Prince Harry has said he will write to UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper about his concerns over the security detail that would be available to his wife Meghan Markle and children Archie and Lilibet when in the country.
The 40-year-old younger son of King Charles III on Friday lost his Court of Appeal battle in London over the issue, which he blamed as an “establishment stitch up” in an explosive interview with the BBC. The Duke of Sussex, who is no longer a working royal and based in the US, revealed that he has not spoken to his father amid the legal wrangles and fears for the security of his wife and kids.
“This process has only ever been about ensuring my safety and that of my immediate family when we are in the United Kingdom, so that we may safely visit my home country with the same level of security that other governments deem necessary for our protection,” Harry said in a statement following the court ruling against him. “The court's ruling confirms that the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures, known as RAVEC and comprised of senior officials from the Royal Household, Home Office and Metropolitan Police, has failed to follow its own mandated processes for me, which are applied to all other high-risk and high-profile individuals.
“Given my profound concerns over this issue, I will be writing to the Home Secretary to ask her to urgently examine the matter and review the RAVEC process,” he said. Buckingham Palace has not responded in detail but issued a statement to indicate that the matter of the Duke's security was a closed subject. “All of these issues have been examined repeatedly and meticulously by the courts, with the same conclusion reached on each occasion,” a palace statement said. Describing the legal battle as a “last resort”, Harry – who remains fifth in line to the British throne – expressed his anguish at not being in contact with his father and appealed through his BBC interview for a “reconciliation”. He said: “I can't see a world in which I would bring my wife and children back to the UK at this point.
“There have been so many disagreements between myself and some of my family. I would love reconciliation with my family. There's no point continuing to fight any more, life is precious. I don't know how much longer my father has, he won't speak to me because of this security stuff. It would be nice to reconcile.”
Harry has been strongly criticised for fuelling speculation about the health of the 76-year-old monarch while he is undergoing cancer treatment. “Prince Harry is saying 'I don't know how long my father has' – that's going to cause real concern and more speculation in the media and the wider public about what his diagnosis is, which is incredibly unhelpful going forward,” Ailsa Anderson, a former press secretary to the late Queen and Harry's grandmother, told ‘Sky News'.
“What you don't want to do is have your private life played out in the media. So, if you truly want reconciliation, you'll do it in private, not in a BBC News interview,” she said. After Harry decided to step down from full-time royal duties and moved to California in 2020, RAVEC decided to downgrade his high-level police protection for when he was back in the country. Since then, as the Duke of Sussex he has argued that his private protection team in the US no longer had access to the UK intelligence information needed to keep his wife and children safe.
The issue has remained a point of
contention, raising broader questions about the treatment of royals who step away from official duties and their entitlement to public-funded security and whether precedent may influence future decisions. At the Royal Courts of Justice on Friday, Judge Sir Geoffrey Vos said that while Prince Harry's safety concerns were both “powerful and moving,” his “sense of grievance” did not “translate into a legal argument.”
