MEG AND I MOVED our office into Buckingham Palace. We also moved into a new home. Frogmore was ready. We loved that place. From the first minute. It felt as if we were destined to live there.
We couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning, go for a long walk in the gardens, check in with the swans. Especially grumpy Steve. We met the Queen’s gardeners, got to know their names and the names of all the flowers. They thrilled at how much we appreciated, and praised, their artistry.
Towards the end of April 2019, days before Meg was due to give birth, Willy rang.
Something had happened between him and Pa and Camilla. I couldn’t get the whole story, he was talking too fast, and was way too upset.
He was seething actually. I gathered that Pa and Camilla’s people had planted a story or stories about him and Kate, and the kids, and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. Give Pa and Camilla an inch, he said, they take a mile.
They’ve done this to me for the last time.
I got it. They’d done the same to me and Meg as well.
But it wasn’t them, technically, it was the most gung-ho member of Pa’s comms team, a true believer who’d devised and launched a new campaign of getting good press for Pa and Camilla at the expense of bad press for us. For some time this person had been peddling unflattering stories, fake stories, about the Heir and Spare, to all the papers
I suspected that this person had been the lone source for stories about a hunting trip I’d made to Germany in 2017, stories that made me out
to be some fat-bottomed seventeenth-century baron who craved blood and trophies, when in reality I was working with German farmers to cull wild boar and save their crops.
I believed the story had been offered as a straight swap, in exchange for greater access to Pa, and also as a reward for the suppression of stories about Camilla’s son, who’d been gadding around London, generating tawdry rumors. I was displeased about being used like this, and livid about it being done to Meg, but I had to admit it was happening much more often lately to Willy.
And he was justifiably incandescent. He’d already confronted Pa once about this woman, face-to-face. I’d gone along for moral support. The scene took place at Clarence House, in Pa’s study. I remember the windows being wide open, the white curtains blowing in and out, so it must’ve been a warm night.
Willy put it to Pa: How can you be letting a stranger do this to your sons?
Pa instantly got upset.
He began shouting that Willy was paranoid. We both were. Just because we were getting bad press, and he was getting good, that didn’t mean his staff was behind it.
But we had proof. Reporters, inside actual newsrooms, assuring us that this woman was selling us out.
Pa refused to listen. His response was churlish, pathetic. Granny has her person, why can’t I have mine? By Granny’s person he meant Angela. Among the many services she performed for Granny, she was said to be skilled at planting stories.
What a rubbish comparison, Willy said. Why would anyone in their right mind, let alone a grown man, want their own Angela?
But Pa just kept saying it. Granny had her person, Granny had her person. High time he had a person too.
I was glad that Willy felt he could still come to me about Pa and Camilla, even after all we’d been through recently. Seeing an opportunity to address our recent tensions, I tried to connect what Pa and Camilla had done to him with what the press had done to Meg.
Willy snapped: I’ve got different issues with you two!
In a blink he shifted all his rage onto me. I can’t recall his exact words, because I was beyond tired from all our fighting, to say nothing of the recent move into Frogmore, and into new offices—and I was focused on the imminent birth of our first child. But I recall every physical detail of the scene. The daffodils out, the new grass sprouting, a jet taking off from Heathrow, heading west, unusually low, its engines making my chest vibrate. I remember thinking how remarkable that I could still hear Willy above that jet.
I couldn’t imagine how he had that much anger left after the confrontation in Nott Cott. He was going on and on and I lost the thread. I couldn’t understand and I stopped trying. I fell silent, waiting for him to subside.
Then I looked back. Meg was coming from the house, directly towards me. I quickly took the phone off speaker, but she’d already heard. And Willy was being so loud, even with the speaker off, she could still hear. The tears in her eyes glistened in the spring sunshine. I started to say something, but she stopped, shook her head. Holding her stomach, she turned and walked back to the house.
Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.
