They quit their official duties five years ago for freedom and a quieter life, but it will be another week of conflict for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
At the Court of Appeal in London on Tuesday and Wednesday, lawyers for Prince Harry will challenge the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper over Britain’s refusal to provide the fifth-in-line to the throne and his family with guaranteed police protection when they return to the UK.
His lawyers will argue that his two tours of duty with the Army in Afghanistan and his high-profile marriage to a mixed-race woman put him and the family at high-risk from extremists. Still, he is happy to pay for armed protection.
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Read MoreThere will be questions about why the Sussexes, unlike some former prime ministers, are being refused automatic armed protection and access to national intelligence while Taylor Swift was given a blue-light escort to a series of sell-out concerts in London in 2024 after jihadist militants targeted her in a foiled plot in Vienna. Some of the case will be heard in secret due to sensitivity.
Meanwhile, the King is said to be refusing to speak to his younger son because of the embarrassment of a senior member of the Royal Family suing His Majesty’s Government.
Whether Harry comes over for the two-day hearing remains to be seen amid unconfirmed speculation over whether Donald Trump’s hostile and volatile administration might prevent him from coming back in again due to illegal drug use described in his memoir, Spare. The US President has made assurances that he will not deport Harry, but the influential Heritage Foundation has vowed to fight on after Harry’s immigration records were released, heavily redacted.
For the past two weeks, Harry has also been embroiled in turmoil over Sentebale, the charity he co-founded in 2006 with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho in memory of their mothers to help young people hit by the HIV/Aids epidemic in southern Africa.
Their decision to resign from Sentebale in an increasingly acrimonious and public dispute with its chair, Sophie Chandauka, over the direction, running and funding of the charity resulted in the Charity Commission announcing on Thursday that it is launching a “regulatory compliance case”, a formal assessment of the organisation that could lead to an even more serious statutory inquiry.
In sharp contrast, the Duchess of Sussex has been basking in the glow of a commercially successful – even if critically panned – eight-episode Netflix cooking and gardening series, With Love, Meghan. Earlier this week, she launched the first eight in a series of expensive lifestyle products, including jam and honey, under her As Ever brand in partnership with the streaming giant.
“The show was in the top 10 globally in 24 countries, and the products sold out in under an hour,” a source at Netflix said, reflecting an increasingly upbeat attitude towards the Duchess at the company.
‘With Love, Meghan’ has been a commercially successful venture (Photo: Jake Rosenberg/Netflix)Harry: isolated but happy
Settled back in her native California, Meghan, 43, is in her comfort zone and looking to make millions from her celebrity. During her days as an actress in the TV legal drama Suits, she ran a lifestyle blog, The Tig, promoting products and appearing in television cookery slots.
Isolated from many of his old London-based friends, her husband nevertheless appears happy domestically. He balances occasional lucrative work with helping to raise their children, Archie, five, and Lilibet, three, and embracing the West Coast lifestyle with regular runs on the beach near their £11m home in Montecito.
But now, in addition to his reported battles with his wider family, the Palace institution, and the British Government, he is fighting to save a key part of his legacy after working to help some of the world’s most impoverished people in southern Africa since 2004, when he spent two months of his gap year volunteering at an orphanage in Lesotho.
Despite the drama and controversy, these have been just another crazy few days in the lives of Harry and Meghan. They are perhaps the world’s most marmite couple – so much so that the fifth anniversary last Monday of the official end of their lives as working members of the Royal Family went largely unremarked.
They have been damaged by the fallout from the crisis at Sentebale, where Chandauka, a 47-year-old Zimbabwean lawyer, has levelled accusations of racism and misogynoir – discrimination against black women – at the primarily white people previously running the charity, accusing Harry of harassment and bullying as well as labelling it a vanity project.
Worse, she has blamed the toxicity of the Sussex brand for her inability to find new sponsors for the charity, which helps young people in Lesotho and Botswana, two impoverished nations where more than one in five adults are HIV positive, and the unemployment rate is 16 and 23 per cent respectively.
Now Harry has hit back, accusing her of hurting the very people she should be protecting. “What has transpired over the last week has been heartbreaking to witness, especially when such blatant lies hurt those who have invested decades in this shared goal. No one suffers more than the beneficiaries of Sentebale itself,” he said.
In a succession of claims and counterclaims, further information has come to light, The i Paper can reveal, challenging some of Chandauka’s version of events.
Sources close to the former trustees, whose resignations came after Chandauka lost their confidence and refused to quit, pointed out that, despite her claims that the Sussexes’ toxicity made it impossible to find sponsors, Sentebale was almost entirely reliant on money from Harry’s polo games and a $1.5m (£1.2m) donation from the proceeds of his memoir Spare.
It was claimed that the Sussexes’ toxicity made it impossible to find sponsors for Sentebale (Photo: Karwai Tang/WireImage)In addition, there are questions about claims Chandauka made in a television interview with Sky’s Trevor Phillips last Sunday. She complained that Meghan had made a surprise appearance which had disrupted a polo tournament in Wellington, Florida, in April 2024, while Harry’s insistence on bringing a Netflix camera crew, something she felt awkward about, had earlier lost the charity a polo venue in Miami.
It has now been claimed by sources that Chandauka had personally written to Meghan to invite her to the polo and that Harry’s friend Nacho Figueras had secured the alternative venue to the financial advantage of Sentebale after the original hosts in Miami had increased the costs. Chandauka confirmed the invitation but said she and the Sentebale team were informed less than 24 hours in advance of Meghan’s attendance.
Furthermore, video footage has come to light showing that Chandauka welcomed Netflix’s participation. “It’s a great platform and profile. The Netflix brand is globally recognised, and any opportunity to tell the story of Sentebale in the context of a global brand such as Netflix is obviously exciting for us,” Chandauka said at the time.
Much has been made of the awkward exchanges when Meghan asked Chandauka to move away from Harry on the presentation podium after the match. However, the video soundtrack reveals the Duchess asking politely: “Do you want to come over here?”
The Duke of Sussex, centre, with Sentebale chair Sophie Chandauka, centre-right, during the awards ceremony after he played in a polo match during the Royal Salute Polo Challenge, to benefit Sentebale (Photo: Yaroslav Sabitov/PA)The fallout
Both Chandauka and Harry have welcomed the Charity Commission’s decision to examine the running of Sentebale. The commission, the voluntary sector’s watchdog, will weigh up the claims and counterclaims and check whether the charity’s former and current trustees, including Chandauka, have fulfilled their legal responsibilities.
If there is any evidence of wrongdoing, it could lead to a more severe statutory inquiry, under which bank accounts can be investigated and replacement staff brought in to run the charity.
square NEWS Big ReadHow purge of polo and 'posh white men' saw Prince Harry lose control of Sentebale
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Any criticism of Harry personally would be damaging, especially as African Parks, a conservation organisation whose board he sits on, has also faced allegations that its rangers have beaten, raped and tortured indigenous Baka people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. African Parks said it had a zero-tolerance approach to abuse and launched an investigation into the allegations.
If Sentebale were to collapse, it would cause further turmoil in Lesotho, where Trump has cut US aid by 40 per cent and just imposed 50 per cent tariffs. This would threaten thousands of jobs in a country where the national electricity company is effectively bankrupt and relying on government handouts to buy energy.
Harry, 40, like his elder and now estranged brother Prince William, has had an emotional attachment to Africa since he was young. The brothers loved being able to travel around the continent without being recognised, but it was more than that. “I think they both loved the people, the colours, the vibrancy of the countries,” a source who knows the brothers well said.
Without Sentebale, Harry’s list of achievements could look threadbare to some, and Chandauka’s accusations risk poisoning Meghan’s newly successful projects.
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