I Saw Harry’s Alleged Stalker in Court This Week

When I was in the Royal Courts of Justice on Monday, I thought I saw the woman alleged to be Prince Harry’s stalker lined up outside courtroom 76 to get access after lunch on Day One, when his team were laying out his case.

His legal team were about to resume setting out their arguments and, because all the press seats were taken, I had joined the line for members of the public.

I did notice that the court staff who decide how many people are allowed into the public stands, usually as few as 10-12, conveniently cut off entrance to the court just as she reached the top of the line (I think she was 9^th), which, from my previous experience at court, seemed a little strict. Usually, they squash people in like sardines.

She looked kind of pissed off and stalked off into the depths of the court building, disappearing into its musty warren of corridors.

I went to an overflow room with a video link, but she did not appear there. At the time, I doubted it could really be the same woman who had been written about as Harry’s alleged stalker; it seemed extraordinary that she could get that close.

She also looked slightly different from images I had previously seen, and I wondered if she might be wearing a wig.

However, I now believe that she was indeed the woman Harry regards as the stalker, after I read a report by Victoria Ward in the Telegraph, which said the alleged stalker had managed to enter Court 76 twice while Harry was there. Ward said that the woman was able to get into the courtroom and sat only a few rows behind the prince.

A little context is necessary here. The woman has long presented herself not as a threat but as a devoted supporter. She has been described as a member of the so-called “Sussex squad” of committed fans. She first got physically close to Harry and Meghan in Nigeria during their trip there. Photographs from that visit show her beside Meghan, and there was no sign at that point that the couple or their team regarded her as dangerous.

By September, however, I understand she had been placed on a police list of “fixated” individuals.

Around that time, there were two further encounters. At a WellChild event in London, the main public engagement of Harry’s that week, she is said to have entered the hotel hours early and hidden in the toilets, emerging when she knew the prince was nearby.

Even then, she did not manage to get right up to him.

At a separate charity visit connected to the provision of prosthetics for injured servicemen, she did. According to Harry’s side, she walked towards him, and an ex-military member of his staff physically blocked her just feet from the prince, before hustling Harry inside as doors were slammed behind them. That incident has since been cited by his team as part of the case for improved protection.

My own experience last week underlined how easy it would be for someone determined to cause harm to approach a high-profile figure at the Royal Courts of Justice. The security regime is, in practice, quite soft. You place your belongings in a tray, send them through an ageing X-ray machine, and walk through a scanner watched by a handful of guards. Given that, statistically, a significant number of people entering the building are defendants or individuals with deep grudges against one another, the laxity is surprising.

On the first morning, I accidentally carried in a heavy metal camera tripod I was using for outside broadcasts.

Folded down, it was about 15 inches long and easily solid enough to be used as a weapon, especially if partially extended. No one noticed it when my bag went through the machine. Only when I returned after lunch, put the same bag back on the belt, and the tripod showed up on the screen did a guard pull me aside, give me a stern telling-off, and insist I check it in. Tripods are on the official list of banned items, for obvious reasons, yet it had slipped through once without comment.

(I made a mistake taking it in, but in my defense, I am new to doing my own YouTubes etc, and didn’t customarily walk around with a tripod before October last year, so I wasn’t aware of the protocol.)

Those who support Harry getting his security renewed will, of course, say this incident is a powerful illustration of why Harry needs proper, armed police protection in the U.K. rather than relying on private security guards.

That said, the presence of one fixated fan in a public courtroom is unlikely to influence the RMB and RAVEC committees, which are currently deciding whether Harry and his family should receive automatic police protection every time he comes to Britain. A stalker-type figure turning up to see a famous person at an open court is not unprecedented.

However, the episode does highlight how exposed Harry is under the arrangements currently in place. Whatever the legal principles of open justice and equal access to the courts, it is hard to imagine a similarly obsessed individual being allowed to sit yards behind Prince Andrew, who does still have RAVEC-mandated police protection, if he had been giving evidence in the same building. In those cases, police officers would almost certainly have found a way to move the person on long before they reached the courtroom door.

What this incident also shows is the weakness of the “bespoke” security package that Harry was told he would receive whenever he visited the U.K. From what I have been told by his camp, that tailored arrangement in practice amounts to as little as a phone number for a police liaison officer rather than an actual deployment of officers around him. During this latest hearing, there were again no police bodyguards with Harry; he relied on his own private security team, who had no authority inside the court to remove a member of the public they considered a risk.

The behavior of a single fixated fan will not convince officials that Harry should get full, automatic, state-funded protection the moment his plane touches down at Heathrow.

And, clearly, Harry could bring his children to visit their grandfather, the King, safely under the current arrangements if both sides made a concerted effort.

I do think Harry was hugely unwise to aggravate the situation by detailing how he had killed 25 members of the Taliban in his memoir, and to include an account of chasing one man riding a motorbike who was being hunted down by an Apache helicopter he was crewing. I understand how this looks to many people like a cynical attempt to raise his own threat level to get security (although I think it was just stupidity).

There is no denying that Harry whizzing through London with a police escort and outriders would telegraph a very different level of legitimacy than Harry stuck in London traffic. I suspect being treated as a royal again by the state would be a balm to his wounded pride.

That said, he has been clear he wants the security detail reinstated to avoid another tragedy (like what happened to his mother), and the British state clearly has a responsibility to make sure the son of the King is better shielded than he was inside Court 76 last week.