Revelations have changed course of extraordinary case

As the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s former communications secretary, Jason Knauf was the keeper of many royal secrets. After the 39-year-old Texan joined the Royal household’s PR team in 2015 from Royal Bank of Scotland, he soon found himself helping to manage the media around Prince Harry’s blossoming relationship with Meghan. Yet despite overseeing the communications for the couple’s wedding in May 2018 – including handling the fallout from Thomas Markle Snr’s last-minute decision to pull out following a heart attack – his relationship with the Sussexes deteriorated after he submitted a bullying complaint against them in Oct 2018. Mr Knauf sent an email to Simon Case, then the Duke of Cambridge’s private secretary and now the cabinet secretary, warning that he feared “nothing will be done” about alleged attacks on staff. The couple deny the claims.

Six months later, in March 2019, it was announced that Mr Knauf would no longer be working for the Sussexes and instead become a senior adviser to the Cambridges. In January, Mr Knauf was named as being among a “Palace Four” who had agreed to give evidence on whether Harry and Meghan had given private information to the authors of

Finding Freedom.

But they insisted they would remain “strictly neutral” and had no interest in helping either side in her legal action against

The Mail on Sunday.

In a letter lodged with the High Court on their behalf, Mr Knauf, Samantha Cohen, the couple’s former private secretary, Christian Jones, former deputy communications secretary, and Sara Latham, former communications director, said they would also provide evidence about the creation of the letter Meghan sent to her father, as well as the draft, and whether she expected it to be made public. In her witness statement, Meghan’s lawyer, Jenny Afia, questions why Mr Knauf has supplied his evidence now, pointing out that his solicitors sent a letter in April suggesting he had “no involvement in the drafting of the letter”. She complains that there is “little detail as to the circumstances in which Mr Knauf ’s witness statement has been obtained”. We may never know why – but there is no doubt Mr Knauf ’s latest revelations have changed the course of this extraordinary case.