Journalists place enormous value on good sources — and in few corners of the profession is that truer than royal reporting, where reliable inside information is notoriously difficult to obtain.
With that in mind, it is easy to see why some royal correspondents were pleased to be added to a WhatsApp group set up by Liam Maguire, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s “Director of Communications”.
Membership of that select circle meant receiving the latest updates about the California-based couple before many others in the press pack.
Those included are not especially difficult to spot. When a message arrives from Montecito, the same details often appear almost immediately on social media, sometimes in near-identical language. It may not be journalism in the traditional sense, but it does give those reporters access to information unavailable to outsiders, myself included.
I cannot claim to have taken some principled stand by refusing to join the group, because Mr Maguire never extended an invitation. Having spent much of my career as a social diarist, I am accustomed to being approached warily. Causing the occasional stir, rather than smoothing every ruffled feather, comes with the territory.
This week, however, I find myself rather grateful to be on the outside. The journalists who did receive the Sussexes’ updates have been left looking foolish — through no fault of their own, it should be said.
Last Friday, members of the group were sent a lengthy message setting out plans for Prince Harry and Meghan’s return visit to Britain next week. This was not one of the brief alerts they sometimes receive, but a detailed operational note outlining precisely what the couple were expected to do after arriving in the country.
Prince Harry and Meghan pictured in London in 2020. They have not brought their children to Britain since Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June 2022
It was said to confirm that they would be bringing their children, Prince Archie, aged seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, with them. It would be the first time that the children had been in Britain since they came for Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June 2022.
The message also confirmed that the family would be staying at a royal residence – a momentous development given that King Charles decided they should no longer have access to their former Windsor home, Frogmore Cottage, in 2023.
News of the visit was duly reported on news websites within minutes and in newspapers the next day. The BBC’s Daniela Relph, for example, reported on the Corporation’s website: ‘The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have accepted an offer to stay in a royal residence with their two children when they visit the UK next month. Harry and Meghan, as well as their son Archie, seven, and daughter Lilibet, five, will be guests of the King on a royal estate for their first trip as a family to Britain in four years.’
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However, reporters’ gratitude at confirmation of such a scoop turned to alarm the next day when The Sun newspaper reported that Harry’s demand for automatic, taxpayer-funded police protection had been rejected by the Home Office committee which decides such matters.
This soon led to another ping on the phones of the WhatsApp group members. This time it was a message informing them that everything they had been told the previous day and duly reported on their employers’ websites and newspapers was, in fact, wrong.
Harry was now ‘reconsidering plans to bring his wife and children to the UK… after his request for police protection was rejected’, as the BBC’s Daniela Relph put it.
Spare a thought for the BBC’s poor viewers and website users! Less than 24 hours after they had been informed, with all the authority that the Corporation could muster, that something was going to happen, they were now being told that it might not happen at all.
Readers of the ‘newspapers of record’ which also had to report the volte-face will have been equally confused.
The reporters should be forgiven. As royal correspondents, they are used to receiving briefing notes that help them cover events. The palace notes are usually factual, so the journalists might have expected Harry and Meghan’s messages to be equally trustworthy.
Fat chance.
What makes it worse is that nothing actually changed between Friday and Saturday. All the Home Office committee did was repeat what has been the case since the Sussexes quit royal duties and moved to North America to seek their fortune in 2020. And what was reiterated by the judge when Harry lost his appeal against the Home Office’s decision last year: the couple no longer qualified for automatic, taxpayer-funded security because they had moved overseas.
The only thing that changed was that Harry threw his toys out of his pram when the Home Office confirmed that its policy still applied to them.
One of the journalists who is a member of the WhatsApp group, Tom Sykes of the Daily Beast, an American website, felt the need to issue a public mea culpa for unwittingly misleading his loyal readers.
‘It is now blatantly apparent what this whole exercise was about,’ Sykes wrote. ‘The tour, the announcement that Meghan and the kids were coming, the whole carefully choreographed media rollout, the months of assurances to the Royal Household that this was happening, the accommodation requests, the detailed planning: it was all just to bounce his poor, weak, loving father into intervening in the Government’s security decision-making, something Charles, to his eternal credit, has refused to do. This is the high-water mark of Harry’s emotional blackmail.’
Strong stuff. Sykes won’t, I suspect, be the only journalist who now refuses to believe a word he’s told by Harry and Meghan when it arrives on his mobile phone.
