After the success of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s events in Nottingham yesterday, I knew that royal reporters and royalists would be ranting, raving and practically barking in anger. What I didn’t predict was how quickly Buckingham Palace would publicize their own irritation and rage with being outplayed by Prince Harry and Meghan. This is the last gasp of an out-of-touch institution which has spent a decade making mistake after mistake, then crying when their own terrible decisions blow up in their faces. “How dare you survive everything we’ve thrown at you.” Well, Tom Sykes spent five full pages ranting about all of this on his Royalist Substack. Some highlights from “‘It’s Unforgivable’: Harry and Meghan Tear Up Queen’s Megxit Deal.”

The quote from a Sussex friend to Hello Magazine about the Sandringham agreement: “It doesn’t trouble them. They never agreed they wouldn’t be half in half out. That was what was decided and foisted upon them. They’re just living their lives and they can, because they’re financially independent.”…The Sussexes’ position, six years on, is that none of [the Sandringham Agreement] counts, because nobody made the Queen sign a contract with her grandson. The statement (let’s be honest, this has been spoon-fed by their office) has gone down spectacularly badly with my sources this morning. One friend of the late Queen, who is also close to the wider family, told me: “It’s unforgivable.”

How dare they want a written contract!! Another source, a former courtier loyal to King Charles, to whom I read the Hello! quote, said: “The idea that you would ask the Queen to sign a contract with a member of her family is absolutely disgusting, but it’s entirely what we have come to expect from these two. I am appalled to hear this.”

Sykes’ take on the Sandringham Agreement: The Queen did not need his agreement. She was the Queen. She ruled. The arrogance of now suggesting that she should have had to sign a contract binding herself to the two of them is outrageous. Nobody foisted anything on anyone. Harry sat in the room at Sandringham. He negotiated. He ultimately accepted, and he said so, out loud, the next day. The Queen, who did not use the word carelessly, called it an agreement. I am sure they wanted a different outcome. I am sure that, in their own minds, it was imposed on them. But they accepted it at the time, and the fact that they have now decided they don’t like the deal, because the Netflix deal has collapsed, does not mean it does not bind them. To brief otherwise is outrageous.

The palace is irritated & “wrongfooted”: In the Daily Mail, Rebecca English, whose sources inside the palace are as good as anyone’s, wrote that Thursday was the day two rival royal courts went head to head, that Harry and Meghan are now “cosplaying at being royal,” and that the palace is irritated. The picture she paints is of an institution that has been left completely wrong-footed, that does not know what to do and does not know where to turn. That is completely my understanding too. There is dismay, and among the hawks, who have been pushing for much tougher sanctions against Harry since long before the move back, there is a great deal of “I told you so.”

Man-on-the-street interviews: Because what we saw in Nottingham was two people behaving as full-on members of the royal family. One of my stock questions to the people on the street was whether they regarded Harry and Meghan as full-fat members of the royal family, and basically everyone said yes. Only one person I found was attuned to the subtleties of the couple no longer being paid-up members of the working royal firm. Everybody else simply assumed. As I wrote yesterday, that confusion is the palace’s nightmare, but from Harry and Meghan’s point of view it was the entire purpose of the exercise: to blur the boundary.

The palace’s strategy: This is an enormous deal for the palace, and the signs so far are that it is being handled badly by the ascendant doves, led by Theo Rycroft. The strategy, insofar as there is one, appears to be to stand back and hope it all goes away, perhaps in the hope that they leave at Christmas and don’t come back. That is not remotely likely, because all their options in America are now dead and they can no longer afford that life. The Sussexes’ best remaining bet is to generate exactly this: conflict, attention, stories, in Britain, where it is absurdly easy. There will always be an organization that will have them. There will always be a town they can descend on, a school run they can disrupt, a road that has to be closed.

The disruptive Sussexes: Hello! understands the couple will do only a “handful” of joint outings over the coming year, with Harry doing more on his own. But you do not have to do a lot of these to be a thorn in the side. Two or three a year is still incredibly disruptive, and still extremely bad for the royal family. Yesterday, for example, the royal press pack should have been in Cardiff, where the King was opening the Senedd. It was in Nottingham instead.

Lord Chamberlain’s letter: The Lord Chamberlain’s letter, which I said at the time posed more questions than it answered and was, frankly, a joke, has now been revealed as exactly that. The legacy media leapt up and down and told us it was a massive slap-down for Harry and Meghan. It was nothing of the kind. For two weeks after the Sussexes’ jet touched down, generals, ministers and county grandees had been ringing Buckingham Palace to ask what on earth they were supposed to do with these two (Do we bow? Do we curtsy?), and the palace had no answer for them. When the answer finally came, it was a letter to those Lord Lieutenants, High Sheriffs, ministers and military chiefs saying, essentially, that there was nothing to see here: “no change,” the HRHs still “in abeyance,” their position “akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests.” Private citizens, that is, to whom “courtesies” might still be owed and for whom “recourse to public funds may be required.”

The rival court: It is not enough now for the King’s aides to wring their hands and tell the Sunday Times, as one did last month, that there are now three courts, two official and one not, and that it’s “not great.” The King should have said at the beginning, publicly and in plain English: the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not working members of the royal family, they are not welcome to carry out this kind of work, it is a distraction from the work of the royal family, and we do not welcome it. He said none of it.

[From The Royalist Substack]

Wow. The worst part of this is that I think it’s an accurate portrait of the conversations happening at high levels of the monarchy. There’s a deep frustration simply because they can’t control Harry and Meghan and somehow “force” them to stop going outside. Speaking of, I have a few notes. One can argue, as Sykes has, that Harry did “negotiate” at the Sandringham Summit, but the plan was already in place. Much of the summit was built around a sort of royal version of “scared straight” – trying to convince Harry to leave Meghan by forcing the “hard exit.” That’s why Meghan was blocked from attending the summit as well, and that’s why no one should blame her for not adhering to the summit’s terms. She wasn’t allowed a seat at the table in a conversation about her future, and she never signed jack sh-t. All of this hand-wringing over “but YOu pRoMIsEd not to be working royals” stems from the palace’s error, not the Sussexes’ error.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.