“I’m happy about it,” the president, 80, said when the couple’s transatlantic relocation came up during an Oval Office question-and-answer session Wednesday. “I was not a fan.”

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https://youtu.be/fi-yxhEbpsg?si=u0ATQH9kBTkFEvCs

Well guys, I am absolutely thrilled to say that the one and only Plum Sykes, my sister, will be joining me on the podcast this evening. We also have the inimitable Paula Froelich who will be lifting the lid on why Hollywood insiders are convinced that Meghan is filming a new series in the UK. Hope you can join us. 10 pm London time, 5 pm New York York time I will try and be in the comments! See you there.

https://youtu.be/fi-yxhEbpsg?si=u0ATQH9kBTkFEvCs

“Prince Andrew .. committed sex crimes in the US,” the Kentucky Republican said, as he read out a list of 14 people he described as Jeffrey Epstein’s collaborators, including former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley, the magician David Copperfield, and the retail billionaire Les Wexner.

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Thompson joins the departing ranks of Sir Clive Alderton, the King’s private secretary and Bernie Flannery, his long-time butler of more than 40 years. The Palace said that Thompson, who was dubbed the “hot equerry” after photos of him in a kilt became an unlikely internet thirst trap, will pursue a career in the private sector, is also leaving the British Army after nearly 22 years of military service.

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Not Annabel Elliot.

The Queen’s younger sister, according to an astonishing report by Gabriel Pogrund in The Sunday Times, is being paid by the King’s Foundation (His Majesty’s flagship charity) for “branding” and “retail” consultancy.

The exact amount is unknown, but given that the arrangement came about after Prince William, upon taking over the Duchy of Cornwall on his father’s accession, promptly removed Elliot from its payroll, where she had collected hundreds of thousands of pounds over two decades advising Charles on interiors, one imagines it’s not, what’s the phrase I am looking for, one peppercorn if demanded?

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The friend added: “The King’s faith has played a part but ultimately this is a strategic decision for the good of the family. The stand-off needed to be resolved.”

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The friend added that nothing “concrete” would have been possible without a complete resolution of all Harry’s court cases and said they considered it “vanishingly unlikely” Harry would appeal his thumping civil defeat by the publisher of the Daily Mail that has landed him and his seven co-plaintiffs with a potential £35m ($50m) bill.

Asked if William approved of his father’s tacit consent to Harry coming home, the friend said that the King had made it clear William and the future of the monarchy was the King’s “top priority.” The friend wouldn’t be drawn into a discussion of any “differences of opinion on specifics” between the monarch and his heir, saying only that William and Catherine were a credit to the monarchy and that Charles was “immensely proud” of them.

The comments represent the first time a close ally of the King has spelt out any details of the King’s strategic thinking, and offered anything other than an emotional justification or response to Harry’s return home.

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The thoughts were relayed to me in response a recent series of articles and videos I have published calling on the King to provide clarity vis-à-vis Harry’s situation, and saying that is is absurd that the King has remained hidden away in Scotland enjoying the grouse season and attending shoot lunches while the debacle unfolds.

I have argued that the King should have returned to London to signal that he understood how gravely offended his people are by Harry’s return without an apology, and that some significant censure (such as, for example removing by fiat the family’s HRH’s which are already in abeyance) would reassure the public that Harry is not being positioned for an advantageous new settlement.

One former courter told me they were unsurprised that the King’s response was to “lose himself among the Highland heather and hills” and “bury his head in Duchy lemon posset.”

The entire point of a constitutional monarch is to unify the nation and provide a cohesive head at the top of it and yet on the single most divisive royal question of his reign (what is Harry’s role? Is he a working royal, a private citizen, a counsellor of state, all three at once?) he has said absolutely nothing. He has let a Labour MP call Harry a hero, let a former Home Secretary lobby for his security, let his son’s friends and media employees brief the newspapers, his head filled instead with the sound of Purdey shotguns being discharged!

The late Queen understood, when faced with an analogous crisis, that Andrew had to go. One source told me that she was the head of a family and the head of an institution, but that when the two knocked against each other, the institution always came first. Firing Andrew extracted a huge emotional toll on her.

There are terrible parallels with the frozen royals sequestering themselves in Balmoral after Diana’s death in 1997, but this time there is no noble cause of children to protect.

The old friend noted the extraordinary engagement from my audience on the articles and videos so it is good to know that somebody, somewhere is listening to me—and you!

The friend’s breezy assurance that the King is keeping William’s interests top of mind cut little ice with a friend of William’s who declined to discuss the matter at all, continuing the Wales’ policy of ignoring Harry and Meghan’s provocations both on and off the record. This policy of total disengagement, which was instituted after Caterine’s diagnosis, has been enormously successful for the Wales’ who have seen their personal popularity rankings climb to the high 70s over the past year. It may be harder to continue with it, however, with Harry and Meghan back on UK soil.

The couple are believed to be staying with hedge fund billionaire Ian Wace. Locals I’ve been on the phone with about the new arrivals are by turns amused, entertained, appalled and titillated by their new neighbors.

One source said: “A lot of them simply can’t wait to see if Meghan really is as ghastly as everyone makes out.”

Another source, a friend of other royals (but not the King) told The Royalist: “If the King didn’t want Harry and Meghan here, they wouldn’t be here. Words would have been dropped in the right ears to ostracize them and the newspapers would have been briefed that the King was not on board with it. That is very definitely not happening. The King clearly wants them to be happy and settle here, and he and his staff are doing nothing to obstruct that. It’s a huge opportunity for Harry and Meghan to start again.”

Another source said that Theo Rycroft, the King’s deputy private secretary, was helping to mastermind the King’s response to Harry’s return.

Rycroft is in the running to take over from arch-hawk Sir Clive Alderton, who announced his resignation three weeks before Harry and Meghan’s return. At the Royal Ascot race meeting some hawks, I am told, openly described Harry’s attempts to get security for his family return to the UK in July (which can now very clearly be understood as the amuse-bouche to this week’s main course) as “emotional blackmail.”

This is what I write on the matter on June 21 this: The hawks, led by Sir Clive Alderton, the King’s private secretary, believe that Harry’s behavior is unforgivable and that the monarchy will be harmed if Harry and Meghan are replatformed by the king. William sides with them. They are described by Harry as the “men in grey suits.”

The doves, led by former diplomat Theo Rycroft, Alderton’s deputy (who is expected to succeed him in the fullness of time) are aligned with the King’s wish to reconcile with Harry and let bygones be bygones in service of the Victorian myth of the model family.

[The hawks] 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.”

Well, the hawks are well and truly finished now. The King may find that the British people, by whose consent he reigns, are less easily persuaded than his paid employees by the arguments of the wisdom of reconciling with and forgiving someone who hasn’t even got round to apologizing.

Gill (host of Triggered on Talk, and one of the funniest and sharpest new voices writing about the royals on Substack) joined me to dissect a People magazine story in which a friend of Meghan’s declared: “My biggest concern is the level of media attention she’ll face in the UK. I’m worried for her.”

I know, I know. NOTHING screams leave me alone like arriving in a gigantic private jet after a global media briefing campaign, does it!

“She hasn’t even unpacked her suitcase yet,” said. “The Sussexes are returning to Britain, but they haven’t left their emotional baggage behind. They’ve brought it with them.” Everything you read in People, she noted (adding a cheerful “allegedly”), comes “directly from the Sussex Spin Machine,” and this is “them trying to paint Meghan out as the victim yet again.”

Samara makes the case that there is a deliberate blurring of two entirely different things: “You’ve got unpleasant press coverage. That’s not actually the same thing as paparazzi intrusion... headlines are not actually a risk factor.”

Gill was blunt about Meghan’s standing: “Meghan is a celebrity. She’s a public figure. She’s put herself out there time and time again, and she’s profiteering from her face, her name, her children, and I think she’s fair game.”

We got into the deep history of the victimhood project, from Tom Bower’s anecdote about Meghan asking the Garter King of Arms, before she was even married, for a nightingale with its tongue cut out as her heraldic symbol, to the confiscated passport claim (Buckingham Palace sources were at the time clear that that was a lie.)

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Despite this performative statement of triumphal return (“It all went great!”) Harry and Meghan are refusing to confirm that they are in the United Kingdom.

The thinking seems to be that it would undermine their own argument about privacy if they briefed about their movements, or maybe they just believe they will have a stronger case to sue newspapers that publish details of where they live or where their kids are going to school if they have never said a word about it (I’m not sure Justice Nicklin would be convinced.)

The bigger point is that every phone in the Cotswolds is going mad, the WhatsApp groups are afire, and everybody from Stow-on-the-Wold to Fleet Street thinks they know where the family are going to be living, and where the kids are going to school (I certainly do).

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The top line for me is what I have been saying here since the news broke, based on a conversation I had with a friend of Harry’s in March: that Harry and the kids are moving back, while Meghan will come and go.

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It might seem incredible that Harry and Meghan, who less than four years ago were roundly criticizing the British royal family (with Harry at one point telling The Telegraph: “You know what you did, and I now know why you did it. And you’ve been caught, so just come clean and we can then all move on…they just couldn’t help themselves”), now appear, without having issued any apology or even an expression of regret for having upset people, to be coming back to the United Kingdom with many of the benefits of being members of the royal family.

Any idea that the King is not nodding this through is, frankly, absurd.

It’s going to go down incredibly badly, the notion that these two people who think the monarchy is terrible, cruel, duplicitous, deceptive, uncaring (pick your own pejorative adjective) are now back in a better position than any non-working members of the family have ever been in, and we are now being softened up for them to be given full security, at huge cost, as we saw in the newspapers this weekend.

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Interestingly, the figures on whether people approve of Harry and Meghan’s decision to return to live in the UK is a closer call 34 percent say no, 27 percent say yes, and 39 percent don’t know. But most people clearly perceive the homecoming as a dangerous thing for the monarchy, with 22 percent saying it will make the institution weaker and only 8 percent saying it will make it stronger.

There are much stronger figures on whether Harry and Meghan should apologize for implying the royal family were racist: 43 percent say yes, against 26 percent who say no. Financial reasons are given by 36 percent as the likely explanation for the couple’s return to the UK.

One of the most divisive issues of all, of course, is who should pay for their security in the UK, and there has been a great deal of reporting on this because RAVEC has apparently finally commissioned an RMB (a risk management board) which could unlock security for Harry and his family. Some politicians have recently said he should get it, so this is a live issue.

But the extent of the opposition is very clear: 68 percent say they should pay for their own security, while just 2 percent say taxpayers should cover it. You would be naive to think that doesn’t feed into the decision-making process. Meanwhile, 16 percent think the couple should become working members of the royal family again.

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