All weekend, the British press was trying to figure out what to say about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s successful trip to Nottingham last Thursday. Clearly, Buckingham Palace was openly peeved about it, but the mood within the media was different – they still see the value in hating on Prince Harry and Meghan, but they’re also starting to see the value of just covering the Sussexes straight on without defaulting to enraged, snide commentary. Making matters more complicated, the Sussex team has been regularly briefing the media. That has changed the tenor of the coverage too, because Harry and Meghan are narrating their own lives back in the UK instead of leaving it to the Windsors to dictate the talking points. Well, Roya Nikkhah at the Times had a big post-Nottingham story about how much the Sussexes “hate” the phrase “working members of the royal family.” From Tom Sykes’ coverage of the Times piece:

Prince Harry has doubled down, via a conveniently placed “friend,” 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 which ended as I exclusively revealed with the couple leaving their final event 15 minutes early enabling them to collect their children from school.

The question of whether or not 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 Sunday Times, a source described as a friend (but who anyone who has worked this beat for any length of time will recognize as 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.”

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.”

What we are looking at is a defiant rejection of the very modest attempt by the King, via his Lord Chamberlain, Lord Benyon, to clarify the couple’s position a fortnight after they landed back in the country. A letter was sent at the King’s direction (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, and it stated that the Sussexes’ position was “akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests.”

The couple went into paroxysms of fury when the letter came out. Their side pushed back, via the Telegraph, that 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 to them and generally an outrage. What this weekend’s briefing shows is that the anger has not gone anywhere. They did not accept what was said in the letter then, and they do not accept it now. They are determined to go on being perceived as current members of the royal family, which is precisely what the Palace does not want, because it leads to the establishment of a rival court.

…The Palace, from what I am hearing, is in a state of dismay. They do not know what to do. The feeling is that there is nothing further they can do without the King giving the authority to come down harder, to let it be known to the Sussexes that they are risking their titles. But the Palace is very nervous about even modest steps such as removing them from the royal website, because they do not want to look vindictive, and they are worried that it will stoke the flames and make things worse.

[From The Royalist]

Regarding the somewhat pedantic argument over “working royals” or “members of the royal family who work,” I’d like to see all sides just get over themselves, honestly. This is not a winnable battle for either side. Harry seems hellbent on defining his own special role where he doesn’t really work for the Firm but he’s still sort of a member of the Firm and he does “royal-style” events which look exactly like working-royal events. For the palace and the leftovers, the conversation and issue is about control, about who represents what. The Windsors can’t actually control Harry and Meghan in the larger sense, even if there seems to be some coordination between Harry and his father in the past year. Mostly though, I wish Harry would understand that he doesn’t actually *need* these attachments (both emotional and linguistic) to the Windsors.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.