Until now, the Duke of Sussex’s three-year whinge-fest against the Royal household had referred obliquely to “the institution”, a faceless monolith constructed to crush his hopes and dreams.
In his memoir, he focuses his anger on three individual courtiers, though his loathing for them is such that he cannot bring himself to utter their names. They are the Bee, the Fly and the Wasp, “middle-aged white men who’d managed to consolidate power through a series of bold Machiavellian manoeuvres”.
These insects, he says, buzzed around the palaces, had a sting in their tail, and, in the case of the Fly, were “drawn to s***”.
”I disliked these men,” Harry writes, just in case readers had not worked that out for themselves, “and they didn’t have any use for me. They considered me irrelevant at best, stupid at worst.”
You don’t need to be a GCHQ cryptographer to work out the identities of the three servants, not because of Prince Harry’s spiteful descriptions of them, but because of the well-documented role each of them played in the episode he is describing: Megxit.
Their crime, in Harry’s eyes, was to stand in the way of what he wanted and to effectively force him into exile against his will. There are, however, two sides to every story, as Harry himself has been keen to point out as he promotes his memoir, Spare. Their job, as well as protecting the monarchy at all costs, was to save Prince Harry from himself.
If they ignored the Duke’s pleadings, it was because they hoped that his self-described “red mist” would dissipate with time, and that he would see that those with more experience than him - not least his grandmother - might actually know what they were talking about.
Royal insiders are also keen to point out that Harry is directing his fire at the wrong target. While it may be “emotionally a softer landing” to blame the staff, they were only acting on orders, which came from people he loved. The Bee, who was “so poised that people didn’t fear him”, which was a “big mistake, sometimes their last mistake”, says Harry, is Sir Edward Young, 56. Back then, he was private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II (he masterminded her appearance with Daniel Craig at the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony) and he is now private secretary to the King.
Aside from the fait accompli Harry thinks Sir Edward helped arrange over Megxit, his treason, as far as Harry was concerned, was that he failed to take action against the press following what the prince saw as unfair and untrue reports concerning his wife, and then “ambushed” him at a 2019 meeting with the Queen and the then Prince of Wales, where Harry was scolded for suing four newspapers without permission from the Queen or his father.
The Fly is Simon Case, 44, then private secretary to Prince William, now Cabinet Secretary. He had spent his career growing fat on “the offal of government and media, the wormy entrails” in Harry’s words. As a man who worked for Harry’s brother, Case was viewed as a natural enemy.
Then there was the Wasp, “lanky, charming, arrogant”, a man who was “so weedy” that you might push back against him, only for him to “give you such a stab with his outsized stinger that you’d cry out in confusion”, Harry says. He is Sir Clive Alderton, 55, the then principal private secretary to Prince Charles, former British ambassador to Morocco and now principal private secretary to the King and Queen Consort.
Sir Clive was also part of the “ambush” over the legal case and, along with Sir Edward, he is accused of telling the late Queen that he had never received any requests for help from Harry and Meghan over media coverage.
Together, these men are charged with a “fix” over the so-called Sandringham summit, where the details of Megxit were thrashed out. According to Harry, there were five options on the table, ranging from sticking with the status quo to leaving the royal fold altogether, but Sir Edward had allegedly only printed out a draft statement for option five, which became Megxit.
Harry claims Sir Edward lied by saying that draft statements had been prepared for the other four scenarios but that a printer was broken - the prince even sought out the printer in question to prove it was in working order.
But if Harry somehow thinks that the private secretaries had between them scuppered his desire for a middle way - a hybrid half-in, half-out arrangement involving long periods in North America - he has surely misunderstood their remit.
Private secretaries take instructions from their “principals”, as they refer to them (or, very often, “the boss”).
One source who knows the workings of the palaces said: “Private secretaries are rather like the White House chief of staff. They are the most senior adviser to their principal, they provide counsel and act as a liaison with the outside world, including the other palaces.”
But in the same way that in government, advisers advise and ministers decide, in the royal family, advisers advise and royals decide.
“In the case of Megxit they were like sherpas before a big political summit: they take instructions from their principals - and also No 10 in this case - thrash out the details between them, then offer the principals a range of options.”
Harry loved the late Queen and he doesn’t want to think this was her decision, so it’s easier for him to blame it on a stitch-up by the private secretaries.
”Drawing fire from their principals is part of the job of private secretaries. In extreme cases they might be required to resign when the blame might truly lie with their “boss”; on a day-to-day level, they are the fall guy whenever one member of the Royal family is in dispute with another.
The late Queen had asked Sir Edward, Sir Clive, Case and Prince Harry’s own team to “work together at pace” to find a solution to Harry’s plea for a new way of working. For four days in January 2020 they held meetings in Sir Clive’s office at Clarence House, and insiders with knowledge of the meetings have said all of them wanted to find a way to keep Harry and Meghan in the fold.
Sir Clive even believed that if they could hit on the right formula it would be applicable to other “spares” in future.
The problem they came up against was that Harry and Meghan wanted to be free to make their own money in whatever downtime they were allowed from royal duties. It was the late Queen, not the private secretaries, who was the most adamant on the point that there could be no compromise. She knew, as did Prince Charles, that if Harry and Meghan tried to earn money in the private sector, they would be accused of leveraging their status as members of the taxpayer-funded monarchy to line their own pockets.
It was by no means the only occasion when Royal staff had to protect Harry from himself. In his autobiography, he mentions that he and Prince William wanted to put out a strongly-worded statement following the end of the inquest into their mother’s death. They felt that the media had not been apportioned sufficient blame by the coroner, but their staff talked them down, urging them to let the facts tell the story rather than questioning the verdict.
On another occasion, when William and Harry were due to attend a photocall together at a military event, Harry “threw a tantrum”, one insider recalls, and refused to appear. He was eventually persuaded to change his mind by his staff, who saved him from the slew of negative publicity that would have resulted, not to mention the moral high ground his brother would have occupied over him if he had gone solo. It was not an isolated occasion.
Buckingham Palace has declined to comment on Prince Harry’s depictions of the private secretaries.
”Being a private secretary is one of the toughest jobs in public life,” said one former royal aide. “You have to be talented, smart, calm, patient, and have eyes in the back of your head. To single out individuals for something like Megxit and say it’s their doing when they are only there to advise, is just wrong.”
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