The Sussexes’ selfish return spells peril for the royal family

Cambridge : “Please, boys. Don’t make my final years a misery.” The words of the future King Charles III as he pleaded with his two sons to patch things up at their grandfather’s funeral in April 2021 have just acquired a whole new resonance.

The “boys”, better known as Prince William and Prince Harry, never did make up. Indeed, their feud only darkened and deepened as the elder brother fumed at the younger’s treachery towards the royal family in general, and his wife, in particular. (Outrageously, in her interview with Oprah Winfrey , Meghan accused unnamed members of the family of racism in relation to her unborn baby’s skin colour.)

The last time Harry and William stood together, just the two of them, was in July 2021 at the unveiling of a bronze statue of their late mother on what would have been her 60th birthday. The pair could barely look at each other. For William, Harry’s deeply personal and spiteful revelations two years later in his biography, Spare , were an unimaginable betrayal by the human being he once trusted best.

A lid could be kept on that seething Shakespearean sibling rivalry, as long as Diana’s beloved boys, now men in their 40s, were separated by an ocean. Harry and Meghan found freedom in California from the stultifying Windsor ways they so publicly scorned. The Waleses were left to steady the ship after the turbulence of “Megxit”. They did so admirably and to universal acclaim despite Princess Catherine’s shocking brush with cancer .

The sudden announcement on Wednesday night that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are returning to the UK later this month – a typical piece of Sussex melodrama, both blithely selfish and utterly ruthless – threatens the uneasy truce between the brothers. It also heralds a moment of intense danger for the monarchy because almost anything could happen – and very little of it good.

The King has shown immense fortitude during his cancer treatment , and continues to carry out his duties with charm and aplomb, but the 77-year-old Charles is ailing. Understandably, there is speculation that Harry has seized this moment to shore up his family’s position while a fond Papa is still on the throne and able to bail him out.

With a commitment to a slimmed-down monarchy – probably comprised of his own three children, George, Charlotte and Louis, and their immediate heirs – things would look very different under a future King William V. The duke and duchess, and Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet (the children’s faces unknown to the British public even though they are sixth and seventh in line to our throne), might well lose their titles and their access to the only thing that they have left to sell, apart from tens of thousands of jars of Meghan’s jam . A sticky position, you have to agree.

Cynics point out that Harry’s newfound enthusiasm for Britain follows a humiliating failure in the United States. After the duchess’s teeth-rottingly glutinous lifestyle show, With Love, Meghan , was panned, Netflix drastically watered down the couple’s lavish deal.