This week, Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles’ private secretary Clive Alderton – effectively his chief of staff and lead courtier – would be stepping down in the next ten months. The timing of the announcement was certainly interesting, having come in the same month as Charles’ rescinding an invitation for Prince Harry to stay at BP, and the subsequent Highgrove meeting with the Sussex family on July 10. It’s hard to miss that Alderton’s retirement is at least partially due to Prince Harry and the decade-long mismanagement of everything around Harry, Meghan, their kids and their exit. Well, following the Alderton announcement, Tom Sykes posted a lengthy, self-congratulatory Royalist Substack where he referenced his own reporting. While Sykes has gone off the deep end about all things Sussex, I’ve remarked before about how he actually has some interesting dirt about the internal politics of Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace (Prince William’s office). Here’s some of what Sykes wrote in “The Wasp Is Leaving the Palace. Advantage, Harry.”

The news that Sir Clive Alderton, King Charles’s principal private secretary, is standing down from his role after 20 years of royal service is a huge win for the bring-back-Harry party, captained by the king himself, to which Alderton has long been a leading member of the opposition. It will not come as a huge surprise to readers of The Royalist or viewers of my YouTube channel; I have been talking for some time about the rise of the court’s chief dove, Theo Rycroft, Alderton’s deputy who is now in pole position.

The Royalist has been ahead of the game on this story, but it has been gossiped about for several months now. There is a reason it has been so difficult for my colleagues in the UK legacy media to report. Although it has been widely known in royal circles for some time now that Alderton was deeply unhappy with the direction of travel of Charles’s Harry policy, reporters cannot afford to anger the king’s press office (headed by another hawk, Tobyn Andreae) or they risk being cut off. For many, that is simply too big a risk to take.

I have been reporting for some time on the increasing influence of Rycroft, and although Buckingham Palace is briefing that there will be a competitive recruitment process open to internal and external candidates, most people understand that Rycroft, in the natural order of things, should take over the role. That is how these things usually work.

Part of what makes writing about the royals sometimes a little tense is the way that the palace so often confirms or denies things. After I wrote about Rycroft’s rise, plenty of people pushed back unofficially, telling me I was wrong, that there was no friction, no factions. So it is, I’ll admit, gratifying to have it confirmed that my sources have been telling me the truth: the court is indeed riven with factionalism, and Charles, now that he has his health back, is reshaping his court around the thing he actually wants, and what the king wants is Harry back.

There is a bigger story here too: a king taking back power. You have to go all the way back to George III, who confounded his doctors in 1789 (recovering his wits just as parliament prepared to hand power to his son as regent), to find a British monarch restored to health so pointedly reclaiming control from his heir. Charles is reasserting himself, and the court is being reshaped in his image, not William’s.

Ultimately, if you are the king’s private secretary, your job is to enable him. The feeling in parts of Charles’s own camp for some time has been that Alderton was, if not doing the opposite, very definitely not getting on very enthusiastically with the business of delivering what the king wanted (reconciliation with his son and his son’s family); he seems to have been intent on saving the king from what he regarded as his bad ideas. After twenty successful years at Charles’s side, it seems Alderton thinks this too big a mistake to endorse.

[From The Royalist Substack]

Begrudging credit to Sykes: I think he’s correct about the factions within the king’s court, just as I think Alderton both undermined and enabled a dithering, weak king and a deadbeat father. Alderton is to blame for a lot of what happened around the Sussexes, but Charles is to blame as well. My guess is that Charles, fueled by the “hawks” in his office, decided to make some horrible decisions (the Frogmore eviction, the years-long silent treatment, rescinding the invitation to stay at BP), and then blamed those hawks when his decisions blew up in his face.

That woman Kinsey Schofield also “reacted” to Sykes’ reporting, saying in part: “If Harry believes one retirement suddenly clears the path back into the Royal Family, I think he’ll be disappointed… The trust deficit is far bigger than any one adviser…I think it’s premature to call this a win for Prince Harry.” I mean…Harry absolutely loathes Alderton, so it actually IS a win. But it will be interesting to see if Theo Rycroft becomes the new private secretary. Rycroft is absolutely more pro-Sussex in general.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.