Bless their hearts, they commissioned a fresh emotional-support poll to discover how British people feel about such hot-button topics of “do you still support a prince who escaped this country over six years ago?” The results of this latest emotional-support poll come via Tom Sykes’ Royalist Substack. He excitedly wrote a full three-page screed about the poll numbers while the Princess of Wales was keening around Italy. As we’ve seen before, even when the left-behinds get a rare W, the royalists are too busy obsessing over the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to even celebrate. Please enjoy some of Sykes’ ranting from his latest, “Harry’s Support Among the Young Just Evaporated.”
Edward VIII (as the Duke of Windsor) was the greatest threat to the reign of his brother, George VI. Prince Andrew is the greatest threat to the reign of his brother, King Charles III. And for a long time, it looked like Prince Harry would be the greatest threat to the reign of his brother, the future King William V.
Disgruntled dukes make uniquely dangerous brothers for kings, especially when they feel they have nothing to lose. And there was a period, not so very long ago, when William’s team had genuine reason to be worried. Not because Harry was popular in any overall sense — his approval ratings had cratered from the dizzy heights of 70% and 80% he once enjoyed as a working royal to around 35% — but because of where his remaining support was concentrated.
The concern was generational. As recently as February 2025, YouGov data showed that 48% of 18-to-24-year-olds held a positive view of Prince Harry — only a shade off William’s numbers in the same cohort. Among the young, Harry was not a pariah, he was competitive. And monarchy is the ultimate long-term project. The older generation that loathed Harry would, it was thought, gradually shuffle off this mortal coil, while the younger cohort that was more sympathetic to him would age into political and cultural dominance. Harry, in other words, was playing a long game, and the demographics were on his side. That argument is now dead, and the latest YouGov data is its death certificate.
The most recent quarterly royal favorability tracker, shows that Harry’s support among 18-to-24-year-olds has collapsed from 48% to just 35% in barely a year.
That is a drop of 13 points in a single demographic that was supposed to be his firewall. More importantly, it means Harry is now net unpopular among young adults — more of them dislike him than like him. He is net unpopular across every single age group in Britain. There is no demographic, no age bracket, no generational cohort in which Prince Harry commands majority support or even breaks even. The lifeboat has sunk.
The headline figure is even worse: The YouGov fame and popularity tracker has Harry’s rating plunging from 37% to 25% in a single quarter — the kind of drop that, in political polling, would be considered an extinction-level event.
In late 2019, before Megxit, 72% of Britons viewed Harry favourably. He was the Queen’s cheeky grandson, the Invictus hero, the prince who made old ladies blush and veterans laugh. So, in the space of six years, Harry has alienated more than half the country.
Meanwhile, the King is damaged, but still afloat; despite the Andrew scandal, he is on 60%.
The 13-point collapse in Harry’s youth support suggests that the therapy-speak has reached its sell-by date. There is a finite amount of goodwill that any public figure can draw on while simultaneously appearing in court, airing family grievances in public, and living a life of extraordinary privilege in Montecito while complaining about how hard everything is. Even the TikTok generation, it turns out, has its limits.
William’s team, who once privately fretted about Harry’s residual support among the young, can now afford to exhale. The threat of a long-term generational split — a shadow king lurking in Montecito, popular with the voters who would one day shape William’s reign — has evaporated.
The monarchy, meanwhile, sails on. Sixty-four percent of Britons want to keep it. Fifty-nine percent say it is good for the country. The institution that Harry walked away from is thriving. The man who walked away from it is not.
Harry’s wife Meghan does even worse, at 20%. Between them, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are now marooned at the bottom of the royal league table, kept from dead last only by the radioactive presence of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who limps along on 3%.
Nothing says “the monarchy is thriving” quite like the left-behinds commissioning an emotional-support poll to gauge the popularity of the prince who walked away from the whole sorry lot of them MORE THAN SIX YEARS AGO. Nothing says “the monarchy will sail on for decades to come” than a bald-demon heir fixating on his brother and his brother’s wife, and constantly pressuring “royalists” to write hateful hit jobs on the Sussexes. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that they still include Harry and Meghan in their sad little polls, and it’s hilarious that these people still think that they can manipulate actual public sentiment in this particular way. It’s already blown up in the Windsors’ pitiful faces dozens of times – there was the huge crowd outside St. Paul’s Cathedral for Prince Harry’s Invictus service in 2024, there were the huge, energetic crowds for Harry last September when he was in Birmingham and London. More recently, there were huge crowds and vocal supporters for the Sussexes in Australia. Which is probably why this particular poll was commissioned. Plus, they’re trying to sabotage Harry’s July visit for Invictus’s One Year to Go events. These people are just so sad.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
