Harry and meghan

It isn’t long now until the joyous day that Harry and Meghan once more make Britain their home, but several aspects of their return are still clouded in mystery. We have no idea, for instance, where they are going to be living – although the Cotswolds have been mooted. Once they arrive there, there is also the rather vexed question as to whether their no doubt hugely expensive security is going to be privately funded or the taxpayer’s burden. Two former home secretaries have gone public to argue that there should be at least some level of taxpayer-funded protection for the Sussexes. This may not be a wildly popular perspective but can at least be justified on humanitarian grounds.

That Coutts dossier on Nigel Farage said in passing: ‘He is considered by many to be a disingenuous grifter.’ I didn’t quite know what grifter here meant. According to the Telegraph, a podcast host at Spotify called the Duke and Duchess of Sussex ‘grifters’. That does not limit the semantic field. It feels to me like a synonym for chancer, which in an 1889 dictionary of slang was defined as ‘one who attempts anything and is incompetent’.  Stephen Frears’s film The Grifters (1990), not to be recommended to anyone of a nervous disposition, deals with fixing racecourse odds, running confidence tricks, and even faking one’s own death.

Is Gavin Newsom the latest big name to snub Meghan Markle and Prince Harry? Royal author and socialite Lady Colin Campbell claimed that the California governor has blocked Markle’s phone number in an attempt to distance himself, as her political demands continue to fall on deaf ears. https://twitter.com/gbnews/status/1683593356524363777?s=46&t=KTzG0soGgiCKUdkuiUQOwA “Gavin Newsom has been harassed by Meghan to such an extent for her putting forward her idea that they should allow her to step into Dianne Feinstein’s shoes, which would incidentally give her access to the Intelligence Committee because that goes along with the seat, and Dianne Feinstein is a member of the Intelligence Committee," she said on GB News Monday.

America! The land of the free. A place for second chances. But if you're a foreigner who wants to keep basking in the aforementioned freedom, the one thing you probably shouldn't do is write about your excessive drug use in a memoir when you're on a visa.  That's the mistake made by Prince Harry, who now faces legal action that could end with his deportation back to Britain.  You’d think a royal armed with the best schooling (and lawyers) money can buy would know that. But as is clear from Prince Harry’s latest debacle, hundreds of thousands of the finest British pounds in tuition will only get you so far. In his memoir Spare he wrote that he had consumed cocaine on several occasions. “Of course. I had been doing cocaine around this time.

Picture the convivial scene. You have been invited into the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s palatial £11 million mansion in Montecito, California as an honoured guest. Once you have removed your shoes, been frisked for weapons or recording devices and been offered a kombucha smoothie, you are ushered into the inner sanctum of the world’s most talked-about satellite branch of the royal family. What would you expect to find? A dartboard with Prince Charles’s face on it? Endless piles of obscure genealogical books that explain why Prince Harry is, in fact, the rightful heir to the throne? Or endless expensive, studiedly tasteful rooms that lack any heart and soul whatsoever?

Once again, a moment that should be a unifying and celebratory for the Windsors has attracted division and discord. It has been reported today that Harry and Meghan will not appear on the Buckingham Palace balcony for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations. All of this controversy for a fleeting appearance on what someone described on social media as ‘an outdoor patio on the second floor of an old building’. It’s the world’s most famous outdoor patio, utilised first by Queen Victoria in 1851 to mark the opening of the Great Exhibition. Since then, the Buckingham Palace balcony has been a focal point and climax of significant national celebrations and commemorations. Even Neville Chamberlain rocked up there, fresh from signing the Munich agreement.