Cruel, Self-Serving, and Paranoid, the Cynical Sussexes Just Humiliated Their Last and Most Powerful Advocate

Well, if I’m irritated, imagine how King Charles is feeling today.

On Saturday evening, barely 20 hours after the Sussex office had sent out a detailed operational note to the media (a precise, minute-by-minute rundown of everything Meghan and Harry were planning to do on their tour of the United Kingdom), news leaked to the Sun that, actually, Meghan and the kids (maybe) wouldn’t be coming after all.

The reason his team gave for (maybe) pulling the plug is that they have been denied a security package by RAVEC.

Let me say this as plainly as I can: Harry has not had a security package from RAVEC for well over half a decade. He has been told this over and over again. He has challenged it in the courts and lost.

The idea that the continuation of the status quo represents some sudden and dramatic development, a bolt from the blue that justifies upending the plans of dozens of organizations, betraying the trust of every journalist and reader who took the Sussexes at their word (guilty), and plunging the entire tour into chaos, is not just absurd. It is insulting to everyone’s intelligence.

And it gets worse. In the very same operational note that they published on Friday, the Sussex office themselves acknowledged that they did not have RAVEC security.

They said ON FRIDAY that the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (RAVEC) had “not conducted” a risk assessment, meaning they wouldn’t get RAVEC cover.

They said that, in a document sent out under their own authority, and said that they were going ahead with the tour anyway. No security, no problem, we’re coming.

Whatever caused a switch to flip in Harry’s troubled head, his response was a childish fit of self-pity. His voice was “breaking” on receiving the news in his Montecito mansion, I am told, and he then began raging, as usual, at the palace functionaries he has previously described as “men in grey suits” for “keeping him” from his father.

He then proceeded to throw his toys out of the pram, and throw the entire tour into jeopardy.

I can’t really offer my readers an apology for taking an operational note at face value. As a journalist you have to assume such documents are in-good-faith statements of intent or you can’t do much.

Yes, it’s a bit embarrassing to have been conned. But think of the King. And think of the veterans who this tour was supposed to be about supporting!

It is now blatantly apparent what this whole exercise was about. The tour, the announcement that Meghan and the kids were coming, the whole carefully choreographed media rollout, the months of assurances to the royal household that this was happening, the accommodation requests, the detailed planning: it was all just to bounce his poor, weak, loving father into intervening in the government’s security decision-making, something Charles, to his eternal credit, has refused to do.

This is the high-water mark of Harry’s emotional blackmail. Think about what he is actually doing here. He is telling his father that unless the King intervenes to override a government security committee, he will not get to see his grandchildren. He is weaponizing Charles’s love for his son, seeking to exploit the King’s emotional vulnerability, his longing to see Archie and Lilibet, and using all of it as leverage to pressure him into intervening with RAVEC on his behalf.

It is sickening to think it may all have been done for that purpose. But the evidence now points overwhelmingly in that direction.

When it didn’t work, when Charles did not pick up the phone and override the security apparatus of the British state to give his boy what he wanted, Harry blew the whole thing up.

Meghan gets what Meghan wants, or nobody gets anything.

I think it’s wrong to subject your own father to that kind of manipulation. I think most people would agree that emotional blackmail directed at a 77-year-old cancer patient by his own son, using grandchildren as the currency, is about as low as it gets. But let’s set even that aside for a moment, because the real victims here are the people Harry and Meghan say they exist to help.

This tour was supposed to be about Invictus, wasn’t it? About the men and women who have sacrificed their bodies and minds for their country? So let’s think about them for a moment.

Let’s think about the people who have spent the past two years working to put the Invictus event together, which now seems to play second fiddle to Harry and Meghan’s arrogance and ego, the organizers, the coordinators, the logistics teams who have poured their time and energy into making this work.

Think about the staff at the Chelsea Hospital who had prepared for a visit, who had organized their schedules and their patients and their plans around the expectation that the Sussexes were coming. Think about every charity, every organization, every volunteer who rearranged their lives on the strength of Harry and Meghan’s promises, now revealed to be false and conditional on their own status.

All of them, discarded in a heartbeat because Harry didn’t get his security reinstated.

As Tom Bower said on my show the other day, the Invictus Games have become the Meghan Games. How right he is.

The wounded veterans, the hospital patients, the charity workers, the palace staff who spent months preparing apartments and drawing up plans: none of them matter. None of them even register. They are props in the Sussex psychodrama, to be picked up and put down as the mood takes them.

And this is what really stings about the whole affair. It’s not that Harry and Meghan are selfish (we knew that). It’s not that they are manipulative (we knew that too). It’s that they are willing to do all of this in the name of the very people they are letting down. They will stand on a stage and performatively clothe themselves in the language of service and sacrifice and the nobility of the military spirit, and then, in the very next breath, use those same veterans as bargaining chips in a family row about status and protection officers. The hypocrisy is staggering, and I think people are revolted by it.

Naturally, none of this is Harry’s fault. It never is. Bafflingly, it all seems to be the fault of the King’s private secretary, Sir Clive Alderton, an affable, public-spirited man trying to do his best to look after the interests of the King in the face of a series of horrific betrayals by a money-hungry, failing Sussex organisation. Alderton is probably on about £100k a year, tops. Harry and Meghan made over $100 million dollars by betraying their family. But sure, Alderton is the villain here. Alderton is the one keeping Harry from his father. It would be laughable if it weren’t so contemptible.

Everything is always someone else’s fault. We saw this pattern over and over again in “Spare,” and it is worth revisiting those examples now, because they illuminate the psychology at work in this latest debacle with painful clarity.

When Harry decided to wear a Nazi uniform to a costume party, whose fault was it? William’s and Catherine’s, because they laughed at it. Not Harry’s, for choosing to dress as a member of the Wehrmacht. William and Catherine’s, for finding it funny. That was the story he told himself, and that was the story he published to the world.

When he shaved his head at Eton, whose fault was it that he looked ridiculous? William’s, for telling him it wasn’t a great idea. Not Harry’s, for shaving his head. William’s, for pointing out the obvious.

When Harry wanted to wear a beard at his wedding, in violation of an Army regulation (that dates back to the First World War, when facial hair prevented gas masks from forming a proper seal with the face) and was told he couldn’t, who did he blame? William, naturally. It ended up having to be adjudicated by the Queen, of all people. A row about facial hair, elevated to the sovereign, because Harry could not accept being told no.

Every single time, with every single grievance, it is never Harry’s fault.

Harry knew he didn’t have security. He knew he wasn’t getting security. He has known this for years. And he organized this entire tour anyway, spinning along everybody in the media, his charities and in royal service for over six months, telling them it was happening, that they needed accommodation, that Meghan and the children were coming. Apartments were made ready. Plans were drawn up. People across the royal household and across the charitable sector went out of their way to make it work. The King himself, at considerable personal cost to his relationship with William, extended an olive branch and offered to facilitate the visit.

And it turns out the whole thing was a cynical ploy to force Charles’s hand on security. When the gambit failed, Harry torched everything rather than simply turn up without a RAVEC detail (which, let us not forget, is precisely what he said he was going to do on Friday).

I think people can see now why the British public, William, former employees and Netflix feel the way they do about the Sussexes—keep them well away, please. Harry has gone from a 70-plus per cent approval rating to the 20s. Meghan’s brand is utterly toxic. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because, over and over again, people watch you say one thing and do another. They watch you claim to care about wounded veterans while using them as leverage in a family argument about your status. They watch you shamelessly lecture people about service while treating every person and every institution around you as an utterly disposable means to an end, given none of the respect or consideration you so volubly demand for yourself.

This is a man who is willing to let down and betray every single person foolish enough to give him the benefit of the doubt (I include myself here in the matter of this tour, but, more significantly, the veterans and the King) rather than accept a reality he doesn’t like.

Incredibly, Harry’s office is still saying the family might come to the U.K., potentially only for a single day (the duration of Harry’s own visit is unaffected).

And do you know what, I actually think they are so shameless, so cruel and so irredeemably stupid that they will still come.

Harry has said he has suffered severe mental episodes in the past and I think it is obvious from his paranoid ranting that he is genuinely having some kind of breakdown and has lost touch with normal mores, fed by his obsession with therapy (including the psychedelic drug-based therapy he has boasted of using) which so often prioritizes self.

As for Meghan, she has shown us over the years that she delights in attention. I don’t think she will care too much how it is generated. She has shown zero regard for protecting her children from the spotlight (as her Instagrams demonstrate, where she uses them the whole time) and the fact that they are the ancillary weapon in this disgusting attempt to blackmail the British state is totally par for the course.

The people this reflects most badly on are the grasping, venal Sussexes. But I’m afraid that we must be clear: this is a grotesque humiliation for a King who has only ever tried to be fair, at considerable personal cost to his relationship with his other son.

I said it would end badly and that the King was making a mistake, but even I could not predicted the Sussex would shame themselves this quickly.

The King must now learn his lesson, like the rest of us, and like William. The olive branch must be withdrawn. They can book a damn hotel if this is how they are going to behave. If they do come, and the King agrees to meet them, or honor them with accommodation at a royal palace, which I genuinely still fear he might, I think his subjects will be utterly appalled.