Harry bans Fawcett from organising wedding bash

ORGANISING any wedding is stressful, so imagine what it’s like when your father is heir to the throne. Although Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s nuptials are four months away, tensions are already surfacing.

I hear that Prince Charles has suggested his controversial former valet, Michael Fawcett, should organise the wedding reception at Windsor Castle.

The idea has, however, gone down like a lead balloon with Harry and Meghan, who are said to want nothing to do with Fawcett, the aide so indispensable to Charles that he reportedly squeezed the royal toothpaste on to HRH’s toothbrush.

‘The Prince of Wales thinks Michael is a wonderful events organiser,’ a royal source tells me. ‘But the suggestion has created tensions.’

The disagreement comes as Charles has handed major new powers to Fawcett, 55, who earlier resigned not once but twice from the Royal Household.

Fawcett is paid £85,000 a year as executive director of Dumfries House, the stately home near Cumnock, Ayrshire, Charles ‘saved for the nation’ in 2007.

Now, I can reveal, Fawcett is also to gain control of the Prince’s Foundation, Charles’s architectural charity, which boasts an income of £2.46 million, according to the latest accounts. The foundation’s annual report states that it is to be merged with the charity which runs Dumfries House, with the stately home’s management team initially taking control.

‘The finance function has already been transferred to Dumfries House Trust,’ confirms the report.

Earlier this month, I disclosed that Fawcett’s company, Premier Mode Ltd, received just over £276,000 from the Prince’s charities last year.

A spokesman for Dumfries House Trust said a ‘significant portion’ of the payments went to ‘third-party suppliers of services’.

When a number of the Prince’s staff complained to Charles about Fawcett’s bullying attitude in 1998, he duly resigned. Within a week, however, he was not only reinstated but promoted.

Then, in 2003, he was forced out as a senior valet when an inquiry found he had sold off gifts on Charles’s orders.

However, he was retained as a highly paid ‘consultant’.