In April 2019, the Times had a bombshell story about what was happening behind the scenes at Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace as courtiers tried to figure out what to do about Prince William and Kate on one side, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex on the other side. There were multiple quotes and revelations in this piece which proved to be accurate. Not only accurate, but prescient about the real fear (within the palace) that they were simply going to lose Harry and Meghan’s star power if they didn’t properly manage them. Palace officials were talking openly about sending Harry and Meghan away, outside of the UK, but in an official capacity with some kind of title and job, like governor-general of Canada or Australia, or UK trade ambassadors. In Spare, Harry confirmed that those discussions took place as well. Within all of the “how do we harness the Sussexes’ rock-star power” discussions, there was Prince William, like a bump on a log, his insecurities front and center. A source told the Times: “People are telling William, ‘Don’t worry. Your influence will grow and Harry’s will fade.’ This is peak Harry.”
Within this same Times piece, sources confirmed that William had been “reaching out to senior figures in the media as he prepares for kingship and by the apparent decision of those same newspapers to side with the palace over Meghan and Harry by peddling the most negative coverage of the duchess’s relationship with her father, Thomas Markle.” One source said, “The danger to them is that Meghan is going to be bigger than Diana.” And that’s why William was 100% behind the effort to simply get Harry and Meghan out of the country: “In some ways it would suit William to get his brother out of the country for a few years and Meghan as far away as possible.” Well, obviously, Russell Myers’ new book, William & Catherine, has completely reimagined this royal history.
Buckingham Palace considered making Prince Harry the governor-general of Canada to keep him and Meghan in the royal fold, a new biography has claimed. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were said to have been presented with a range of five different scenarios during “round the clock negotiations” before the infamous Sandringham Summit in January 2020, which decided the terms of their exit from the Royal family.
In a new book about the Prince and Princess of Wales, a former courtier said that the options laid before Harry and Meghan “clearly demonstrate that they were hardly left fending for themselves in an environment that wasn’t interested in looking after them”.
Russell Myers, the author, quotes another palace insider as saying “nothing was ever good enough” for the Duke and Duchess, who would ultimately go on to relocate to Montecito, California, and achieve their goal of financial independence from the Firm. Simon Case, Prince William’s then private secretary, was involved in the crunch palace discussions to find a workable solution for Harry and Meghan stepping back as senior royals.
The suggested governor-general role would have seen Harry become the monarch’s representative in the former British colony, a member of the Commonwealth, but it transpired that only a Canadian national could fill the role.
“We’d spent months trying to work out a role for them and every time we thought someone had cracked it, there would end up being several reasons why it couldn’t work,” said a senior palace source. “Harry being governor-general of Canada wouldn’t happen because you need to be Canadian, various ideas of them working across Africa had security implications, or someone else was already doing the job – it was almost an impossible task,” they added.
But during the discussions between the three principal private secretaries of the late Queen, the then Prince Charles and Prince William, as well as a handful of senior communications personnel from each household, no workable solution was found.
Myers writes that, at the time, Meghan left her husband “to face the music alone”, as she joined their son in Canada amid her now well-documented growing unhappiness within the royal fold.
Of the different options available to the couple – who pitched a half-in, half-out arrangement – the senior palace source explained that they “got nothing in return” in the way of useful ideas from the Duke and Duchess. They said: “We already knew they were intent on signing commercial deals and that just wasn’t going to work within the model. So we kept saying to them, ‘How do you want this to work? Do you actually have a tangible plan that could help us?’, but we got nothing in return.”
In Myers’ new book, courtiers insist that palace staff had “bent over backwards” to accommodate the couple, but to no avail. A former courtier described the Sussexes as a pair of “loose cannons” who were not trusted within the wider household.
As I pointed out, even as early as March and April 2019, there were open conversations about “where to send Harry & Meghan” and “we need to get them out of the country” and “will William freak out if we send them to Australia or Canada?” By the time the Sandringham Summit came along, many of these options had been discussed for the better part of a year. The problem was that by January 2020, Prince William and then-Prince Charles had decided on a different course of action: they decided that the Sussexes needed to be pushed out completely, no half-in solution, no protection, sink or swim. Charles and William’s calculation was that the Sussexes would never succeed, that they would divorce and Harry would come crawling back home eventually. That’s why “the printer was broken.” As for “Meghan left her husband ‘to face the music alone’…” They literally refused to meet with Harry AND Meghan. They only agreed to the summit after Meghan left the UK. They wanted to get Harry alone so they could steamroll him.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid.
