Prince Harry faced a growing backlash from ministers, the Royal Family and the public last night over his bitter attack on King Charles.
The Duke of Sussex faced substantial skepticism after expressing in a BBC interview his frustration that his father, Prince Charles, ‘won’t speak to me,’ and describing himself as the victim of an ‘Establishment stitch-up.’
In addition to this, he claimed that the Royal Household had intervened in his efforts to reinstate his UK police security, an accusation refuted by both the Government and Buckingham Palace.
Government sources adamantly dismissed the Duke’s unusual request for Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to ‘urgently’ probe the committee behind the decision to reduce his security. Whitehall insiders clarified that the committee operates independently from political influence, highlighting this fact.
Palace insiders said his TV outburst risked deepening the rift with his family, adding that his comment about the King’s cancer, saying he ‘doesn’t know how much longer he has left’, was in particularly poor taste.
In another humiliating blow for the Duke, a Mail on Sunday poll today finds overwhelming backing for the King in his row with his youngest son.Â
According to the survey, by Find Out Now, 64 per cent of voters back Charles, while just 36 per cent support his son.
It also shows that the public would like to see Harry and Meghan stripped of their HRH titles.Â
Last week it was reported that Meghan had been using the title in private, despite an agreement that they would not do so.
Palace insiders also railed against the BBC for letting the Duke’s outrageous claims go unchallenged.
After judges ruled against him over the security issue on Friday, Harry claimed the Royal Family had exerted undue influence over the Home Office’s Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures, or Ravec.
He said he was stunned to learn that two key Royal Household aides sit on the committee.Â
A royal source said their involvement was long established and insisted they had no ‘advocacy’ role. ‘They advise on what the royals are up to,’ said the source.
In his TV interview, the Duke suggested they helped influence decisions on behalf of the Royal Family and said he would ask the Home Secretary ‘to look at this very, very carefully’ and review Ravec and the Royal Household’s ‘influence’ on it.
But a Government spokesman told The Mail on Sunday: ‘All members work together to advise the independent chair on the protective security of the Royal Family and key public figures.
As part of long-standing arrangements these decisions have been taken by Ravec, not the Home Secretary.’
Meanwhile the BBC, which spoke to Harry near his home in California, admitted a ‘lapse’ in editorial standards over its coverage of the interview on Radio 4 Today programme.
It said: ‘Claims were repeated that the process had been ‘an Establishment stitch-up’ and we failed to properly challenge this and other allegations.
This case is ultimately the responsibility of the Home Office and we should have reflected their statement.’
In that statement, the department said: ‘We are pleased that the court has found in favour of the Government’s position in this case. The UK Government’s protective security system is rigorous and proportionate.’Â
The BBC said it also should have given the view of Buckingham Palace, which said after Harry’s outburst: ‘All of these issues have been examined repeatedly and meticulously by the courts, with the same conclusion reached on each occasion.’
Harry vowed he would never bring his children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, to Britain and claimed that ‘the other side’ in the court case had ‘won in keeping me unsafe’, as England’s second most senior judge slapped down his Appeal Court bid to reinstate his police bodyguards when in the UK.
The Duke, who left Britain in 2020, alleged the Royal Household exploited security measures ‘to imprison’ members of the Royal Family, blocking them ‘from being able to choose a different life’.
He said: ‘It’s really quite sad that I won’t be able to show my children my homeland.’
Royal biographer and historian AN Wilson said: ‘You keep thinking, ‘Meghan and Harry can’t get any worse.’ And then they do.’
He added that since Meghan’s arrival, Harry, ‘a largely popular, merry prince who served his country in Afghanistan with courage and good humour, has become estranged from the British public.
‘Now, he is a humourless whinger, adrift from his former friends and speaks in the Californian psychobabble that Meghan has picked up among her ghastly Montecito neighbours.’
‘It cannot continue. The King should strip them of the right to dignify themselves by their royal titles.Â
‘Not just the HRH, but their Duke and Duchess of Sussex titles. They should become simply Mr and Mrs Windsor, free to sink into their pathetic, unloved, sunlit exile, and the decades of pointless boredom that stretch ahead – a hell entirely of their own making.’
During the interview with the BBC’s Nada Tawfik, Harry complained: ‘I’ve been treated differently to everybody else that exists, I have been singled out.’
Friday’s ruling is a bitter blow to the Duke, who said that, of all his court battles, this one ‘mattered the most’.Â
He will now be expected to foot the legal bill for both sides.
Two in three voters back King over Harry in new bust-up
By Glen OwenÂ
Even before Harry’s interview with the BBC on Friday, public hostility was growing towards the Prince and his wife Meghan.
Despite the couple’s informal agreement with the late Queen that they would stop using the word ‘Royal’ and their HRH titles after they quit their official duties and emigrated to the US to become ‘financially independent’ from the Crown, it was revealed last week that the former actress had sent a food hamper with a note that said: ‘With the compliments of HRH The Duchess of Sussex’.
Meghan admitted calling herself Her Royal Highness to friends but denied it flouted the Megxit deal because it was not for commercial ends.
Voters are not persuaded. In a Mail on Sunday poll, conducted by Find Out Now, 67 per cent of people say that they would like to see the titles formally removed, with 33 per cent disagreeing. The poll also found that nearly two-thirds of voters back the King over Harry in the latest row: 64 per cent, compared with 36 per cent supporting his son.
The survey found wide variations according to party affiliations. While 70 per cent of Tory voters and 61 per cent of Reform voters sympathise more with Charles, only 28 per cent of Labour voters share that stance.
The poll also found a majority (62 to 38 per cent) saying Prince Andrew bore some responsibility for the suicide of his accuser, Virginia Giuffre, whose claims he has always strongly denied.
Simon English of Find Out Now, said: ‘It is heartbreaking to hear that Prince Harry no longer talks to his father. It would be interesting to know what people think he should do to win back his father’s support.’
