Prince Harry’s delicate relationship with his father, King Charles III, has collapsed after the duke restated his demand for taxpayer-funded armed police protection when visiting the U.K.
It emerged on Friday—just hours after Sussex sources denied there was any “plot afoot” to bring Harry and Meghan back to Britain more frequently—that Harry had personally written to the British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in the hope of getting his security reinstated.
According to The Sunday Times (London), the letter was addressed directly to the home secretary and formally requested a new “risk assessment” from the Royal and VIP Executive Committee. This Home Office committee determines protection for royals and VIPs. Harry has been denied such assessments since stepping back from royal duties in 2020—a decision that effectively locked him out of the system.
The king’s camp has now reacted to the move.
Sources close to the monarch told The Sunday Times that Harry’s latest intervention is deeply unhelpful, adding: “It complicates things for the king. It’s not going to help matters. We are back to where we were.”
That bleak phrase, “back to where we were,” reflects the collapse of the tentative détente painstakingly constructed over the past two months.
Before their meeting in September, the king had not seen his younger son in more than 18 months, reportedly due to concerns that Harry might try to use their relationship to influence his ongoing legal battle with the British government.
Harry himself was well aware of this. In a BBC interview in May he said: “He won’t speak to me because of this security stuff.”
One senior courtier memorably told the Daily Beast last year, “It is very difficult [for them to meet] when His Majesty’s son is suing His Majesty’s government in His Majesty’s court.”
After losing every aspect of his legal case and following several months of back-channel diplomacy, Harry finally met his father in early September. The carefully choreographed meeting was intended not only to re-establish a personal connection, but also to demonstrate that one had been re-established.
One implicit condition was that Harry would not publicly discuss the meeting afterwards.
He did—immediately.
In a Guardian interview days later, Harry declared it had been great to see his father, said the meeting had brought closer the prospect of his children visiting the U.K., but then said: “Over the coming year, the focus really needs to be on my dad.”
It was foolish to discuss the meeting at all, but doubly so to say something that suggested that the king was seriously unwell—a message directly at odds with the palace’s core strategy of projecting stability and health while the monarch undergoes cancer treatment.
Harry’s faux pas was followed by a story in Us Weekly—edited by Dan Wakeford, formerly of People, a magazine with long-standing Sussex ties—claiming there had been “hugs and tears” at the meeting.
The palace was incensed. One aide acidly briefed: “Some people appear to have mistaken a cup of tea and a slice of cake for the Treaty of Versailles.”
The U.K. tabloid The Sun then published a counter-briefing describing the encounter as “formal” and “squeezed between other meetings.” Harry, furious, accused “the men in grey suits” of undermining him and trying to sabotage the relationship with his father.
Harry’s latest move, writing directly to the home secretary, has plunged relations back into open hostility.
His team insisted Sunday that the duke does not expect and has never asked the king to intervene. This is semantic nonsense. In an emotional BBC interview Harry gave after losing his court case, he said: “There is a lot of control and ability in my father’s hands. Ultimately, this whole thing could be resolved through him. No necessarily by intervening, but by stepping aside, allowing the experts to do what is necessary.”
“This is the fake naivety again,” one former courtier told the Daily Beast. “Everyone knows this isn’t about risk management protocols or bureaucratic committees. It’s about power and control. The establishment doesn’t want Harry being able to land at Heathrow without notice and getting greeted by an armed escort.”
Harry’s persistence, despite losing his legal case and spending millions of dollars in the process, is viewed by palace insiders as self-destructive. “He was so close to what he says he wants—a functional relationship with his family,” one friend of the king said. “Then he blows it all up again.”
For critics of Harry who have the king’s ear, the whole episode will be used to restate old warnings: that every interaction with his son will end up in the press, weaponized as part of a public pressure campaign.
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