How the royals have dealt with a torrent of allegations from Harry and Meghan: Queen was ‘as angry as I’d ever seen her’ after Sussexes claimed they had the monarch’s blessing to use the name ‘Lilibet’, aides tell ROBERT HARDMAN

In yesterday’s Mail on Sunday, Robert Hardman revealed how the Government developed secret plans for a regency if the late Queen could no longer rule. Today, a raft of insiders tell how the royals have dealt with a torrent of allegations from the Sussexes…

As the world discovered almost exactly a year ago, Spare is undoubtedly the most candid and caustic royal memoir ever written.

Throughout the book, however, Prince Harry was keen to stress his devotion to the Queen and Prince Philip.

Later, reflecting on his grandmother after her death, he wrote: ‘We had secrets. Special relationship, that’s what they said about us, and now I couldn’t stop thinking about the specialness that would no longer be.’

He did not, however, hold back in Spare when attacking some of her staff. They did not respond, though they were interested by what had been omitted from his book.

One privately recalled that Elizabeth II had been ‘as angry as I’d ever seen her’ in 2021 after the Sussexes announced that she had given them her blessing to call their baby daughter ‘Lilibet’, the Queen’s childhood nickname. 

Among the most sensational claims in Spare was that Prince William had physically attacked his brother during an argument about Meghan’s behaviour towards staff

As the world discovered almost exactly a year ago, Spare is undoubtedly the most candid and caustic royal memoir ever written

The couple had subsequently fired off warnings of legal action against anyone who dared to suggest otherwise, as the BBC had done. However, when the Sussexes tried to co-opt the Palace into propping up their version of events, they were rebuffed. Once again, it was a case of ‘recollections may vary’ — the late Queen’s reaction to the Oprah Winfrey interview — as far as Her Majesty was concerned.

Those noisy threats of legal action duly evaporated and the libel action against the BBC never materialised.

On October 27, 2022, Prince Harry’s publishers had announced that his long-awaited memoir was finally close to completion. Promising ‘raw, unflinching honesty’, it would be variously titled Spare, The Minor (Italy), Reserve (Germany), The Other One (Poland), and so on. It was not hard to detect an overarching underdog theme.

The announcement all but eclipsed the news, on the same day, that the Royal Mint had struck the first coins featuring the face of the King.

Asked about the King’s feelings on all this imminent incoming fire from the Sussexes and their associates, one Palace staffer referred to them as ‘headwinds that we face from across the Atlantic’.

That was one way of describing an extraordinary 12-week run of non-stop disobliging headlines and combative allegations, all of them entirely beyond the control of the King and his staff. Storm-force gales might have been a better metaphor.

That this should all be unfolding in the first phase of a new reign might once have been considered disastrous. However, there were two unexpected aspects to these ‘headwinds’ which would work in Charles III’s favour.

First, the constant diet of extraneous negativity, though awkward and at times embarrassing, made very little impact, according to polls, on public attitudes towards the monarchy. Second, it appeared to have no discernible impact on the King himself.

Asked about the King’s feelings on all this imminent incoming fire from the Sussexes and their associates, one Palace staffer referred to them as ‘headwinds that we face from across the Atlantic’

Just over a month later, on December 1, the inaugural trailer appeared for the Sussexes’ forthcoming six-part Netflix documentary about their new life in California. The Royal Family and their staff steeled themselves for a reprise of the Sussexes’ March 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which Meghan had made allegations of royal ‘conversations’ about the possible skin colour of the couple’s first child.

Pressing on with his engagements, the King went to Central Hall, Westminster, on December 7 to mark the 40th anniversary of Business In The Community, a favourite charity.

He had been its founder patron since a meeting in 1982 with black community leaders. And over the years, he had helped cajole the leaders of some of Britain’s best-known companies into adopting more socially responsible and inclusive recruitment policies.

However, the event at Central Hall barely made the news, let alone the headlines, because the media was focused entirely on a celebration of another royal patronage elsewhere.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were in New York on the same day to receive a Ripple of Hope Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation ‘in recognition of their work on racial justice, mental health, and other social impact initiatives’.

The foundation’s president, Kerry Kennedy, saluted them for being ‘incredibly brave’ in speaking out on such issues. After receiving the award, which also praised their ‘lifelong commitment to building strong and equitable communities’ through their Archewell Foundation, the Sussexes issued a joint statement: ‘Together we know that a ripple of hope can turn into a wave of change.’

Back in Britain, staff who had watched the King bring about his own ‘wave of change’ over many decades, through his Prince’s Trust, Business In The Community and multiple other organisations, could only roll their eyes.

‘Of course the King is extremely sad about Harry and Meghan but there is a sense of exasperation,’ says one friend

Even the Sussexes’ most fervent admirers had to acknowledge that, in its two-year infancy, Archewell had yet to demonstrate a ‘lifelong commitment’. More damaging for the monarchy was a perception that Meghan and Harry had felt compelled to abandon their royal duties, in part, because of latent racism within the Royal Family and the Royal Household.

‘Much of the Caribbean gets its news through U.S. outlets, and the U.S. media was generally more sympathetic to Harry and Meghan,’ says a former Palace aide. ‘So Megxit plays directly into this debate.’

Never mind the King’s lifetime’s support for Britain’s evolution as a multicultural society. Never mind that he sees the growing strength of historic racial justice campaigns as an inevitability to be addressed with compassion.

In 2022, before the death of the late Queen, a small research project, which was granted access to the Royal Archives, set about exploring the monarchy’s historic links to specific parts of the slave trade. Prince Charles, however, was already developing more ambitious plans in this area.

He wanted a much broader investigation into the monarchy’s role in the slave trade, in slavery and in the abolition of both.

‘The King understands that this has to be done properly and objectively,’ says one official. ‘He is absolutely not going to hide anything about the past.’ And a member of the King’s staff reflects: ‘It’s a journey that starts with the acknowledgement of pain, and you can get a lot done once you have acknowledged someone’s pain.’

In 2021, Harry and Meghan’s decision to call their new daughter Lilibet, who was born in California and has only once briefly been to the UK, raised eyebrows

Just two days after the Ripple of Hope award, the world was able to watch the first three episodes of Harry & Meghan, the six-part documentary which the couple had been busy making when not ‘building equitable communities‘. The first salvo opened with many withering remarks about the Royal Family and the monarchy. Among other things, Prince Harry claimed that, for male members of the family, ‘there can be a temptation or an urge to marry someone who would fit the mould — as opposed to somebody who you perhaps are destined to be with’.

The clear inference that he was talking about his elder brother astonished friends of the family.

‘On top of all the other breaches of trust, here was Harry making a blatant attack on Catherine. For William, this was the lowest of the low,’ says one.

Opinions were divided as to whether this really was a calculated slight against the new Princess of Wales or whether it was a case of ‘Harry shooting his mouth off’ with yet another round of scattergun assertions and thoughtless allegations.

One member of her staff says the late monarch was ‘as angry as I’d ever seen her’ after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex publicly stated they would not have used her private family nickname for their daughter had she not been ‘supportive’

Elsewhere in the show, he accused his family of ‘a huge level of unconscious bias’, while Meghan dismissed the couple’s original engagement interview with Mishal Husain of the BBC as ‘rehearsed’ and ‘an orchestrated reality show‘.

This came as something of a surprise to Husain herself. As one of the BBC’s most highly regarded journalists, she felt she had conducted a thoroughly professional interview. She coolly restricted her response to the words of the late Queen: ‘Recollections may vary.’

What would have dismayed Elizabeth II the most, perhaps, was the historically befuddled section in which a commentator sympathetic to the couple described the Commonwealth — of which the Sussexes had so recently been such passionate advocates — as ‘a privileged club’ and ‘Empire 2.0’ which had been ‘created’ by Britain in a way that ‘protected its commercial and capitalist interest’.

If so, it was odd that its membership had reached a record high six months earlier with the addition of two new member nations previously colonised by France. Nor was the Commonwealth ‘created’ by Britain. It was built by the eight ‘free and equal’ nations which signed the London Declaration of 1949.

Stylishly filmed, Harry & Meghan was highly watchable and clearly a success from Netflix’s point of view. But for the couple?

It merely seemed to go over the same old ground and the same old resentments.

When the Duke of Sussex let it be known he was coming to Britain in September 2023, en route to his Invictus Games in Germany, his father invited him to stay at Balmoral. Pictured at the games

One of the most contentious moments, for British viewers at least, was when a smirking Meghan performed a comic repeat of her first curtsy to the Queen. The queasy look of discomfort on Harry’s face was that of a man all too aware of the consequences yet unable to do anything about it.

The King and the family said nothing, and the Palace strategy was one of ‘show not tell’. So, on the same day that Netflix first aired Harry & Meghan, the King was with religious charities in North London.

‘I know this looks like a carefully scripted response to the Sussexes but he really has had all this in the diary for a long time,’ chuckled one Palace staffer as the King visited a cafe for refugees and asylum seekers before joining the Archbishop of Canterbury to celebrate Advent at the Ethiopian Christian Fellowship Church.

Many more viewers would watch Prince Harry in the Californian sunshine airing his grievances with his family — ‘I’m probably never going to get a genuine apology’ — than would view news clips of the King going about his worthy, unexciting rounds in wintry London.

What was abundantly clear, however, was which of them looked more contented with life.

Given Prince William’s pathological determination to protect his family’s privacy, he was, say friends, mortified by the casual betrayal of so many fraternal secrets

There was little respite from those trans-Atlantic headwinds, however. Not only was publication of Spare fast approaching but Prince Harry had agreed to do two television interviews, in which he would lob similar accusations. Goaded time and again, the Royal Family still said nothing.

Among the most sensational claims in Spare was that Prince William had physically attacked his brother during an argument about Meghan’s behaviour towards staff.

Given Prince William’s pathological determination to protect his family’s privacy, he was, say friends, mortified by the casual betrayal of so many fraternal secrets.

No one could have been dreading the book more than Queen Camilla, whom he repeatedly accused of conducting her own public relations campaign at the expense of the young princes.

‘Stories began to appear everywhere, in all the papers, about her private conversation with Willy,’ Prince Harry wrote. ‘They could only have been leaked by the one other person present.’

But the book omitted to explain what had actually happened 25 years earlier. Prince William was, indeed, introduced to his future stepmother in July 1998. News of the encounter did, indeed, surface in the Sun soon afterwards.

The then Camilla Parker Bowles was mortified and an internal investigation was launched. The one person whom she had told was her own personal assistant, Amanda MacManus, keeper of her diary.

MacManus had confided in her husband, James, a newspaper executive, who, over a game of tennis, confided in a former colleague who told a friend on the Sun. The full facts emerged when Amanda MacManus issued a public apology and immediately resigned.

Camilla Parker Bowles felt desperately sorry for her assistant, never held her personally responsible and soon reappointed her. MacManus then remained at her side for another 23 years, becoming her private secretary. She retired in 2021 but is still involved with some of Queen Camilla’s charities.

Though presented as a conspiracy in Spare, the true sequence of events was, rather, pure cock-up. A quarter of a century later, the new Queen and her staff made no comment. Naturally, the world wanted to hear Prince William’s thoughts on Spare. His staff remain adamant that he and the Princess refused to open a book which has caused so much pain.

‘Neither of them read it,’ says one of their senior advisers. ‘He is a grown-up 40-year-old with the BBC app on his phone so he knows what it says. But he has people like me to tell him what else he needs to know. We gave him the key points.’

It had been the same with the Netflix series. Looking back, one of Prince William’s team reflects: ‘My boss would say, ‘Whatever the rights and wrongs, I hope that people feel I behaved properly in keeping my counsel.’ You can imagine what he feels about this, especially regarding what has been said about his wife. But he is being admirably grown-up.’

For days after Spare was unleashed on the world, further revelations were unpicked, along with various errors.

Writing in tandem with his ghostwriter, Prince Harry had painted a forlorn picture at Eton of a lonely schoolboy being told, by a lackey, of the death of his adored great-grandmother. ‘I took the call. I wish I could remember whose voice was at the other end: a courtier’s, I believe. I recall that it was just before Easter, the weather bright and warm, light slanting through my window, filled with vivid colours. ‘Your Royal Highness, the Queen Mother has died.’ ‘

Harry had actually been in Switzerland, skiing with his father and brother, when all three received the news.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Harry pictured together at the Chelsea Flower show on May 18, 2015

For the Palace, the most worrying aspect of the book was the omission of large chunks of more recent events. It did not go unnoticed that Harry and Meghan’s wedding, their married life and their eventual departure from the royal world amounted to a small part — less than a fifth — of Harry’s memoir. This suggested either a sequel or, perhaps, a memoir by Meghan in due course.

A common perception is that the King and his staff spend much of their time worrying about what to do with the two difficult Dukes, Harry and Andrew. In reality, however, the King has learned over long years of royal domestic trauma how to compartmentalise issues over which he has little control.

Yes, the departure of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex from royal life in 2020 and their subsequent sensational attacks on the institution, on camera and in print, have hurt.

‘Of course the King is extremely sad about Harry and Meghan but there is a sense of exasperation, that he has done what he can and now he is King, there are many more things to think about,’ says one friend. He has tried listening. Now he just says, ‘I don’t want to know what the problem is. I’m just getting on with my life.’ ‘

Nothing is final, however. ‘You’d always like your child back,’ says a senior official. ‘But when your child has decided that, at the moment, they want to do things differently, you have to give them the space to do that. The door is always open, though.’

Charles III New King. New Court. The Inside Story by Robert Hardman, to be published by Macmillan on January 18

At least Prince Harry came back for his father’s Coronation. Meghan, of course, did not: the Sussexes’ favoured media outlets were informed that this was because the date clashed with their son Archie’s fourth birthday.

Cynics have suggested that she might also have been fearful of a negative reaction from the public as she emerged from her car. But police restrictions on public access to the area around the Abbey entrance were such that no one would have been within booing range anyway.

At the Coronation itself, Prince Harry was seated in the third row of the royal section, immediately behind Princess Anne, who was wearing a striking red-plumed bicorn hat that remained on her head throughout. Social media snipers instantly concluded that Harry had been deliberately placed behind his aunt’s tall hat to obscure his view.

This is nonsense. Not only do the Lord Chamberlain’s Office not think like that, but the Princess Royal had only switched to that seat after her request for a speedy exit. ‘The hat was an interesting question,’ the Princess recalled later. ‘I said: ‘Are you sure you want me to keep the hat on? Because it’s quite a decent-sized hat.’ And the answer was yes. There you go. Not my choice.’

At the end of the service, the congregation bowed and curtsied as the King and Queen processed past them. Tellingly, the Duke of Sussex dropped his head for longer than most.

• Adapted from Charles III New King. New Court. The Inside Story by Robert Hardman, to be published by Macmillan on January 18 at £22. © Robert Hardman 2024. To order a copy for £17.60 (offer valid until February 29, 2024; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.