One last duty, then Harry jets off to join family
Duke of Sussex flies out to Canada after his final official engagement – and a private meeting with PM
THE Duke of Sussex is understood to have left the UK for Canada last night following one of his final official engagements as a working member of the Royal family.
He was said to be desperate to be reunited with his eight-month-old son, Archie, whom he had not seen for two weeks, and his wife, in the country the family plans to make their home.
He was whisked to Heathrow following a morning of bilateral meetings with
African leaders at the first Uk-africa Investment Summit in Greenwich, south London. The Duke also had a private, one-to-one meeting with Boris Johnson, understood to have been at the PM’S request.
His departure to Vancouver Island, via Montreal, will be deemed symbolic, just two days after Buckingham Palace announced that it was severing all official ties with the Sussexes as they walk away from public life. On Sunday evening, the Duke gave an emotional speech at a charity dinner, revealing he had never wanted to step away so wholly from his public duties but had “no other option”.
He told delegates at the event, in aid of Sentebale, the Lesotho charity he cofounded in 2006, many of them thought to be friends who have known the Duke for decades, that he had hoped to continue serving the Queen without public
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at a reception for African leaders at Buckingham Palace last night
‘Everyone was moved by how genuine he was, and how heartfelt the whole thing was’
funding, but had been told this was not possible. The decision had “not been made lightly,” he said, while acknowledging they were “taking a leap of faith”.
Johnny Hornby, chairman of Sentebale, said the Duke had made it clear he and his wife were “joined at the hip in this endeavour” but added that “anyone who spends time with them can see that clearly”.
Palace sources said they had been given around an hour’s notice about the Duke’s speech, which The Daily Telegraph understands he wrote himself.
While one senior aide pointed out that it was well known the Sussexes had not got the deal they wanted, another said courtiers had nevertheless been “taken by surprise” by some of his comments.
“All parties involved in the Sandringham talks signed off on the agreement on Saturday, and we were all under the impression that everyone was happy,” the source said.
Aides insisted that the Duke had not snubbed his brother by failing to join him at a Buckingham Palace reception for African leaders last night. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Princess Royal and the Earl and Countess of Wessex were all in attendance.
Meetings undertaken earlier by the Duke of Sussex in Greenwich, which involved audiences with the leaders of Malawi, Mozambique and Morocco, had been scheduled long before the royal crisis unfolded. “All engagements around it had been in the diary for months,” a source said. “Harry would have been more than welcome at the evening reception but had other plans.”
The two brothers are said to have healed their rift over the last few days in a series of private “peace talks” as the
Duke of Sussex prepared to move abroad. A report suggested their wives had joined some of the discussions.
It is not known when the Sussexes will return to Britain, although it is believed that the Duke has engagements scheduled until the spring, when they will formally sever royal ties.
The Duchess of Cornwall, visiting a Swindon hospice yesterday, was asked whether she would miss the couple. “‘Course,” she replied.
♦ Separately it emerged last night that the Queen’s grandson, Peter Philips, used his royal role to front a Chinese milk advert. Mr Philips is identified as a “British Royal family member” on the ads for Jersey Fresh Milk in Shanghai.
The Palace and Mr Philips declined to comment to the Daily Mail.
Within a fortnight of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announcing that they would be “stepping back” as senior royals, it was decided that the couple would, in fact, be stepping down from royal life entirely. For Prince Harry, it seems things have not gone entirely to plan – again.
Speaking on Sunday night for the first time since negotiations with the Queen and the Prince of Wales were finalised at Sandringham, he elaborated on the “progressive” arrangement envisioned by him and his wife, the one he hoped would have left them “half-in, half-out” of the royal show, representing the Queen but free to live abroad and to pursue commercial interests.
“We were excited, we were hopeful, we were here to serve,” he said. “For those reasons, it brings me great sadness that it has come to this.”
“This” means the Sussexes being removed from all royal duties, Prince Harry – a former Army captain who has undertaken two tours of Afghanistan – being stripped of his military appointments and the couple paying rent on Frogmore Cottage, their Grade Ii-listed home in Windsor, once they’ve repaid the £2.4million cost of its refurbishment.
The Sussexes’ plan may have looked good on paper, but it was never something Her Majesty could countenance. If you take public funding and use the HRH title, you don’t go around touting for private work – as the Duke so clearly did last summer when, during a red carpet meet-and-greet at the premiere of The Lion King, he was caught on camera lobbying the head of Disney for film voice-overs for his wife.
While the couple have ended up with an arrangement the Duchess craves – a home in North America with a base in the UK, careers as A-list professionals and the freedom to take ambassadorial roles for charitable causes of their choice – it is unlikely to bestow the sort of privacy that the Duke has longed for ever since the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997.
The Duke must have been delighted that not a single photograph of the Sussexes was taken by the paparazzi while they were on their six-week break in Canada over Christmas. In fact, the only image from the holiday – of the Duke cuddling his son, Archie – was released on New Year’s Eve through the couple’s official Instagram account. Similarly, last week, the Duchess decided which photographs were released of her visit to a women’s shelter in Vancouver.
But this grip may have to loosen when the Sussexes enter the next phase of their working lives. For their success will depend, to a great extent, on public exposure.
Last month, they sought to
‘HOW WILL HE COPE NOW HE IS FREE?’
It was at a party on the annual skiing trip to Klosters that Harry first cemented his reputation as the renegade prince. He couldn’t have been more than 14 (and not old enough to drink), but he was minesweeping abandoned glasses and swigging freely. Then, before anyone could stop him, he had strapped on his skis and careered down the mountain in the pitch black – his panicked protection officers in hot pursuit.
In the years that followed, countless stories about the Prince’s wild nights made the front pages. Still more were kept off them. Harry himself has spoken of how he “shut down all his emotions” for almost two decades after losing his mother, and the period of “total chaos” in his 20s when it all finally came to a head. While his brother went to university, got a steady girlfriend, and played by the rules (as was expected of the heir), Harry fizzed with frustration and aimlessness.
That he is finally striking out on his own, then, comes as no surprise. Harry has always done things his own way. He always seemed to me to be painfully aware of being the “spare”. I remember Diana telling me over a coffee in Kensington Palace in the summer of 1997, shortly before she died, how Harry was always teasing William, saying: “If you don’t want to be king, it doesn’t matter – I will be.” “He loves royal life,” she said. “The castles, the horses and, of course, the soldiers.”
When he was deployed to Afghanistan in December 2007 to join his regiment, the Blues and Royals, I was one of those invited into the MOD for secretive briefings to see how his anonymity could be preserved in Helmand Province. It was with some pride that the editors of Fleet Street’s most notorious tabloids all agreed to keep his deployment secret. They wanted to give Harry a chance. We all did. “All my wishes have come true,” he said.
It was in the Army that Harry found his stride; later, projects like Sentebale and the Invictus Games finally giving him real royal purpose. How will he cope now he is, supposedly, free? I must say, I’m not sure living outside of the only structure he has ever known will suit him as much as he believes it will. But for now, and with his grandmother’s blessing, off he goes into the bundu. I only hope it is everything he always hoped. By Ingrid Seward, editor in chief, “Majesty” magazine register “Sussex Royal” as a global trademark, although it is now unclear whether this will survive the spring, when they give up using their HRH titles. And never again will the couple enjoy the extraordinary luxury, reserved for actual royalty, of being led along a line of Hollywood’s most powerful players.
And so, yet again, Prince Harry hasn’t got quite what he had wanted from this. It is a theme that has echoed throughout his life.
For decades, his happiness has been like an intermittent radio signal, crackling on and off, but rarely staying on full power for long. As a little boy, he was blessed with the natural larkiness of the naughty younger brother, a foil to the more sensible, dutiful William. He has long made jokes about being ginger with an outspokenness born of a sure-fire confidence in his looks, rather than an insecurity about them.
But his happy-go-lucky nature was damaged – whose wouldn’t be? – by two appalling hammer blows. First, the unhappy marriage, separation and divorce of his parents; and then, a thousand times worse, the death of his mother when he was only 12.
His years spent at Eton were inevitably underpinned by that tragedy. No one, least of all Prince Harry himself, would claim he was any sort of intellectual, but he failed to shine academically at school. He did, though, develop deep, lasting friendships there, and the school provided shelter from the press and public interest.
His happiest time was in the Army, where he headed after school and stayed for a decade until 2015. There, he found purpose, with control and respect of – and from – his brother officers. As the grandson of the nation’s commander-in-chief, and in his position as a plum kidnap target, he was always going to be a special case. But, all the same, he was delighted to be allowed on to the front line in Afghanistan. Again, as with Eton, the Ministry of Defence kept the press at arm’s length – bliss for him.
I met him in Turkey in April 2015, at the centenary of the commemorations of the Gallipoli campaign. He was just about to end his Army career, and you couldn’t have met a more self-assured and happy young man. With consummate ease, he chatted away to the descendants of those who had fought at Gallipoli (my great-grandfather was killed there); he kept a smile on his face, a joke on his lips and a sure knowledge of his brief. He was particularly tender to older members of our party in their eighties.
Today, it is easy to forget that there was a long period where Harry could do no wrong. There were the natural wildnesses and excesses that came with being a young officer, a member of the privileged classes and someone who had been, at his own admission, so harmed by those early blows. So there was the young Harry, stupidly dressing up as a Nazi; getting into scuffles with paparazzi; downing the Flaming Lamborghinis in nightclubs; playing strip billiards in Las Vegas.
But those wild days are long gone, thanks in part to the passing of time – and to his confronting his demons.
In 2017, in a watershed moment that kick-started a national conversation about mental health, Prince Harry joined The Telegraph’s Bryony Gordon on her “Mad World” podcast to talk about how he sought counselling after 20 years of bottling up the grief over his mother’s death. A year later, with the discovery of love in the shape of Meghan Markle, he seemed
truly happy at his wedding, and the pair were unequivocally taken to the nation’s hearts on that sunny, hopeful day.
However, the honeymoon period was surprisingly short-lived. Confusion over Archie’s birth last year, followed by the secrecy surrounding his christening, were taken as signs of petulance. When the couple were followed around Africa by a documentary team last year, their sadness and irritation was palpable.
The sudden six-week holiday showed that their unexplained dissatisfaction had reached turning point. Not to go to Sandringham for Christmas was a break with royal protocol; the illness and hospitalisation of Harry’s beloved grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh, at the age of 98, appeared to make little difference to the Sussexes.
For the Duke, it seems things have not gone entirely to plan – again
It’s easy to forget there was a long period when he could do no wrong
They were already semi-detached. In their Canadian hideout, they were putting the finishing touches to their bombshell announcement.
When Bryony Gordon visited the royal couple last year, she described how they “seemed subdued and sad. They lacked the energy or sparkle I had seen in them previously. All the hope that Prince Harry had expressed when we spoke about his mental health in 2017 appeared to have evaporated.” She said it seemed like Harry was “living out the trauma he had experienced as a 12-year-old – walking behind his mother’s coffin on global television – again and again and again.”
That increasing lack of purpose seems to have gnawed away at him, just as his brother’s destiny has grown more and more substantial. Only last year, the Duke of Cambridge was on television learning the ropes of the Duchy of Cornwall, a hugely important role he will take over when his father becomes king.
Certainly, Harry’s status as the “spare” to the heir makes him increasingly expendable, not least as the Cambridges have produced three children. Just as he gave up the Army, the only job he has ever adored, so he has moved further away from the Biggest Job – as a potential king.
This gap has only been partly filled by his admirable founding of the Invictus Games for disabled veterans. With the Sussexes’ shock retreat, he has now created another huge gap where once his royal duties used to sit.
While the couple’s move to North America may make the Duchess of Sussex happy – the former actress will easily capitalise on her now-stellar international status – it may leave her with a problem: a down-inthe-mouth husband.
What will Harry do with all that spare time? He has always been happiest with a pint in his hand surrounded by boisterous mates, and he won’t have ready access to that in Canada.
With this latest gambit, the Unhappy Prince risks being unhappier than ever.
Harry Mount is the author of ‘How England Made the English’ (£9.99, Penguin)