Households of UK princes to be split
LONDON: The royal households of Britain’s Prince William and younger brother Prince Harry will be split “within weeks” to keep the peace in their families, multiple reports have said.
Courtiers hope that a formal separation of their staff may also help ease some recently-reported tensions between the brothers and their wives – Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, according to The Sunday Times. In October, the paper had reported the brothers were considering a formal division of their joint royal household, which is based at Kensington Palace, and the creation of “separate courts to reflect their increasingly different responsibilities.” The division of households will happen before the birth of the first child of Harry and Meghan.
The first major division of the royal household will be of their media team. The princes, grandsons of Queen Elizabeth II, until now operated via what was referred to as a joint royal household but now they will carve out more distinctive roles for themselves. They will operate through separate staff and communication teams, a move seen as a way for them to seek out a more independent path from each other in terms of their charity work and royal duties.
“When William becomes the Prince of Wales, he will take on a lot of extra responsibility, including the Duchy of Cornwall. Harry and Meghan have none of that, and seem ambitious about forging their own paths,” a source told the Sunday Times.
Kensington Palace has not commented on the reports yet.
But it did announce in November that Harry and Meghan plan to move out of Nottingham Cottage in the Kensington Palace complex.