Prince Harry reportedly fears bringing Meghan Markle and his two young children, Prince Archie (5) and Princess Lilibet (3), to the UK as he grapples with his ongoing legal battles.
The estranged member of the royal family is currently fighting for taxpayer-funding security for his visits to the UK. The Duke was stripped of his police protection privileges after he stepped down as a working royal in 2020.
Earlier in June, he won the right to appeal the British government’s rejection of publicly funded security detail in the country. Just days after that he requested to speed up his appeal, hoping for the hearing to be done and dusted by July’s end. However, a Court of Appeal judge eventually denied him any special treatment in the case to “jump the queue.”
As the wait for the same weighs down on him, a new report suggests that the lack of police protection is what is keeping his family away from his home country because “he can’t guarantee their safety.”
Why Prince Harry ‘fears’ bringing his family to the UK
The Duke of Sussex purported “doesn’t feel his family is safe when they’re in the UK because they do not have police protection officers with the Metropolitan Police with him,” GB News’ royal correspondent Cameron Walker said during a recent episode of The Royal Record podcast.
The British media is anyway notoriously renowned for indulging in the Kate Middleton vs Meghan Markle discourse, which often one-sidedly paints a favourable image of the former. Hence, Prince Harry’s concerns for his family’s safety aren’t as superfluous as one would believe even if he voluntarily backed out of the royal matters.
On the same page of the discourse, the royal correspondent reminded that the Prince’s wife, Meghan Markle, also iterated the alarming fears they had regarding the family’s safety even when they were members of the royal family. “Meghan spoke very openly and quite emotionally about this, the fear she had in terms of her family’s safety, checking all the doors were locked at night in her Montecito house and worried for her children’s safety as well,” Walker said.
Digital Editor Svar Nanan-Sen joined in on the conversation and chimed in, “[Prince Harry] suffered a couple of court defeats now and he’s still fighting his way, plus he’s got another appeal coming up.”
He also pointed out how the Duke is presumably “very concerned about” this issue as he envisages “coming to the UK more regularly, both himself and his family.”
Cameron Walker foregrounded that Harry doesn’t feel he and his family are safe in the UK without police protection. “Perhaps that is the main reason why Prince Harry isn’t bringing Meghan and Archie and Lilibet over to the UK because he can’t guarantee, he would say he can’t guarantee their safety,” he detailed.
How Princess Diana’s death still affects Prince Harry in this context
The royal commentator also underlined Princess Diana’s death as another possible factor that quantifies Prince Harry’s fears about his family’s safety. “I think in the back of his mind constantly since August 31, 1997, is look what happened to my mother,” Walker added.
Princess Diana died in 1997 following her fresh divorce with then-Prince Charles in August 1996. She had just started a new relationship with Dodi Al Fayed, who was with her in the car when their vehicle became the subject of a tragic accident. A driver and bodyguard also accompanied them. While Al Fayed and the driver died instantly, Diana passed away hours after medical workers tried their all to keep her alive.
GB News’ correspondent noted that she “chose to not have her protection officers… She didn’t have police protection with her when she died in the car crash in Paris. And I think that really affected Prince Harry.”