Harry and Meghan Cook Up Trouble for King Charles

Annabel Lee-Ellis / via REUTERS The question of whether the Sussexes should be described as “working royals” has become a strange new battleground in Harry and Meghan’s campaign to re-establish themselves as “public figures” in Britain.

In comments to the London Sunday Times , a source described as a friend (likely a member of their press office) said, “‘Working members of the royal family’ is a really lazy phrase.

He hates it, she hates it.

They are not ‘working’ for the institution, but they are members of the royal family, and they work.

Their days are built around their family life and their work.

She’s running a business seven days a week.” Prince Harry has doubled down on his claim to be a member of the royal family in the wake of his and Meghan’s shambolic charity visit to Nottingham on Thursday, a day of royal-coded engagements that ended, as The Royalist exclusively revealed , with the couple leaving their final event 15 minutes early to collect their children from school.

The friend went on, “Things like Nottingham aren’t done in the name of the institution or the crown, but Harry is the son of the king, he is still a member of the royal family, he’s just not a member of the institution.

It’s misleading to call them ‘former royals.’ It has an impact on how they’re perceived and the way people talk about them.” This position defiantly rejects King Charles’ modest attempt, via his Lord Chamberlain, Lord Benyon, to clarify the couple’s position two weeks after they returned to Britain.

A letter was sent (the palace was at pains to make clear this was the king’s wish) to government departments, military officials and the lord lieutenants, who are the monarchy’s local representatives in the shires, stating that the Sussexes’ position was “akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests.” The letter sent the couple into paroxysms of fury.

Their side pushed back via the Telegraph, saying they were not private citizens but “public figures,” that they should have been consulted on the contents of the king’s letter, and that it was very damaging.

This weekend’s briefing shows that the anger has not gone away.

They did not accept what the letter said then, and they do not accept it now.

This is precisely what the palace does not want, because it could lead to the establishment of a rival court.

Queen Elizabeth II understood exactly what damage a rival court could do, because her father’s entire reign was devoted to preventing Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson from establishing one in Britain.