No one stimulates comments among HELLO! readers like the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Their ongoing fisticuffs with the royal family prompt three types of response: anger at their betrayal of the royal family, anger at their treatment by the royal family or anger at HELLO! for reporting on them so often.
Harry and Meghan are very much a couple for the internet age. Their tendency to play out their grievances in public was on full display this week as Harry was variously “looking at options” for a visit without police protection for his wife and children, announcing that he had accepted an invitation to stay at Buckingham Palace, and being told that his acceptance had come so late that there wouldn’t be enough staff to look after him.
Jane, commenting while Harry and Meghan were still mulling their options, said: “H and his family could easily fly in, celebrate with those in the [royal family] prepared to give them the time of day, and fly out with none being any the wiser. And he has been promised security if the dates are provided. He is attention seeking his own worst enemy.”
I am sceptical that he and his family could slip into the country unnoticed, especially as he is here to promote the next Invictus Games next year. But a more pressing question is whether he would want to go incognito given that this trip gives him the opportunity to press his case with the Home Office into reconsidering whether he warrants police protection.
Margi, responding to a report about Harry and his family holidaying in Europe, questioned why they were happy to travel there but not in the UK. “Wait, they are already in Europe? If the safety of their children is paramount, what is the security arrangement while they travel there? This is just another bid by the spare to become relevant.”
We don’t know where Harry took his wife and children in continental Europe, but security conditions are different there. His private bodyguards are freer to carry arms in Portugal, where they reportedly have a holiday home, or in France, where they might have visited their friend Sir Elton John. A private security report prepared for Harry and leaked recently to ITV and the Daily Telegraph suggested that Harry faces an “elevated” risk in the UK, where he has been the focus of “at least six plots… from jihadist and right-wing threat actors”.
Not every HELLO! reader takes a dim view of the Duke with Elaine highly sympathetic to his plight: “[Harry] has said he would pay for his security but he needs access to the information that Scotland Yard has regarding threats which they have not been willing to provide. He can’t have security that is appropriate without having access to the intelligence that is pertinent to his own personal safety… He is not being unreasonable, he didn’t choose to be born into this family but being born into this family is why he requires security.”
Harry’s strategy for his current visit appears to be a PR disaster
Paul also noted that Harry had offered to pay for police protection but that the Home Office had demurred. He suggested that “Taylor Swift’s personal security had guns had guns,” Paul wrote under an article suggesting that Meghan would have her first engagement since leaving the royal family.
I’m not sure exactly what Paul was referring to, but if it was Taylor’s police protection during her UK leg of her Eras tour (after Austrian police intercepted a terror plot against her) then officers were not armed.
Chase thinks that it is up to Harry to ensure that the King gets to see his grandchildren: “The King not being able to see Harry’s children is on Harry. Harry refuses to believe that the King has no control over what kind or if any security Harry and his family will have when in the UK. Is the threat to Harry’s family so high that it overrides the King from seeing his grandchildren regularly?”
He asks a question on many readers’ minds: is Harry’s campaign against the press and Buckingham Palace worth the personal sacrifices? If he doesn’t bring the children to see the King now, when will he next have the chance?
Harry’s strategy for his current visit appears to be a PR disaster, with no shift in policy on the reinstatement of police protection and an embarrassing back and forth about whether he might stay at Buckingham Palace. But there is hope. If lessons can be learnt then perhaps there might be another chance when he returns for Invictus next year.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.celebrity.land.com ’
