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There was a clear sense of the King wanting to reset royal operations after the medical problems which befell the monarchy in 2024. By the end of that year, routine royal news reports would make no mention of his health. He had been around the world, visiting Australia in mid-October ahead of the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, and next-to-normal duties had resumed at home. The public had to be periodically reminded that he was still undergoing treatment for cancer. The King was not trying to conceal or minimise the fact; he just preferred not to be defined by it.
Alongside the return to royal near-normality, however, came a resurgence of what one courtier had called ‘headwinds’, those external challenges which had seemed to abate a little while the family were battling through 2024.
Of all the ‘headwinds’, it was, once again, the two ‘difficult dukes’ who were generating the most heat and headlines. Since losing his allowance from the King after refusing to move from Royal Lodge on the edge of the Windsor estate, the mystery surrounding the Duke of York’s private funding arrangements was partially explained in December 2024.
Court documents revealed that an alleged Chinese spy had been banned from entering Britain and that the man, later revealed as businessman Yang Tengbo, had developed an ‘unusual degree of trust’ with the Duke. Tengbo had been involved in trying to create business opportunities for the Duke in China following his disastrous 2019 BBC Panorama interview and subsequent departure from public life. Though there was no suggestion that the Duke had any inkling that his former associate was under suspicion (and Tengbo has denied the allegations), it all painted an excruciating picture of a royal outcast trying almost anything to secure money and a scintilla of international credibility.
With Christmas looming, the last thing the monarchy needed was the Duke grinning alongside the rest of the family in public while a new scandal broke over his head. Even so, it proved an uphill struggle to keep the Duke away from the royal Christmas festivities, though he was finally persuaded to see sense by his ex-wife (one reason why Sarah, Duchess of York, has become an increasingly familiar presence back in the royal fold).
The Duke was finally allowed to join the family for Easter. By then, it was the Duke of Sussex making the headlines. Following the King’s diagnosis, Prince Harry had maintained a low profile with regard to the Royal Family for a year. The Duchess had been busy with new business ventures, including a lifestyle show on Netflix called With Love, Meghan and a range of household goods under a new brand, ‘As Ever’ (replacing her short-lived ‘American Riviera Orchard’ marque). The Duke, meanwhile, had been busy with his lawyers.
With great sadness, he had resigned from Sentebale, the Lesotho charity he had co-founded twenty years before. He had stepped down in solidarity with trustees who had left after falling out with the chair of the charity’s board. Days later, he appeared in Britain as his legal team took his long-running case against the British Government to the Court of Appeal. There was no need for him to appear. Many legal experts could see no reason for his presence in the court, scribbling on Post-it notes and sipping water as his barrister pressed his challenge to a Home Office decision to remove his right to automatic police protection in the UK. ‘He seemed to be pitch-rolling ahead of what was likely to be a humiliating court decision,’ was how the King’s team regarded his short visit to London, especially as there was no prospect of seeing his father, who was away on a state visit to Italy.
Yet after hearing he was coming to London, the King had still offered him accommodation at Buckingham Palace during his stay. ‘Once again, he said no – presumably because the Palace is still so unsafe – and ended up staying in a hotel,’ said a member of staff, struggling to hide the sarcasm in light of what the Duke did next.
There was considerable irritation that the Prince and the BBC had arranged a landmark interview about royal security issues yet the Palace was first made aware of it only minutes before broadcast
Following the King’s diagnosis, Prince Harry had maintained a low profile with regard to the Royal Family for a year
King Charles with sons Harry and William. ‘It was starting to feel a little more than coincidental that when the King was on important business overseas, the Duke of Sussex would suddenly emerge from his hard-won privacy to make a high-profile public appearance,’ writes Hardman
After leaving London, he went to Ukraine to meet wounded soldiers. Aside from the glaring inconsistency of claiming that Britain was fraught with danger one day and then travelling to a war zone the next, Prince Harry also had the satisfaction of stealing a march on his brother. The trip to Lviv had certainly come as a surprise to Prince William, who, as an ex-serviceman himself, had long wanted to visit Ukraine. The Duchess of Edinburgh had been the first member of the family to visit the embattled nation in 2024 when she met President Zelensky and his wife and talked to survivors of sexual violence and torture. Thus far, however, the Prince of Wales has been limited to a visit to the Mercians, of which he is Colonel-in-Chief, in Estonia.
One month after his trip to court, the Duke of Sussex received news of the court ruling at first light in California. It was, as many expected, a robust and unanimous rejection of his appeal by three senior judges. The Duke knew it was coming and had prepared the ground for venting his disappointment in advance by inviting a BBC news crew to be ready at a borrowed house. Having granted the New York-based journalist Nada Tawfik ten minutes, he then spoke for more than 30, clearly emotional at moments as he blinked and swallowed. He sounded, variously, naive, furious and implacable in his conviction that dark forces, some of them within the Royal Household, had conspired against him.
At the outset, he said that his case had been unwinnable, adding with a grim smile: ‘I wish someone had told me that beforehand,’ a remark which sounded rather like a rebuke to his lawyers. Prefacing many responses with ‘I have to be careful what I say’, he went on to claim that the Government committee reviewing his security had been infiltrated by royal officials and had operated outside the law to deprive the Sussexes of a level of protection readily granted to others (though the one official whom he named, Sir Clive Alderton, now Private Secretary to the King, had not actually been on the committee at the time).
It all felt like a ‘good old-fashioned Establishment stitch-up’, the Duke half-joked, before alluding gravely to his mother’s death: ‘Some people want history to repeat itself and that’s pretty dark.’ For the foreseeable future, Britain would remain too dangerous for his children.
There was a wistful but jarringly tactless note at the very end, when the Duke was asked about reconciliation: ‘I don’t know how much longer my father has – he won’t speak to me because of this security stuff but it would be nice to reconcile.’ Prospects for that, however, had just receded further. Within royal circles in Britain, some were ‘frankly appalled’ by his glib choice of words about the King’s health. While on the one hand he claimed his court battle was over, he also repeatedly ‘called on’ Keir Starmer and the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, to ‘step in’. The King’s ‘legal jeopardy’ dilemma, therefore, remained unresolved; as long as his son was pursuing his ministers on a judicial question in his courts, the King, as ‘fountain of justice’, could not risk any private discussion for fear that Prince Harry might air some of the details (or his version of them) in public.
The Home Office merely said it was ‘pleased’ by a ruling that reflected its ‘rigorous and proportionate’ security system.
The Palace’s response was short, but managed to convey the sense of weariness after five years of this saga: ‘All of these issues have been examined repeatedly and meticulously by the courts, with the same conclusion reached on each occasion.’ Within the Royal Household, there was both exasperation and incredulity that Prince Harry could expect any sort of rapprochement after springing yet another effusion of scattergun accusations on the family via the media. There was considerable irritation that the Prince and the BBC had arranged a landmark interview about royal security issues yet the Palace was only made aware of it minutes before broadcast. ‘As the Duke of Sussex might say, it felt like a bit of a stitch-up,’ reflected one member of staff.
Robert Hardman’s exclusive details on the Palace’s reaction to Prince Harry’s TV stitch-up interview come from the new edition of his biography Charles III: The Inside Story
King Charles waves in January 2024 as he and Queen Camilla leave the London Clinic following his treatment for an enlarged prostate – just one month before his cancer diagnosis
Royal staff had noticed something else, too. It was starting to feel a little more than coincidental that when the King was on important business overseas, the Duke of Sussex would suddenly emerge from his hard-won privacy to make a high-profile public appearance. In March 2023, as the King was embarking on the first overseas state visit of his reign to Germany, Prince Harry had unexpectedly – and unnecessarily – flown to London to watch the preliminaries of one of his various court cases. When the King was beginning his 2025 state visit to Italy, Harry had done the same again. A few weeks later, as the King flew to Canada, his younger son made a surprise appearance in Shanghai at a conference on sustainable tourism. ‘Only a cynic could possibly detect a pattern there,’ observed one courtier, with mild amusement.
There was one person, however, who seemed wholly unconcerned by the latest Sussex grievance. Even in private, the King showed no interest in discussing the matter. ‘People are always saying that he must be so upset by the Harry business,’ says one member of his inner circle, ‘but when you have all that is going on in his world, you don’t have time to agonise over things beyond your control.’ Back channels remained open, however. There was much excitement when the King’s press communications secretary was spotted having a drink with the latest Sussex media manager during a London visit in July. Some commentators even hailed it as a ‘peace summit’, to the surprise of Palace insiders, who had regarded it as a courtesy call.
It explains why royal officials were not unrelieved that, when Prince Harry ostentatiously put his head round the door of the Court of Appeal, the King was already on that state visit to Italy.
There was a further positive indicator that the King’s health was now much improved: planning had resumed for his funeral. All through 2024, officials had been considering when or even whether to summon those designated to participate in the next iteration of Operation London Bridge. ‘In the end, we didn’t do anything because of the cancer link,’ explained one of those on the list.
Year after year during the reign of Elizabeth II, the current Duke of Norfolk, as Earl Marshal, would assemble officials from the Royal Household, civil service, military and police to run through what would be expected of them when the dark day dawned. The meeting would usually be held at Buckingham Palace (on a day when the Queen was not in) and had grown so large over time that they would all have to meet in the Ballroom. On the last annual run-through before the plan was finally enacted in 2022, the total number present had reached 282.
Following the King’s cancer diagnosis, however, it had seemed inappropriate, to say the least, to reinstate this fixture, however sensible and practical it might be. ‘You can imagine the sort of rumours if word got out, even though it’s just standard procedure,’ said one member of the London Bridge cast. ‘But it wasn’t a case of no planning at all. Eddie Norfolk was very keen to sort out the problem of the gun carriage.’ As explained earlier in this book, one of the main issues that surfaced during the late Queen’s funeral procession from Westminster Abbey had been that the soldiers on parade had all been marching at the pre-determined speed of 30 paces per minute. Unfortunately, it transpired that the Royal Navy ratings pulling the gun carriage with the coffin could only move at just over 20 paces, and considerably less when going round corners. This had made the procession late and elongated (not that the billions watching on television either noticed or cared).
A full day of top-secret gun carriage drill behind closed doors had been arranged in Portsmouth. The eventual solution was to use connecting ‘click track’ earpieces for unit commanders to ensure matching marching speeds. There had also been some practice sessions for the bearer party from the Grenadier Guards, again in strict secrecy in a hangar in Middlesex. None of this had anything to do with the King’s diagnosis, but was simply a case of being prepared, as in years gone by. However, it was only by the late summer of 2025 that senior officials felt comfortable enough to contemplate a full London Bridge run-through at senior level (and even then, it would have to be organised far away from Buckingham Palace).
Adapted from Charles III: The Inside Story by Robert Hardman (Pan Macmillan, £12.99), new edition to be published August 28. © Robert Hardman 2025. To order a copy for £11.69 (offer valid to 06/09/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937
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