

“Criticism of the estimated £5m-a-year cost is understood to frustrate Prince Harry, who believes it is just a drop in the ocean of Ravec’s overall budget for royalty protection.”

Oh really? The £5m-a-year cost is just a “drop in the ocean”, is it? Well, if it’s so insignificant

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Hello Dear Readers,

Happy Friday! And welcome to this month's free newsletter! This one’s simply far too entertaining to go and stick behind a paywall so do read, share and subscribe!

Now, in our newsletter earlier this week we said:

Dear Readers, if there’s one thing nearly four years of covering the Sussexes has taught us, it’s patience. These two are, quite categorically, addicted to telling their “side” of the story, and always with the rosiest spin money can buy.

For more, you can read the newsletter below:

Well, who knew we’d be quite so bang on the money?

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Reports started doing the rounds in the wee small hours this morning that Meghan was heading back into acting, having apparently been “offered a significant role” being shot right here in Britain.

This, sources reckon, was a huge factor behind the move back into a country her own husband had deemed too unsafe to set foot in a mere four weeks ago. Brontë Coy over at News.com.au was the first to report the story, which, frankly, comes as no great shock. With Charlotte Griffiths at The Daily Mail being persona non grata after revealing how she worked with Team Sussex to pen flattering stories about them, Coy seems to have become the new go-to Sussex journalist, only too happy to print out whatever talking points Team Sussex fancies feeding her.

Entertainment sources told news.com.au the Duchess of Sussex has been offered a role in an upcoming project based in the UK, although further details are yet to be shared.

Victoria Ward repeated the story at The Telegraph, with the headline “Meghan ‘offered acting role in UK’

The details of the acting project have not yet been confirmed, but it is thought to be one of the reasons behind the couple’s decision to return to the UK.

Sources close to the Sussexes have not denied the report.

And on and on it went. From Fresh Hell Substack right through to The Sun, everyone was repeating the same line: Meghan had landed herself an acting job here in England. It all sounded rather like a done deal, too, which seemed to back up the idea that this move had been in the works for quite some time.

But then, very quickly, and as we’ve rather come to expect from grand Sussex announcements by now, the wheels started coming off the carriage, and the hedging began almost immediately as the actual truth started leaking out.

It began with a report in The Hollywood Reporter:

The Hollywood Reporter has learned that she is in advanced discussions to join Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, which shoots in the U.K. The part is currently being written for an unannounced third season, so it’s unclear how many episodes she would appear in. The Gentlemen season two premieres on Sept. 3. Markle met Ritchie through mutual acquaintances, we’re told. Additional details were not immediately available, and Netflix did not immediately respond to THR‘s request for comment.

Senior entertainment reporter Bronte Coy, who broke the story, told BBC Radio 4’s Today on Friday that the acting gig played a big role in the couple’s decision to move back to the U.K. “This is such a key part of the puzzle,” she said, adding: “I think when we all heard that news that Harry and Meghan were moving here, and within a matter of days, and the kids were enrolled in school, everyone was asking, what is Meghan going to be doing?” Of the acting role, Coy added : “I’m told it’s significant, and she’s very excited about it.”

And so, in the space of just under 12 hours, we’ve gone from “Meghan’s been offered a significant acting job” to “Meghan’s in advanced discussions for a part being written for a yet-to-be-announced season.”

But Dear Readers, it gets worse. Enter Deadline:

Meghan Markle may be teaming up with Guy Ritchie for her return to acting. As a report started circulating Friday morning that she has been “offered a role in an upcoming project based in the UKạ I hear that the former Suits star has had preliminary conversations to join Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series The Gentlemen for Season 3.

Sources caution that the conversations are hypothetical at this point because The Gentlemen, starring Theo James, has not been renewed for a third season yet; its second season premieres Sept. 3. Additionally, no role has been identified so far, I hear.

So now, once you’ve stopped laughing long enough to pay attention, here’s where we’ve landed: we’ve gone from

“Meghan has a significant new acting job!” to

“Meghan’s having advanced discussions for an unannounced season of a show” to

“Meghan may be acting”, with “advanced discussions” quietly downgraded to “preliminary conversations,” and the whole thing now “hypothetical at this point.” Not to mention sources are busy “cautioning” us that nothing’s set in stone and no role has even been identified.

Talk about counting your chickens well before they’ve hatched. It rather goes without saying that the initial “news” of this hypothetical acting job from Coy, for a show that hasn’t even been given a third season yet, came straight from Harry and Meghan’s camp. Longtime readers will know this by now: announcing things well before they’re actually real is very much their modus operandi.

And if there’s one thing Meghan does seem to have picked up from her husband, it’s this: get it into the press first, and let the pressure do the work of bending everyone else to your will. It’s exactly what we discussed earlier this year, when the Sussex camp floated the idea that he'd be getting his state-funded security detail back.

Harry has had middling success with this little strategy of his: float the wish, let the press do the heavy lifting. But on the whole, as far as we can see, it’s a failing strategy with diminishing returns.

We’ve no way of knowing whether it’s Meghan's people getting cold feet over quite how strongly the initial story landed, which might explain why The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline are being noticeably more restrained about the whole thing. Or perhaps it's Netflix’s camp who aren’t best pleased that a quick natter between Meghan and Guy Ritchie over canapés at some mutual friend’s do has now been blown up into a career-defining role, when no one’s even decided whether there’s going to be a third season. Honestly, our money’s on a bit of both.

By this point, the pattern is entirely predictable. Suffice to say, most of the headlines following Wednesday’s shock announcement have centred on rumblings about their finances, so the Sussexes did what they always do: try to fight off bad press with a good headline.

Whenever the coverage turns hostile, whenever a contract falls through, whenever a report surfaces about, shall we say, “difficult” behaviour, whenever a senior employee jumps ship after only a few months, whenever the viewing figures leak out and they’re nothing to write home about, whenever any of that happens, something rather curious tends to follow with them.

Within days, sometimes within hours, out pops a brand new announcement. A new project. A new partnership. A new chapter. And the tone is always, always the same: forward momentum, barely-contained glee and excitement, something wonderful juuuust around the corner.

The only trouble is: The announcements very rarely lead anywhere.

When Harry and Meghan’s production company, Archewell Productions, announced, with considerable fanfare, naturally, that it would be adapting Carley Fortune’s bestselling novel Meet Me at the Lake for Netflix, it was, by any measure, a rather well-timed distraction.

Spotify had dropped them only weeks before, with the streaming giant’s head of podcast innovation gone and called them “f**king grifters” on his own podcast, no less. And suddenly, here was something shiny and new to talk about instead: a literary adaptation, a romantic story with all sorts of pleasing parallels to their own lives, a nice little signal that Archewell Productions was very much open for business.

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According to credible reports, Netflix reportedly paid somewhere between $3 million and $3.8 million for the rights to the adaptation. The author, by all accounts, was thrilled at the partnership. The press releases were glowing. The industry sat up and took note.

But Dear Readers, that was over three years ago now.

As of today, no cast has been announced. No director has been attached. No release date has been given and sources in the entertainment world were, over a year ago, already openly wondering whether the film would ever actually get made at all.

A Hollywood insider told Page Six:

“By this point, you would have thought they would have got a director on board and a cast. When is this film going to be made?”

“Three years in development for a movie like this at Netflix isn’t good,” a well-placed Hollywood source told us.

Another industry source put it rather more bluntly when they said: “What’s the betting that neither of these projects will see the light of day?”

Meet Me at the Lake, we should stress, isn’t some isolated blip. It’s the template. Meghan and Harry fight bad press with good headlines, and there’s a certain logic to this announcement-as-armour approach.

In the short term, it does the job. A shiny new project generates shiny new headlines, and shiny new headlines give friendly journalists something else to write about besides the bad news. The press cycle moves on. The crisis, for a little while at least, recedes.

But the strategy has one fatal flaw: every announcement creates an expectation, and every expectation eventually demands a result. And when the results simply don’t turn up, when the film never gets a director or when the initiative vanishes off the website without so much as a peep, the failure becomes a story all of its own. Often a rather bigger story than the one the announcement was hastily cobbled together to bury in the first place.

This Guy Ritchie show, mind you, hasn’t even been renewed for a third season. There does seem to be an active writers room on the go, but it’s all very early days, and there’s no obvious role in the script for Meghan as things stand. Filming likely won’t start for at least a year if, and it’s a big if, the show gets renewed at all.

Oh, but did you hear? Harry’s just been told by a judge that he’s got until the 28th of August to hand over his share of a £9.5 million legal bill, and that’s merely the first instalment. But no, no, let's all crack on and talk about Meghan’s “hypothetical” acting role of a lifetime instead!

Let’s just forget, shall we, that for six years now she and Harry have moaned on and on about how brow-beaten and depressed they were here in Blighty. How they needed space from his toxic, “genetic-pain”-riddled family. How they didn’t need the institution at all, they were going to build something bigger, grander, better, entirely on their own terms. And that...simply didn’t happen.

Let’s all forget that all of the past six years have been for nothing. And they’re right back where they started, landing on our shores more diminished than when they left.

Would love to know your thoughts below.

Yours in Royal Tea,

Lady Sinclair

Hello Dear Readers!

Megxit is Dead! Long Live...Harrival…?

Yes, we know. It doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, does it? We’ll keep chewing that one over in the background. But that’s rather beside the point, because the big news broke late last night: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are moving back to the UK to “raise their children”, Archie and Lilibet.

Now, there’s an awful lot to unpack here, and no single newsletter could possibly do it justice. What does this mean for their security detail? Will we be seeing them at Royal Ascot, waving from a carriage at Trooping the Colour? Are they angling to become working royals again? Dear Readers, if there’s one thing nearly four years of covering the Sussexes has taught us, it’s patience. These two are, quite categorically, addicted to telling their “side” of the story, and always with the rosiest spin money can buy.

And it’s that very spin that gives the game away. Take this little gem from People Magazine, who broke the story alongside The Telegraph:

Those close to Harry believe his recent visit to Britain reflects his conviction that the more the public interacts with Meghan, the more they appreciate her. During his visit to Birmingham, where he carried out charity engagements and promoted the Invictus Games, Harry was heartened by the public interest in his wife.

Ah. “Heartened”, was he? And Harry genuinely believes, with conviction no less, that the British public’s, er, lukewarm feelings towards Meghan are simply down to a lack of face time? That familiarity will breed fondness rather than, well, more of the same?

Really? So nothing’s changed, then. Still thick, as ever.

We made this exact point last week, but it bears repeating: before they swanned off to greener pastures back in 2020, Harry and Meghan seemed to genuinely believe they were owed the earth, all on the strength of a few months glowing press and excitement over a shiny new addition to the family. As if royal popularity, for anyone bar the late Queen, doesn’t naturally ebb and flow like the tide. Harry, or whoever’s whispering in his ear, still clings to this rather quaint notion that simply repeating “we're popular, honestly” will magic up everything he wants.

If Harry and Meghan think a move back to England will

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Hello Dear Readers!

We’ve just had some smashing news this evening: We’ve hit 4,000 subscribers here at HRH Royal Tea!

To say thank you, we’re giving away eight comped one-month subscriptions: Four for our free subscribers and four for our paid lot. All you need to do is pop a comment below on the royal topics you’ve enjoyed reading about in our newsletter or topics you’re most keen to read about, and we’ll pick the winners tomorrow.

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Words cannot express how wonderful it is to reach this milestone. This little newsletter of ours came about after one too many grumbles over the sheer lack of historical know-how in the royal-watching world. Our partner, fed up with all our moaning about it, finally turned round and said “Well, do something about it then”, and that’s how HRH Royal Tea came to be! Over the past three and a half years, we’ve genuinely adored diving into royal stories of the week and nattering on about all the little details that never quite make it into our broadsheets.

We’re deeply grateful for all the support you’ve shown over the past three and a half years here on Substack. It genuinely means a great deal that hundreds of you choose to read and support our work. Quite simply, we couldn’t carry on without you, so thank you for being part of it. If you’re in a position to upgrade to a paid subscription, it goes a long way in helping keep this newsletter thriving. And if you’d prefer to have a look around first, there’s a seven-day free trial available so you can explore some of our more in-depth pieces before making a decision!

If you missed our piece over the weekend, you can read it below. We’ve enabled free subscribers to redeem their single-use unlock on this newsletter! If you’re already subscribed and haven’t used your one-time unlock yet, now’s your moment! If you’re new here and fancy reading the whole thing, a free subscription is all it takes to access this post. We’d love to have you.

Thank you all for being here and looking forward to reading your comments. Here’s to the next 1,000!

Yours in Royal Tea,

Lady Sinclair

Giveaway Details: Free subscribers will get access to all of our content for one month, and paid subscribers will get one month comped for free! If you’re a yearly subscriber, one month of credit will be added to your account.

Hello Dear Readers,

Before their relationship became public in October 2016, anyone wanting a peek behind the curtain at the big changes happening in Meghan Markle’s private life wouldn’t have had to look very far at all. From her very first date with Prince Harry, Meghan was dropping subtle little hints on her personal Instagram page.

Take the night of their first proper, solo, in-person date. As their Netflix docuseries later confirmed, this was decidedly not the “blind date” they’d described in their engagement interview. That same evening, Meghan posted a photo of a Love Hearts sweet stamped with "Kiss Me," captioned simply, "Lovehearts in #London." Subtle, Meg. Very subtle.

But that was only the beginning. During the very week the pair had a run of back-to-back dates, Meghan posted twice about a delivery of carnation and cream-coloured peonies, gushing over them with captions like “Swooning over these. #London #peonies #spoiledrotten,” followed shortly after by “Because I'm spoiled rotten. #thankyou #peonies #theynevergetold.” And who could possibly forget the now-infamous photo of two bananas cuddled up together, posted in those early, giddy weeks of courtship?

Meghan was dating someone new. Someone important. And while she clearly understood the relationship needed to stay under wraps, she couldn’t quite resist leaving little clues scattered about for the eagle-eyed, endlessly nosy royal watchers among us to piece together.

Perhaps the most telling breadcrumb of all, though, was the blue-beaded bracelet. It was one Prince Harry had been photographed wearing for years, and suddenly there was Meghan, wearing the very same one, in photo after photo.

Was she doing this because she knew the news would eventually break and rather liked the idea of “clues” being uncovered after the fact, making for a nicer story down the line? Or was she quietly hoping some sharp-eyed Daily Mail reporter would connect the dots a bit early? We’ll never really know.

What we do find rather telling is that Meghan more or less stopped wearing that special bracelet a couple of months after the relationship went public. The game was up, after all. No more breadcrumbs needed once the whole world knew she was dating a prince. This pattern, using Instagram to gently invite speculation into her private life, is a habit that is entirely, unmistakably Meghan. Which brings us rather neatly to the Instagram posts from a few weeks ago that had everyone talking.

The Althorp Photo

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Hello Dear Readers,

It’s been a while since we heard from Omid Scobie, hasn’t it? His last proper outing was that publicity tour for Spare Crumbs Endgame, a book so slavishly on-message that the New York Times described it as reading like “a Sussex press release cooked up by ChatGPT”, which, frankly, was far too generous a review for our liking.

Well, he’s back. This time on the podcast Pop Syllabus with host Christiana Mbakwe Medina, and listening to it felt rather like stepping into a time machine set to 2019. Out came all the old favourites in this whole sorry saga: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle did their jobs without complaint, the Palace didn’t know how to handle their popularity, the British press was uniquely vicious, the courtiers wouldn’t lift a finger to help, the Institution wouldn’t push back, and so Harry and Meghan had no option but to flee to the civilised sanctuary of America, far from the tabloid wolves.

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It’s a coherent argument. Arguable? Yes. Contestable? Certainly. But coherent, we’ll give it that! It really is something, Dear Readers, hearing these arguments trotted out yet again, word for word, as though the last six years simply didn’t happen.

There’s just one small snag Scobie didn’t prepare for…His narrative only holds up if the American media has treated Harry and Meghan any differently. It hasn’t. Which makes it all the more curious that Scobie expects us to nod along as though we haven’t got eyes and ears of our own for the Sussex circus of the past six years.

We could spend all day picking apart every claim (and we could spend a good while longer questioning why anyone treats Scobie as a witness of merit), but let’s zero in on the one line he (and Harry and Meghan themselves, repeatedly, in that Netflix docuseries) keeps reaching for: “The Palace never protected Meghan or pushed back on stories.”

Some of what follows may be old hat for our longtime readers, but stick with us, there’s fresh analysis waiting at the end.

Right. Onto the Royal Tea!

Pushback

To hear Scobie tell it,

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Hello Dear Readers,

Another day, another round of hypocrisy.

Earlier this year, we wrote a newsletter titled “An Open Letter to Prince Harry”, in which we begged whoever was left on his PR team to please, for the love of all things holy, see reason and stop issuing wishes to the press in the hopes of manifesting his deepest desires. If you missed it, do go and have a read below:

It seems, Dear Readers, that no one in the Sussex camp took heed.

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The Daily Mirror, a paper Prince Harry has sued at least once, no less, landed a new exclusive from his camp this past Sunday. The gist: Harry is inviting his father to next year’s Invictus Games in the hopes of engineering a “public reunion,” because he’d apparently “love the King’s support.” If any of this rings a bell, that’s because we’ve heard it all before.

Almost exactly a year ago to the day, Harry’s people handed the very same “exclusive” to one Charlotte Griffiths, Editor-at-Large at The Mail on Sunday. Loyal subscribers will remember her as the journalist who blew the lid off how Harry’s team had contacted her out of the blue to leak information about his family as she helped plant a run of flattering stories about the couple in the press. Central to this campaign, was that Harry and Meghan Markle were attempting to rebuild their relationship with King Charles. We covered the whole saga below:

Griffiths’s original piece, had Harry planning to invite “the Royal family” (Prince William very much included) to the 2027 Invictus Games in Birmingham, with email invitations supposedly winging their way to Buckingham Palace and formal ones to follow closer to the date. The hope, as it was framed then, was to give the King ample notice to clear his diary for a grand reconciliation.

In her story from a year ago, she said:

“The Duke of Sussex will invite the Royal family to the 2027 Invictus Games in the hope that it will prove an ideal opportunity for reconciliation, it has been claimed.

Fast forward twelve months, and there’s been no RSVP that anyone’s aware of. Funnily enough, this new Mirror story has quietly dropped William from the guest list altogether and now mentions only King Charles. Which is probably for the best, frankly. Harry may be many things, but he isn’t so far removed from reality as to think his brother would come within a hundred feet of him unless it were for a state-sanctioned funeral.

So what does this new version actually say? Organisers are apparently hoping to get the King involved in either the opening or closing ceremony, plus a spot of mingling with competitors at various events.

“The Duke of Sussex is hoping his father, King Charles, will put their differences aside to join him on stage at next year’s Invictus Games event in Birmingham, signalling a dramatic rapprochement to their fractured relationship

It is understood that the organisers of the Invictus Games plan to invite the King to take part in either the opening or closing ceremony as well as visiting a range of sporting events to meet competitors. The prince’s plan could see the monarch join him at major events during the Games - or at one of the opening or closing ceremonies during the home event.

The King and Harry last spent time together in public at the late Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in September 2022. Prior to that, they were seen enjoying celebrations for the Queen’s platinum jubilee in the summer of 2022.

Pardon our French, but what exactly are they smoking out there in Montecito? Enjoying celebrations during the Jubilee? Where? Was the before or after they packed themselves into a private jet and left festivities early in a huff back to Montecito?

The truth?

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Hello Dear Readers,

Happy Monday! As you’ve probably guessed from the title, we’ve got a bone to pick with Prince William and Princess Catherine (nee Kate Middleton), the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Back in July of last year, King Charles gave his blessing, and the Royal Warrant Holders Association confirmed that William and Catherine were now authorised to grant Royal Warrants of their very own starting in Spring of 2026!

This announcement had been a long time coming.

Back in May of that year, The Times Assistant Editor Kate Mansey wrote a piece laying bare the behind-the-scenes goings-on. It turned out the Wales’s had been waiting, none too patiently, for Charles to grant them this honour.

For any brand, a royal warrant is the ­ultimate seal of approval — and a chance to boost sales thanks to a royal crest emblazoned on its products.

However, the King has delayed a ­decision to grant permission to the Prince and Princess of Wales to bestow their own royal warrants.

A source had ­previously said the couple would use them to “recognise British skills and industry”. Yet friends are now intrigued to find that the wait goes on — agonisingly so for some brands that supply the household of the Prince and Princess of Wales and are keen to find out if they will be acknowledged.

It is understood that the warrant office has already had enquiries from some of these firms. However, a source confirmed that until the ­monarch issues permission to Kate and William, applications cannot be considered.

Perhaps this was the story that finally made the King act because it was only a month later and the official announcement was made. But that was a year ago now, and...we’ve received no updates on this front. Suffice to say, we’re starting to feel a bit like Prince Harry waiting on his security review from Ravec! Only kidding, only kidding…

In all seriousness, we have blown past the announced timeline of Spring 2026. What’s the holdup?

Well, there’s been no shortage of chatter about tensions within the Royal Household, specifically between the King and his Heir. Others

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Hello Dear Readers,

If you sat down and tried to design a British homecoming that could go wrong in absolutely every conceivable way, you’d struggle to beat the one Prince Harry and Meghan Markle wrapped up barely a fortnight ago. The plan, and let’s be honest, we’ve a fairly good idea what the plan was, given how much of it got briefed to friendly journalists along the way, seemed to be some mix of royal thaw and dignified low-key visit. What we actually got was, by most accounts, a run of thoroughly public bad luck and humiliation.

Harry and Meghan came back expecting at least a bit of fanfare. What greeted them instead was a very polite, very collective national shrug from both the British public and his family. So when it’s reported that Meghan has been left feeling “humiliated” by the whole thing, we find ourselves, for perhaps the first time, nodding along with her in agreement .

She was.

They both were.

But we wouldn’t be bothering to write any of this if we didn’t think it’s worth getting precise about where that humiliation actually came from. Because it didn’t come from the press. It didn’t come from the Palace. It certainly didn’t come from some shadowy establishment plot, however fond Harry is of reaching for that explanation. No. It came, rather embarrassingly, from themselves.

The Courtroom Humiliation

Let’s start with the courtroom, shall we, because it was the whiff of that defeat that hung over the entire visit.

Harry had spent the better part of six years going after Associated Newspapers, publishers of The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, through the courts. And it was framed, as everything in the Sussex playbook tends to be, as something rather grander than a mere lawsuit. This was a crusade. A reckoning. A spot of truth-telling, carried out in the proud tradition of a man who’d watched the press tear his mother apart and be damned if he’d let them do the same to his wife and kids.

The judge, unfortunately, hadn’t seen the same documentary.

Judge Matthew Nicklin ruled that the claimants had not proved that information had been gained unlawfully, and every one of the 97 allegations of unlawful activity was dismissed. All of them. Not most. All. After an 11-week trial, the judge said the court required strong evidence to support such serious allegations and concluded that the claimants had not met the necessary legal standard. Some elements, the judge suggested, bordered on “vexatious”.

So no, Harry didn’t slay his dragon. He turned up to the fight, took a magnificent swing at thin air,

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Hello Dear Readers,

Even with the sweltering heat, there’s something rather lovely about Wimbledon in mid-July, isn’t there? Strawberries and cream, Pimm’s on the lawn, and for the last few years, the reassuring sight of the Prince and Princess of Wales and their family settling into the Royal Box like it’s the most natural thing in the world. This year was no different, and if anything, it felt like the Waleses have properly nailed this particular family tradition.

On Sunday, Princess Catherine and Prince William turned up to the Men’s singles final with Prince George and Princess Charlotte in tow, while young Prince Louis stayed home. They watched Jannik Sinner defend his title against Alexander Zverev, and by all accounts they had a smashing time.

Let’s start with what everyone actually wants to know: what did they wear? Catherine went for an olive-green tea-length dress with a cape-like top and a nipped-in waist, reportedly a custom Emilia Wickstead number, finished off with tan pumps, a purple-and-green bow brooch and a pair of Van Cleef & Arpels drop earrings.

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This was one of our favourite ensembles on her. She looked so regal, beautiful, and thoroughly elegant, with not a hair out of place despite temperatures nudging 29C.

Charlotte, meanwhile, seems to be turning into her mother’s mini-me in more ways than one. She wore a bright cobalt-blue dress with flutter sleeves, which royal watchers immediately clocked as strikingly similar to the frock Kate herself wore to the very same final back in 2025.

William and George, for their part, kept things classic: matching striped ties, with William in a suit and George looking every inch the young gentleman beside him. With the heat properly cranked up, mother and daughter were both spotted fanning themselves with those little handheld fans Wimbledon apparently sold out of this year.

What makes the Wales family’s relationship with Wimbledon feel so genuine is that it isn’t merely ceremonial. These are people who actually enjoy and play tennis. William and Catherine have spoken warmly over the years about hitting balls together as a couple, George and Charlotte have both been spotted on court, and by all accounts the competitive streak runs deep, which, knowing their parents, surprises absolutely no one.

George made his Wimbledon debut back in 2022, just before his ninth birthday, and Charlotte followed in 2023. Catherine herself has been patron of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club since 2016.

That love of the game came through in a properly charming exchange with Sinner after his win. Catherine told him it had been “really inspiring” for George and Charlotte to watch tennis played at that level, and complimented him on his “fantastic tournament.” Sinner asked George if he was still playing, to which George reportedly replied, “Yeah, very much so.”

It’s worth pausing on just how far things have come. Back in July 2024, Catherine’s appearance at this same final was a much more fragile affair. Wimbledon was one of only her second public outings since revealing her cancer diagnosis, watching from the box in a purple dress alongside Charlotte and her sister Pippa Matthews, while William was in Berlin for the Euro 2024 final. She got a standing ovation that day too, but for very different reasons; there was real concern in the air, an outpouring of relief just to see her out and about at all.

Fast forward two years, and the contrast couldn’t be starker. This year, Catherine looked well. Genuinely, visibly well. And that Dear Readers, was great to see.

George will one day be King. Charlotte will be a formidable presence at his side. And Catherine, who has navigated illness, scrutiny, public grief, and a family rupture that would have floored most people, will have laid the groundwork for all of it.

With her family by her side, it’s hard not to look at that and think: this is what the future of the monarchy could look like. Not by any means perfect, but steady, warm and well-adjusted in all the right ways. The circus may have rolled into town last week but the show, as ever, went on.

It bears mentioning, and really, only briefly, because they deserve no more than a paragraph, that all of this unfolded against the backdrop of yet another Sussex news cycle. The usual noise. The usual grievances, carefully timed for maximum disruption.

And the Wales family simply got on with it.

There was no reaction nor any visible distraction. No sense that the week had been anything other than what it appeared: a family enjoying Wimbledon, in the sunshine, together. There is a dignity in that response, or rather, in the absence of a response, that speaks volumes. When Harry started making his way to the UK, it was normal to receive media briefs that William had no plans to meet him. There was nothing of the sort this time around. Estrangement is the default.

We have an inkling (dare shall we say fervent hope) that as the years go by, whatever Harry and Meghan get up to matters less and less to the bigger picture. Because the actual business of monarchy, the real, daily, unglamorous work of it, is being carried out rather admirably by William and Catherine. A seemingly solid marriage, children who appear genuinely well-adjusted and happy to be out with their parents rather than shuffled off-camera, and a remarkably low level of self-inflicted drama. It is, in the current Royal climate, almost revolutionary.

Do let us know what you think. Is this steady “keep calm and carry on” approach doing the trick, in your view?

Yours in Royal Tea,

Lady Sinclair

Hello Dear Readers,

When we wrote about Prince Harry’s gamble against ANL/The Daily Mail earlier this year, we posed a fairly simple question: What exactly, is Harry’s endgame?

After reading an article in The Daily Mail yesterday, it’s dawned on us that the question we should’ve been asking all along is “What’s Harry actually got left to lose?” Turns out, quite a bit: what’s left of his privacy, the moral high ground on every complaint he’s ever made about press intrusion and any lingering chance of keeping up the whole Dragon Slayer self-mythologising act.

Charlotte Griffiths, The Daily Mail’s Editor at Large, on the other hand? She’s got nothing to lose whatsoever. And she says as much herself in that Mail piece we mentioned above. Let her set the scene:

It was a Friday in December 2011, and we’d been invited to a shooting weekend at a 4,000-acre estate in Hampshire that belonged to the wealthy family of a Bristol University graduate I’d befriended in Ibiza that summer. More on him later.

Harry had recently returned from California, where he’d been learning to fly helicopter gunships. I was a 27-year-old trainee journalist working on a gossip column for a very different British institution – The Mail on Sunday.

According to the table plan, the prince and I were to sit next to each other at dinner. And because Harry was doubtless wary about being introduced to an H&M-clad stranger, he decided to kick start our relationship by subjecting me to a little test.

From his pocket, he removed a small white pill. Then he held it up to my face, popped it on to my tongue, and said with a smile: ‘Now I know I can trust you!’

And Dear Readers, it’s downhill from here on in. As ever, Harry’s reactionary streak and his need to pin the blame for all his woes on others has blown up in his face spectacularly.

The publication of Spare basically gave journalists free rein to finally publish stories they’d been sitting on for years. Take, for instance, the tale of Harry doing a runner from his army training base just before the whole facility got locked down for a random drug test.

This story only came to light after Harry’s own disclosures about his drug use in Spare and it probably would never have seen the light of day at all if he hadn’t gone and written about it himself, essentially confirming the sordid details in the process.

When Harry took Associated Newspapers to the High Court over unlawful information gathering, the whole point was to paint himself as the victim of a rotten press that had hounded him his entire life. Instead, eleven weeks of evidence did something rather different: it put a spotlight on just how chummy he’d been with the very journalists he accused of destroying his life.

Nobody’s felt that more than Griffiths, whose old messages with Harry ended up read out in court. Facebook exchanges from 2011 and 2012 showed the pair on remarkably friendly terms, with Harry using pet names and reminiscing fondly about a country weekend and snuggling, despite telling the court under oath that he’d only ever met her once and cut her off the moment he twigged she was a journalist. For our musings on this very topic, do see the newsletter below:

And now Griffiths has gone further, publishing a candid essay for The Mail laying out the history of their friendship and, more damningly, how often stories about Harry actually made their way into print. Her account suggests it wasn’t shadowy phone hacking or private investigators doing the damage he claims, it was Harry himself, and the friends around him, talking.

She drives this point home brilliantly by pointing to a rather recent occasion last year.: the news that Harry’s representatives would be having lunch with his father, King Charles’s, people at the Royal Over-Seas League. Apparently The Mail didn’t luck into this tory by happenstance. And it wasn’t leaked by Buckingham Palace. By Charlotte’s account, it came from Harry’s very own camp:

“I can now reveal that, during the summer of 2025, a close adviser to Harry and Meghan had contacted me

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Hello Dear Readers,

We first put this linked newsletter out on 22 May 2024, just after Prince Harry popped over to the UK solo for a Thanksgiving Service and to mark the 10th anniversary of the Invictus Games and all hell broke loose. And honestly, the past two weeks have felt like déjà vu all over again. As ever, when it comes to King Charles and Prince Harry, context is absolutely key, especially when Harry starts pointing fingers and assigning blame.

The older newsletter is vital to understanding the Royal Family’s long-standing dance with the press, but, in our opinion, it’d would be a huge mistake to pretend Harry’s been entirely outside that waltz. Far from it. He’s had his own rather cosy relationship with the media. The run-up to the May 2024 visit, and everything that followed, made that, in our opinion, crystal clear.

The past few weeks have seen he and Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex doing the same. Our friend over at has been doing smashing work cataloguing how Harry and Meghan’s press operation contradicted and disrespected the journalists they tasked with helping make their trip a success.

And now it’s all gone tits up.

As recently as last week, Buckingham Palace was briefing that, contrary to briefings from the Sussexes, Harry hadn’t accepted their invitation to stay for his UK visit. Harry’s team this morning then released a rather pompous statement to the BBC stating they he had accepted the invitation, which prompted the Palace to step in say that the offer was no longer in play. Unbeknownst to us, on Saturday, Harry formally turned down the offer in writing, no less. But then, apparently, he changed his mind?

So if you’re keeping track: Harry's team knew full well the deadline had come and gone, and yet they went ahead and put out an announcement declaring his stay at Buckingham Palace all confirmed and sorted, presumably banking on the Palace just quietly going along with it rather than risk a bit of press bother. When that didn't quite pan out, Harry’s people had a strop and released a rather sniffy statement calling the Palace's decision to actually stick to its own rules “disappointing.”

For what it’s worth, Buckingham Palace isn’t budging. The line from the them is simple: Notice periods exist for a reason, staff need time to prepare and turning up late to say “Actually, yes” doesn’t undo that. So Harry’s having to stay elsewhere, his team are cross about it and the Palace, refreshingly, isn’t playing along with the last-minute changing of the story. And we haven’t even gotten to the best bit: The ruling in Harry's case against The Daily Mail is due out tomorrow. It’s understood that if he wins any part of his 14 claims, he plans to deliver a victory speech in public. So perhaps having him swanning in and out of the Monarch’s official residence right in the middle of that is hardly the best look, is it?

The Palace’s most recent view on all of this can be summed up in Hannah Furness’s article published today in The Daily Telegraph:

“It has taken quite some time for the King to lose patience with his younger son.

But after weeks of dithering, days of back-and-forth briefing, and the rejection of a long-standing invitation to stay at Buckingham Palace, he has finally had enough.

The King, whose parenting has hitherto been criticised for being too indulgent, has drawn a boundary for his 41-year-old son in a sharp lesson to be learnt publicly.

Buckingham Palace is not available on lastminute.com.”

Well said. And it’s about time.

To Harry, all of this chaos comes down to

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Good evening Dear Readers,

It's been quite the week for Prince William and Princess Catherine, the Prince and Princess of Wales, hasn't it?

Over the weekend, Catherine (nee Kate Middleton) took on the National Three Peaks Challenge: Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa, if you’re being proper about it), the highest points in Scotland, England and Wales, all summited within 24 hours. For those counting at home in their trackies, that’s 23 miles on foot, over 10,000 feet of climbing, and 462 miles of driving between the three, done through the night.

The challenge itself has been a rite of passage for hillwalkers and charity fundraisers for decades. Generations of ordinary Brits have taken it on in aid of everything from local hospices to national causes. What made this one different is who was doing it, and why. Princess Catherine did the climb in support of The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, the fundraising arm of the London hospital where she was treated for her cancer in 2024. She and William have been joint patrons of the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust for years, but this felt very personal.

In her own words, shared alongside the photos released by Kensington Palace, she described the trek as a chance to “explore life beyond diagnosis and to give something back.”

She talked about wanting to raise awareness of the deeper, often invisible toll of serious illness, and the importance of a whole-person approach to care. Not just treating the disease, but the person living through it. It’s a message that only really lands when it comes from someone who’s actually walked that path (quite literally in this case).

Just think about where she was two years ago.

A woman recovering from cancer treatment, easing back into public life step by careful step. And here she was, hauling herself up three of Britain’s toughest peaks in under a day, largely alone on the mountain, before being met at the bottom by William, the children and her family. Catherine’s always been the sporty sort, so it’s not hard to imagine how

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Hello Dear Readers,

What a week.

Does anyone else feel like we’re stuck on one of those merry-go-rounds whenever it comes to Prince Harry, Meghan Markle and their “recollections”? Their version of events has a funny habit of contradicting itself, or simply not holding up once a bit of time’s passed. Take Harry claiming in one lawsuit that Sir Edward Young, the late Queen’s Private Secretary, never passed on his offer to pay for security, only to turn up a year and a half later in another lawsuit waving round a letter Sir Young wrote on his behalf to the government, proving the “institution” had actually been pushing for him to get it.

This month’s been more of the same, really. We’ve banged on about Harry’s security so many times we’ve almost lost count. So rather than go through it all again, we thought we’d just dig out what we wrote two years back, when Harry popped over to the UK on 7 May 2024 and the whole circus kicked off. That visit came with its own little PR campaign claiming the King had snubbed him, a claim that turned out to be rubbish.

So, without further ado, here’s a portion of that old newsletter again, because it’s relevant today to understanding what Harry actually wants, why the King can’t simply hand it to him and just how little has actually changed.

What Harry Wants, Harry Doesn’t Get

Written 3 August 2024

If you haven’t yet read the People exclusive in its entirety, we suggest you do so first then come back here. Two sentences in, we found myself already fact-checking and we knew a second cup of strong tea was needed:

In the lead up to Harry’s trip, the Sussexes dropped some pretty substantial bread crumbs in the press. A multiple-press approach was utilised. Team Sussex enlisted the help of both US and UK media to circulate the same message: “Prince Harry is doing everything he can to see his family but they aren’t giving him the time of day”.

Given their history of misrepresentation, is it so surprising that King Charles’s hesitant to engage with someone who consistently uses the media to manipulate narratives? While Harry’s camp continues to portray a false image of reconciliation and progress, the reality is far more complex. Undoing the damage from the last five years isn’t instantaneous because of a headline you solicit. The root of their strained relationship isn’t because the King isn’t taking Harry’s calls. It lies in Harry’s demand that the King use his constitutional role to pressure the government, a request that was rightfully denied.

The People article emphasizes that under UK law, the King is constitutionally powerless to override the government’s decision to revoke Prince Harry’s taxpayer-funded, 24/7 security detail.

“Harry feels that as King Charles could intervene”?

Dear Readers, it appears Harry is engaged in a high-profile campaign to pressure his father, the King of England, into overturning an official government decision. This is nothing short of an attempt to bypass proper channels and secure special treatment. Doesn’t this reek of corruption? One can’t help but draw parallels to Prince Andrew, who famously used similar tactics to manipulate his mother into granting his wishes. In those instances, Prince Charles was left to play the role of the reluctant enforcer, explaining the grave consequences of unchecked royal privilege.”

Unlike his mother, King Charles doesn’t indulge Harry. Instead of learning from Prince Andrew’s mistakes, Harry is escalating the situation by blaming his father for something he didn’t do and legally shouldn’t control. Queen Elizabeth’s intervention was met with the government’s justified rejection. Accustomed to getting his way, Harry is now

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Hello Dear Readers,

We will be blunt because we’ve run out of patience.

Tonight we’ve had no fewer than four exclusively sourced stories across our tabloids and broadsheets, all conveniently sympathetic to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

The general thrust? Harry can do as he pleases. The Megxit deal has apparently been quietly rewritten in their favour. They’re “half in, half out” again, that phrase is doing a lot of work this week. There’s hope they’ll patch things up with the Prince and Princess of Wales. And the British public, we’re told, is finally coming round.

Oh, really?

But they weren’t finished there. Not by a long shot.

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Because we’ve now also had two further exclusives, one from The Sun, one from The Telegraph, leaking that the Home Office has rejected Harry’s request for round-the-clock Royal Protection Officers for the duration of his trip.

“The Duke was informed that his application for a security package for the visit had been denied. The family will not receive taxpayer-funded protection while in the UK other than when they are within royal residences”

Source close to Sussexes told The Telegraph:

“The precarious security and endless speculation is making logistics for the private security team increasingly difficult. The Home Office and Ravec are wilfully creating conditions that make it nearly impossible to move the family”

According to Sussex sources: “Among the options under consideration are to fly them in and out of Britain in one day, from mainland Europe, where the family is thought to be on holiday.”

So let’s see if we’ve got this straight: Harry and Meghan managed to fly out to Portugal with the children, a summer holiday, presumably, though one can never be entirely sure, and nobody was any the wiser.

And yet, rather than getting on with the actual business of sun, sand and enjoying themselves, they appear to be far more preoccupied with making sure the British press gets a running commentary on their travel plans and their grievances. Blow by blow. While allegedly on holiday. An international trip, mind you, that they achieved (moving the family) with no Home Office help!

So now Meghan and his children may not

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Hello Dear Readers,

Happy Monday! And welcome to this month’s free post. This one’s open to every subscriber and reader, no paywall in sight. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do so below. We’d love to have you join our little community.

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Now, onto the Royal Tea!

Yesterday marked Prince William’s 44th birthday, and the Prince and Princess of Wales celebrated by sharing a never-before-seen photo of William and Princess Charlotte from before Trooping the Colour.

Lovely stuff. Unless you’re The Daily Mail, of course.

Yesterday, a piece in the newspaper titled “‘His absences have not gone unnoticed’: NORMAN BAKER asks when ‘workshy William’ is ever going to step up - and reveals the number of engagements carried out so far this year by the future King.” was released.

What utter codswallop.

Now? It’s as good a moment as any to ask whether the Court Circular, the centuries-old ledger that's long been treated as gospel on royal “work”, still tells us anything useful at all. For our long-time subscribers, this opinion of ours is old hat. We’ve long been a proponent of doing away with the Court Circular.

This is not the first, nor will it be the last time, that Prince William has worn this particular criticism for years. When engagement counts get published, someone draws up a table and William’s numbers get held up as evidence of a man not quite pulling his weight.

Well-known veteran royal reporter and author Valentine Low noted, years back, that the press turned on William specifically when he didn't “play the game” the way they wanted him to. Which might, actually, be the whole point. He's not refusing to play. He’s playing a different game entirely. One the press, frankly, can't get a handle on.

A System Built for a Different Reign

To understand why the Circular feels so out of step, Dear Readers, you’ve got to remember who it was built for. The Court Circular, in its modern form, is practically tailor-made for Queen Elizabeth II. She was duty personified: stoic, unwavering, endlessly present. She turned up. She shook the hands. She unveiled the plaques. And the Circular dutifully logged every single one of them, tallying engagements like a child counting down the days until summer hols. For a monarch whose strength was visibility and sheer, relentless continuity, this system worked like a charm.

But the world the monarchy operates in has moved on rather a lot since 1953. Every handshake, every speech, every new initiative now gets broadcast, picked apart and judged in real time across Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. Visibility isn’t just about clocking in anymore. It’s about how you turn up, why you’re there, and what difference you’re actually making once the cameras have gone.

Take William’s work with the Jac Lewis Foundation, a Welsh mental health charity, in partnership with the Welsh Rugby Union, where William serves as Patron. Together they’ve funded a new mental health hub offering professional wellbeing and crisis support to hundreds of people at risk of suicide, and that’s before you factor in the knock-on reach to the families of everyone who walks through that door. Once you do, you’re talking about an initiative touching thousands of lives in a very tangible and real way.

What about Prince William funding £11 million to build 30 affordable eco-homes on the Isles of Scilly, specifically aimed at tackling a housing crisis that’s been brewing for years?

Or just look at the 2024 Earthshot Prize ceremony in Cape Town, it wasn’t held in some grand old hall, but in The Earthshot Prize Dome, a custom-built venue right next to Cape Town Stadium.

Designed and built in South Africa, it’s designed to be dismantled and reused for future events across the country, a brilliant example of sustainable thinking. At 36 metres wide, 15.5 metres tall, and stretching a whopping 144 metres (that’s twice the length of a rugby pitch), it was the largest structure of its kind on the African continent. And the production of it and Earthshot Ceremony itself? It created around 650 local jobs, giving a real boost to Cape Town’s creative industries.

There’s a real maturity to William’s approach to philanthropy. He treats the people he works with as equals…Adults with their own ideas, their own expertise, and their own vision. He’s not chasing quick wins or flashy headlines. He’s in it for the long haul

Or what about a property William bought privately last year, 60 Sanscroft Street, in Lambeth?

The building’s being redeveloped into 16 flats, all set to serve as transitional housing for people experiencing homelessness or those in need of more stable accommodation.

And it’s no small investment either. With the average flat in Lambeth going for around £500,000, the investment in this project clocks in at worth well over £8 million before renovation fees. The first units are expected to be ready by the end of next year, and William’s handing the reins to Centrepoint, a charity he’s been Patron of since 2005, to manage the site. Centrepoint’s been helping young people aged 16–25 find shelter and support for decades and this homesite will be a boon towards accomplishing their mission statement.

But go on, have a guess: Did this initiative show up in the official count of William’s “engagements” at the end of 2025? Of course not.

The Court Circular doesn’t capture any of that impact. As far as the ledger’s concerned, a thirty-minute plaque unveiling and a multi-year, multi-million-pound campaign to tackle homelessness are exactly the same: one tick, one line, one entry. That’s the disconnect that has to be addressed and is missing from The Mail’s hit-piece on William. If we want an honest conversation about who’s actually doing the work, we can’t keep using a system that flattens everything into identical units.

Not Every Royal Is Held to the Same Yardstick

Here’s where it gets a bit unfair, too. Princess Anne is, rightly, adored for her work ethic. She’s the family workhorse, clocking up hundreds of engagements a year with a no-nonsense, get-on-with-it attitude that the public absolutely laps up. She might pop into four separate patronages in a single day, forty minutes apiece and be back home for tea.

But nobody’s asking Anne to reinvent the institution. Nobody expects her to lead a national conversation on climate change or mental health. Knowing the ins and out of royal initiatives and events is our bread and butter and we could not name one long-standing initiative spearheaded by Princess Anne that is changing lives. But as 18th in line to the throne and being of an older generation, this does not matter.

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William? Doesn’t have that luxury. As heir to the throne, in his early forties, he’s not just another senior royal ticking off engagements. He’s the future of the whole institution, and in an era when trust in traditional institutions is looking decidedly shaky, that future needs to feel relevant, modern and worth keeping.

Simply showing up isn’t enough for William, whether that’s fair or not. The public want to see him lead: champion causes, build coalitions, actually use the platform for something. A photo op doesn’t cut it any more. People want impact, authenticity, transparency and if they don’t see it, they’ll scroll straight past, or worse, start questioning the point of the whole monarchy. Which, given it’s funded by taxpayers, is a perfectly reasonable thing to start questioning if nobody’s showing their working.

Look at what Princess Catherine’s been building with her Shaping Us campaign. That’s not a few school visits and a tidy press release. It’s a sustained, multi-year push to change how Britain thinks about early childhood. For an in-depth look at the impact of her work, please see the newsletter below.

Through the Royal Foundation’s Business Taskforce for Early Childhood, she’s nudged major UK employers to rethink parental support altogether. Deloitte rolled out 26 weeks of fully paid leave for all parents, miles beyond the standard fortnight most new dads get, which is barely enough time to work out which end of the nappy goes where. IKEA, NatWest and Iceland Foods have followed suit in their own ways, from funding early years teachers to backing baby banks and toddler meal schemes.

Then there’s William’s Earthshot Prize, rallying global innovation against climate change, with £15 million and counting already invested. None of this is a one-day splash. It’s legacy-building, designed for the long haul. And yet it barely registers in the Circular’s arithmetic, because the Circular counts events, not outcomes. It’s a tally sheet, not a measure of influence. Plaque-cutting might have done the job in the 1950s, and it still suits Anne’s generation perfectly well. But today’s audiences, particularly younger ones, want to see the Crown actually grappling with climate change, inequality, mental health, with purpose and staying power. They want the institution proactive, not just present.

So why the Hit-piece?

Since 2020, since Harry and Meghan stepped back, William’s relationship with the press has clearly been shaped by his grandmother’s old mantra: never complain, never explain. It was the Queen’s guiding rule, and William stuck to it religiously through the Oprah interview fallout and Harry’s memoir. At the time it read as simple loyalty, the Queen was still on the throne, after all. But the instinct hasn’t budged since her death either.

It’s worth remembering the alternative wasn’t exactly tempting from where William was standing. He grew up watching his parents’s marriage play out in excruciating public detail through the early ‘90s, anonymous interviews, pointed digs, Princess Diana with Martin Bashir, Charles’s painfully stiff sit-down with Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994. He saw exactly where that road leads.

So when William sat down for a genuinely candid chat with Eugene Levy, the reaction from royal correspondents told its own story. Roya Nikkhah wondered aloud why he’d chosen Levy over the BBC. Chris Ship spent his airtime grilling Levy on whether he’d been allowed to bring up Prince Harry, dragging in a subject that had nothing to do with the actual conversation, purely for the clicks. Which, if you think about it, answers its own question.

That’s precisely why Levy got the gig and the BBC didn’t. Harry barely featured, mentioned once, briefly, and only as past tense, because the interview was about the future, not the family soap opera. But clicks and drama are what the press is chasing, and there’s not much of either in a stable monarchy with a low-drama King and Queen-in-waiting. Just as Harry must sense his window for reconciliation narrowing the closer William gets to the throne, the press can clearly feel its access to the whole operation slipping too.

When William and Catherine started their family, they quietly threw out the old playbook for introducing royal children to the cameras.

Gone were the days of inviting photographers into the nursery for a formal shoot, or worse.

Dig up the Smithsonian’s archive footage on YouTube of a two-year-old William, barely able to form sentences, swarmed by microphones and lenses, and it’s genuinely uncomfortable to watch.

Part dystopia, part Truman Show and somehow that used to pass as normal. William and Catherine simply weren’t having it for their own children.

And from the moment they drew that line, the press has been trying to find a way back over it. Years spent looking for any excuse to claw back the access they used to take for granted.

So when journalists complain they’ve “lost control” of William, as if he were a leopard that slipped its enclosure, or sound vaguely put out that Levy “got more out of him” than any seasoned royal correspondent ever has, or mutter darkly that he’s “very controlled“, it all translates to the same complaint: he won’t let them push him around.

That’s the real sticking point. After Diana, Charles’s public standing took a proper battering, and while time’s healed a fair bit of that, not all of it. There’s a reason Queen Camilla still can’t crack fifty percent approval with the public. The King has spent close to four decades trying to win people back round and along the way his court has leaked, and kept leaking, feeding the press a steady diet of drama to keep the column inches filled, not unlike his younger son.

William doesn’t carry that same baggage. He and Catherine are, by a wide margin, the most popular working royals in Britain, and that’s held steady despite years of broadsides from Montecito, if anything the Waleses are more popular now than they were back in 2020. So when the press tries to take him down a notch, like this most recent “Workshy” grumbling it doesn’t really land.

None of which is to say William doesn’t need the press at all. Of course he does, it’s how his initiatives get any spotlight, how the case for a relevant monarchy gets made to the public. But he doesn’t need to grant access on his father and brother’s terms. He’s got other routes now. And that’s precisely what’s rattling the media.

Back to the Court Circular

The Court Circular is steeped in history, and that’s fine, tradition is part of the charm. But it’s no longer a sensible compass for judging royal relevance, and it’s well past time we found something better. The Circular can keep its place as a record of formal engagements. What it shouldn’t be allowed to do is define the worth of a generation that is plainly approaching the job differently.

Maybe what’s needed is something like a Royal Impact Index, pitched to the Palace properly: a measure capturing the full sweep of initiatives, partnerships and actual outcomes. Reach, resonance, real-world results. Social media engagement, campaign longevity, policy influence, alongside the steady, reliable engagement-counting that suits Anne so well. Those are the real markers of modern royal usefulness.

Because in the end, it was never just about showing up. It’s about showing up and making a difference. And that, Dear Readers, deserves rather more than a tick in a ledger.

Do let us know your thoughts below. Is it time we did away with the Court Circular altogether? We'll never argue that seeing more of Prince William wouldn't be a net positive for the monarchy...in fact, we'd go as far as saying that if he took even a leaf or two out of Princess Anne's book, the Montecito Duo might find a lot less of a vacuum to fill with their faux royal engagements and drama. There's surely room for both approaches, but we still lean towards wanting a far more comprehensive way of measuring impact, not just events.

Yours in Royal Tea,

Lady Sinclair

Hello Dear Readers,

You’ll have seen it everywhere by now. Page Six had it first, on the 8th of June, citing the usual unnamed “sources” who confirmed Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex hopes to bring Meghan Markle, Archie and Lilibet over for the Invictus Games’s “one-year countdown” event in Birmingham and, while he’s at it, fancies a crack at patching things up with his father.

Then, this week, suddenly everyone else has it too. News.com.au ran it as an “exclusive” yesterday. The Telegraph’s Victoria Ward (naturally) published its own version, which the BBC and ITV then duly credited as the original source, despite the fact Page Six had been sat on this for the better part of a fortnight already. CNN’s now covering it as a fresh story. It is, structurally, the same nine paragraphs wearing a different outlet’s letterhead, doing the rounds of every English-speaking media market. If we had to guess, Harry and his PR team were simply doing the rounds, making sure every major media market across the globe was thoroughly briefed on their arrival.

But, if you’ve been paying even half attention to this saga over the last six years, you’ll recognise the choreography immediately. This isn’t a leak. It’s a release schedule.

In 2023 of January during the Spare promotion tour, Prince Harry had a curious rejoinder when asked if he’d ever come back into the royal fold:

“Meghan and I had always wanted to continue to serve before our step back from the royal duties. If my father asks us for support across the Commonwealth, then that is certainly an open discussion”, Harry said.

To no surprise, except perhaps to Harry himself, no such ask or invitation materialised from King Charles. Harry wasn’t deterred. A year later, Charles’s cancer diagnosis was made public. Prince Harry made a quick trip to see his father for 30 minutes. In the days following, sources close to the Duke of Sussex let it be known that, yet again, he “was open to supporting” the royal family in their time of need:

The Duke of Sussex is willing to step into a temporary royal role while his father undergoes cancer treatment, it has been reported. Harry has told friends he would step into such a role while King Charles is unwell, according to The Times.

The duke and his father are said to have had several “warm exchanges”since the King’s illness was diagnosed, it was claimed. A royal source has also told the newspaper that Charles, 75, is keen to reconcile and see more of his son, and believes doing so would benefit the monarchy.

“Much has been said on both sides in recent years, but that has never diminished the fundamental bond of blood, and there are now pragmatic aspects to consider, with the King and Kate’s wellbeing ­paramount in this. The details of the Clarence House meeting and subsequent conversations are private, but the feeling is that this arrangement could work.”

Dear Readers, the query we had upon reading this obviously spoon-fed story was “Who’re the mystery people having feelings this arrangement, half-royal/half-influencer, could work”? And isn’t this the same arrangement the late Queen Elizabeth vetoed back in 2020 with the buy in from her son King Charles and grandson Prince William? We were right to be skeptical. The exact opposite happened. Many stories were written emphasizing Charles would always keep the door open for his son. But as far as him becoming a part time royal? That was nothing more than flights of fancy from the Sussex camp.

And over the years, we’ve seen this exact same strategy. It’s a beautifully predictable little dance: a “source close to Harry” floats some absolute fluff in the press about “warm exchanges” and “positive steps” being made with his father, only for Buckingham Palace sources to quietly put their foot down and counter the narrative. Then Harry pops over to the UK to do his usual faux royal act, gets completely frozen out by his father and brother, and his camp immediately runs back to the papers to have a proper whinge about it. Lather, rinse and repeat.

For a look at the most recent time they tried pulling this stunt, you can check out our newsletter from October 2025 below.

The Security Paradox

And here we are again. Our trouble with all of this? Where do we begin? Well, to start, this is a couple who have spent the better part of a decade telling us, repeatedly, passionately, occasionally tearfully, how much they loathe press intrusion. Harry’s entire legal crusade against the Home Office, the one that’s cost the British taxpayer over half a million pounds and counting, was built on the argument that he and his family are at genuine, serious risk and that the current arrangement, which requires him to give the Home Office thirty days notice of any UK visit so it can be assessed case by case, isn’t good enough to keep them safe.

He told the BBC last year, in so many words, that he couldn’t see a world in which he’d bring his wife and children back to this country under the current setup. His barrister stood in the Court of Appeal and told the judge his client’s “safety,” his “security,” his “life” was at stake.

So explain this to us: how is it that the Home Office, a government department with statutory confidentiality obligations, apparently can’t be trusted with thirty days notice without it amounting to an unacceptable risk to his family, and yet the entire English-speaking world has now had several weeks notice, splashed across four continents worth of tabloids, with exact details of which children are coming and roughly when?

If you genuinely believed

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