If ever there was a wonderfully apt descriptor for the truly odd position Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex has found himself in, it would have to be “peculiar and unusual,” a phrase we owe nothing less than a British government body. for
Harry is, after all, the only member of the most famous British family in history to self-exile in a foreign country; a man who has regularly signed up to the monarchy but has clung, like a barnacle, to the title given to him by said monarchy; and a former official representative of the Queen who is now a prince with any kind of portfolio.
“Particular and unusual”? I’d say that describes him perfectly.
That phrase emerged (where else?) in a London court where a judge ruled last Friday that the outspoken 37-year-old polo player could challenge the Home Office’s decision to stop him from receiving police protection automatic when in the UK.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that Harry had taken legal action over a decision by the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (known as Ravec) in 2020 that the Duke and his family no longer they would receive the same level of protection they had when he and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, were full-time members of the royal family.
Now, Harry has the green light to challenge Ravec’s position.
At any other time we might consider all of this a win for Harry and Meghan, not to mention their law firm Schillings, as all those juicy billable hours keep piling up and on and on, except for another royal story that’s been has developed , also in the Superior Court.
On Thursday last week, a judge ruled that the BBC must pay William and Harry’s beloved childhood nanny Alexandra Pettifer (you’ll remember her as Tiggy Legge-Bourke) $346,000 (£200,000) after she make “false and malicious allegations”. against her to get Diana, Princess of Wales, to accept in 1995 panorama interview.
(Stay with me here, these two court cases are sadly connected.)
The aftermath of that infamous tell-all interview, in which the Princess of Wales so casually dropped that seminal line about there being “three of us in the marriage”, would be devastating for her and the house of Windsor.
At the heart of this situation is how Martin Bashir, a relatively unknown journalist who had never covered the royal beat and had no connection to them, pulled off the journalistic coup of the century. The answer is basically lying.
By 1995, Diana had been separated from Prince Charles for years and was increasingly isolated, locked in a public relations battle with him and suspicious of some of the people around her.
In August of that year, exactly two years before Diana was murdered in Paris, Bashir managed a meeting with his brother Earl Spencer.
The story that Bashir did for Spencer at the time, we learned via last year’s Dyson Report, was extraordinary and completely misleading.
At another meeting at the Spencer Althorp estate in mid-September 1995, Bashir presented the earl with forged bank statements purporting to show that Charles’s top private aide was being paid by “dark forces” who were a threat to Diana.
Bashir also told Spencer that there was a plot to kill the princess and that MI6 was also watching.
“What Mr. Bashir told me was shocking: a series of tales so extraordinary that, as soon as he left, I called panorama’executive producer, who confirmed that everything was true and that he could trust Mr. Bashir,” Earl Spencer wrote in the daily mail this weekend.
A concerned brother, five days after that Althorp meeting on September 19, 1995, Earl Spencer introduced his sister to Bashir in London.
The tale Bashir told Diana struck a chord with the vulnerable princess and less than two months later she secretly sat down with him to film their pyrrhic prime time interview. (She gave her own staff the night off and led others to believe that the men bringing technical equipment into her apartment were there to install a new hi-fi system.)
Deciding to do the interview was, as his longtime private secretary, Patrick Jephson, later writes in his fascinating book. Shadows of a princessa “suicidal” move.
Not only did the Queen then intercede and tell the Welsh it was time for a divorce, but with Diana’s paranoia fueled to a point and her losing trust in “key people “, as his brother has argued, he made the decision to abandon his official day-to-day government guard. (The princess, however, continued to use them for royal engagements.)
For the better part of 15 years at that point, Diana had been protected by a team of four at all times. It didn’t matter if she slipped away to Harrods for a quick shopping spree or was off official palace duty, grim-faced officers from the Department of Diplomatic Protection and Rules were by her side.
However, having ditched her personal bodyguards, the princess was further exposed to the hordes of ravenous paparazzi who chased her (sometimes literally) through the streets of London and on one notable occasion, for an airport in Spain.
Two years after Earl Spencer met Bashir, Diana was murdered in Paris. On that tragic night, his sister had “no officer of royal protection on hand, having chosen to dispense with the services of those in whom she should have been able to implicitly trust for her safety,” he wrote.
Having properly trained bodyguards that night in Paris probably would have saved his life. As several former PPOs have argued over the years, they would never have allowed him to get into the car with untrained, drunken driver Henri Paul, nor would they have played a game of cat and mouse with the press horde.
There is a sad symmetry that the protection Diana so easily gave up, based in part on the lies and deceptions she had been cruelly fed, is the very protection her son is now fighting tooth and nail for through the court system .
If the princess’ situation was based on deception, Harry’s appearance was based on naivety about what he thought would happen after the Megxit sonic boom.
If there is one thing that has been focused on in the countless post-mortems of his historic resignation, it is that he seemed to have expected much greater buy-in from the royal family and the Home Office to go ahead with his plan .
As he told Oprah last year, following the duo’s decision to step back from full-time working royal life, he and Meghan had been “notified at short notice that security would be lifted” and that ” my family literally cut me off financially.” “.
This situation begs the question of what the Sussexes thought would happen in terms of finances and security when they decided they were going to ‘balance’ their time between the UK and North America (as was their initial plan) , all the time. that they became “financially independent”?
And then, did she really expect the government and her father to continue to look after the couple, even after the Sussexes had made the decision to leave royal life wholesale?
Both Diana and Harry are alike in that they made important decisions without fully considering the possible consequences of their choices.
Likewise, mother and son (and daughter-in-law) are united in this, how different might things look today if neither of them felt so isolated or alone while inside the royal tent?
The biggest question of all is, almost 25 years after Diana’s death, has Buckingham Palace learned anything?
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with over 15 years’ experience working with several of Australia’s leading media titles.
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