JAN MOIR: Harry and Meghan are like two eager limpets sucking nutrients off the rusty hull of the Royal Yacht Britannia

Time to pack away all hopes and bright dreams for the new year and wearily lift our eyes towards Montecito, where the sun never sets without another gassy drama taking place.

Even by their own standards of high dudgeon and imagined insult, it has been quite a week for Harry and Meghan.

It’s not just that the Duke of Sussex has embarrassed the Armed Forces and the entire British nation by being given a Living Legend of Aviation award, an entirely fatuous tribute whose previous recipients include – riffs through Hollywood flying log – Tweety Bird, Casper The Friendly Ghost and Flying Ace Snoopy. It is more that down on the ground, it seems the Sussexes have been exposed as the Bonnie and Clyde of name-napping, revealing themselves to be a pair of marauding banditos who mounted a raid on the House of Windsor and made off with a prize beyond rubies – the Queen’s childhood nickname.

At the time, back in the summer of 2021, the Sussexes claimed that Elizabeth II had given her blessing to their baby daughter being christened Lilibet – and issued legal warnings to the BBC and others who suggested otherwise.

Prince Harry has controversially been given a Living Legend of Aviation award

The couple’s decision to call their daughter Lilibet is said to have angered the Queen

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have made a new life for themselves in California

Now we know that the Queen was far from happy. In fact, she was furious and felt she had been bounced into accepting the Sussexes audacious decision. ‘Angrier than I ever seen her,’ said one aide.

And the name-nap was audacious. Not to mention cheeky, grasping and utterly selfish. The only people to address the late monarch as Lilibet were her parents, her sister and her husband. One can imagine, for a woman who lived so much of her life on the public stage, a matriarch whose very homes were business hubs packed with official staff and courtiers, how much this affectionate intimacy mattered. Unlike the Koh-i-Noor diamond or the ballroom at Balmoral, the Gold State Coach or any of her myriad titles, the name Lilibet wasn’t on loan, it wasn’t a regal rental – it was hers and hers alone. Until it wasn’t.

Harry served two tours of duty in Afghanistan

Among the royals, it was a tradition to pay quiet tribute to the head of the family via the middle name to their daughters; three of the Queen’s four granddaughters and four of her seven great-granddaughters have Elizabeth as a middle name. But this respectful homage wasn’t good enough for the Sussexes, a pair of ‘grifters’ (according to one Spotify executive who worked with them) forever hungry to forge lucrative connections to the House of Windsor; thus strengthening any silken bonds that might subtly remind the American public of their supposedly elevated status.

Even as they trashed the Royals as racists and worse, Harry and Meghan still clung to the institution’s superstructure, like two eager limpets sucking nutrients off the rusty hull of the Royal Yacht Britannia. But if they hated the Royal Family so much that they had to change continents to escape them, why didn’t they call their daughter Doria? That’s what I would like to know.

The late Queen’s dismay has been freshly revealed in Charles III. New King, New Court. The Inside Story, a new book by the royal biographer, my colleague Robert Hardman.

Robert’s sources are impeccable and no doubt his version of events is the one that history will recognise as the truth. Yet as Lilibet-gate continues to make headlines around the world, it is notable that the litigious Sussexes have not said a word about this reputationally corrosive development. Not one squeaky cheep! Indeed, the silence from Montecito is deafening.

Perhaps Harry and Meghan are consoling themselves with the shiny new Living Legend of Aviation award, something to put on their mantelpiece along with their Global Ambassadors of Do Gooding accolade and their Hey Guys Humanity Needs Us trophy.

The aviation award is to be presented by John Travolta at a star-studded ceremony in Los Angeles today. Not just because he is a qualified pilot, but because he also feels a ‘special connection’ to the royals because he danced with Princess Diana at the White House nearly 40 years ago. Dear God.

This is the cheap, tinsel world that Prince Harry has chosen for himself, but will he actually turn up to this meaningless, cringe event? No one doubts that Harry was a brave helicopter pilot during his two tours of duty in Afghanistan, but so were many thousands of other airmen flying in war zones around the world. And since then, it has to be said that his key contribution to aviation and aerospace has been to take numerous flights on private jets while hypocritically lecturing everyone else about climate change. Is there an award for that? Polite answers via air mail, please.