Tom Sykes had another unhinged “guest” on his Royalist podcast this week. The topic of the day was, as ever, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Specifically, the subject was about how Prince Harry and Meghan are clearly and obviously “desperate” to come back to the UK. Sykes and his guest halfway let the cat out of the bag about the actual concern with that – it’s not that Harry and Meghan would come back, broke and in desperate need of royal favor, it’s that the Sussexes already have a rival royal court in Montecito, and that Prince William and Kate would cry incandescent tears if the Sussex family came back and stole the Waleses’ thunder. Of course, Sykes and his guests are always going to take it way too far, saying gross things about how Archie and Lili will make their cousins’ lives a “misery.” Those comments were so egregious and ridiculous, the Sussexes’ rep made a statement:
King Charles’s willingness to reconnect with Prince Harry may put his other son’s future rule at risk, comedian Mark Dolan has predicted. Appearing on The Royalist podcast, the English presenter theorized that Harry’s meeting with the British monarch at Highgrove House earlier this month could lead to a host of issues for his brother, Prince William, later down the line.
“I think that my concern is that Charles is enabling Harry to establish a rival court in a complete defiance of what his mother, in her wisdom, laid down,” host Tom Sykes said, alluding to Queen Elizabeth II’s 2020 agreement with Harry to step back from royal duties and to stop using his HRH titles. Dolan concurred, saying that Harry is, in essence, “tearing up his agreement with the late Queen” by meeting with his grandfather on royal property.
“It’s horrible that the Queen, the late Queen, is being betrayed in this way by a grandson that claims to have loved her and admired her,” he said. “Where you struck a deal, and you’ve reneged on that deal, and that poor woman is not here to enforce it…And if she was, I think she would enforce it, and she’d be a lot tougher than Charles has been.”
However, the other issue Dolan argues is more “generational.”
“You’re going to have Meghan and Harry, will make life a misery for King William and Queen Catherine,” he explained. “And they’d love to be in the U.K., I think up to half of the year with this rival court, and then it’s going to carry on into the next generation…. And Archie and Lily, when they’re teenagers and young adults, I predict will make life a misery for George, Charlotte, and Louis,” Dolan added.
In order for Charles to correct course and be a “responsible steward” for William’s eventual ascendancy, Dolan said the king needs to “scale back the whole royal operation.”
“He needs to make the monarchy a lean, mean, fighting machine,” he said. “Constitutionally, I think he’s been a good king, and he’s a kindly and intelligent man, very ethical as well. But he’s got to modernize the monarchy.”
A spokesman for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex called Dolan’s remarks “deeply distasteful.”
“There is a fundamental difference between criticizing public figures and choosing to demonize two young children who have done absolutely nothing to warrant it,” the rep said. “To speculate that Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet will one day ‘make life a misery’ for their cousins is an extraordinary and irresponsible thing to say about children. We are genuinely disgusted by these comments. Whatever views people may hold about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, children should never be dragged into adult disputes or portrayed as future antagonists for the sake of a provocative soundbite.“
I bet Sykes couldn’t wait to email the Sussexes’ rep with that quote about the kids. He finally got a reaction. The Sussexes’ rep is correct, that was “an extraordinary and irresponsible thing to say about children.” But beyond the targeted harassment of two children, the larger discussion really slips in the real fears – it’s about royal courts, the attention economy, priggish William and Kate being overshadowed by the charismatic Sussexes, and power. Incidentally, the “Sandringham agreement” didn’t say anything about “the Sussexes can’t establish a royal court.” When the Windsors forced the agreement down Harry’s throat, they did so without understanding that they were creating the exact conditions for a rival court in America. You know what the Sandringham agreement did include though? Terms on security for the Sussexes for a year as “breathing room.” The Windsors were the first to break the terms of the agreement, therefore the agreement was null and void.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images and Meghan’s Instagram.
