Boris Johnson’s memoir will be out on October 10th, and his publisher is trying to hype the book by releasing choice excerpts and previews. One of the big excerpts – the one which has gotten the most attention in the UK – is Boris Johnson writing that in January 2020, he was tasked with prevailing upon Prince Harry to stay in the UK. The timeline: BoJo became prime minister in the summer of 2019, and Harry and Meghan left the UK for a “Christmas holiday” in Canada in December 2019. By early January, they announced their intention to step away from the royal family, and by January 13th, Harry was meeting with his family and the courtiers alone at Sandringham and working out the terms of Sussexit. Then, just days later, Harry and Boris both attended the UK-Africa investment summit. Boris pulled Harry aside and they spoke alone for twenty minutes as Boris tried to convince him to stay in the UK. Boris apparently writes that the meeting was not his idea – that Buckingham Palace and Downing Street asked him to speak to Harry and make the last-ditch appeal. Now Buckingham Palace claims that they didn’t ask BoJo to do anything.
Boris Johnson was not asked by Buckingham Palace to try and persuade Prince Harry to stay in the UK, The Telegraph understands. The former prime minister claims in a new book that he was asked to give the Duke of Sussex a “manly pep talk” to convince him not to step back from his royal duties. He says that officials from Buckingham Palace and Downing Street made the request in the belief that a last-minute intervention, in January 2020, might encourage the Duke to change his mind.
In Unleashed, his memoir which will be published on Oct 10, Mr Johnson describes “a ridiculous business… when they made me try to persuade Harry to stay. Kind of manly pep talk. Totally hopeless”. The pair enjoyed an “informal” 20-minute meeting, which took place behind closed doors on the margins of a UK-Africa investment summit in London’s Docklands, on January 20, 2020.
Sources close to the Duke confirmed that the then prime minister did suggest that both he and Meghan remain in the UK.
However, sources with knowledge of such meetings at the time insisted that the Palace did not ask Mr Johnson to intervene. While it cannot be ruled out that a member of the Downing Street team suggested that it might be worth mentioning to the Duke, there was no specific formal request. By that point, all involved had realised that any attempt to persuade the Sussexes to stay would be futile. The following day, Prince Harry flew to Canada to be reunited with Meghan and their son, Archie.
The previous evening, the Duke had delivered a speech at an event for Sentebale, his charity based in Lesotho, in which he said he had “no other option” but to step back from royal life and spoke of his sadness that it had “come to this”. A week earlier, on Jan 13, the Duke had joined his grandmother, Elizabeth II, father and elder brother for the so-called Sandringham Summit, to thrash out the terms of his exit.
The current “Buckingham Palace” saying this is not the same as the “Buckingham Palace” in January 2020. Different courtiers, different CEO. It’s possible that QEII and her courtiers did request it, but then-Prince Charles and Clarence House did not. We know for sure that Kensington Palace didn’t request jacksh-t – they were doing the most to push Harry out and leak everything that was said during the summit. This is a beef between Charles and his dead mother about what to do about Harry – QEII clearly wanted Harry’s exit to be handled with more sensitivity, more delicacy and more warmth. But the whole point of the “hard Sussexit” was, in Charles’s mind, to force the Sussexes to capitulate and come back, broke and broken. The fact that it now looks like the monarchy asked the whole-ass prime minister to beg Harry to stay is not the image the current monarchy wants to project.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.