One thing could force King Charles to not invite Harry and Meghan to his coronation. And it would leave him "devastated". Photo / AP
One thing could force King Charles to not invite Harry and Meghan to his coronation. And it would leave him "devastated". Photo / AP
OPINION:
A big storm is brewing in the royal family, with King Charles "ready to ban" his son and daughter-in-law, Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, from the coronation.
According to the Daily Beast, the sovereign is ready to play hardball with the Sussexes and bar them from the abbey if Harry's forthcoming memoir takes particular aim at Queen Consort Camilla.
A friend of the horse and hound-loving Camilla explained to the Beast's Tom Sykes: "It is one thing for Harry to attack Charles, he can take it on the chin, but if Harry forces him to choose, by laying into Camilla in his book, I have no doubt he will choose Camilla.
"Almost everything Charles has done over the past 20 years has, in one way or another, been about getting Camilla accepted by the public."
Sykes writes that, "There is tremendous nervousness in Charles' circle about what the book might reveal, not least because a full throated attack on Camilla's character would be devastating to Charles.
"Sources in the palace say simply that the question of the guest list is on the 'tbc' pile, pointedly leaving the door open for Harry and Meghan to get the call up — or be excluded."
Harry and Meghan at the Queen's funeral in September. Will they get an invite to the King's coronation? Photo / AP
Similarly, a report in the Mail on Sunday has claimed that "Buckingham Palace is in a state of high alarm" over Harry's autobiography slash possible warts-and-all tell-all.
Team Charles has good reason to be nervous. When the Queen used her Accession Day to say it was her "sincere wish" Camilla would be crowned queen one day, Harry remained conspicuously silent on his stepmother's planned elevation.
Ditto that the first draft of the royal's book was allegedly "sent back" to him and co-writer J. R. Moehringer because "the first draft was very touchy-feely" and the publisher wanted "more revelations to be added", according to the Mail.
They have also reported that Harry's three-book deal is worth $72 million. For that sort of cash, they would surely want something much more juicy than him spending 300-plus pages writing about how Meghan saved him from a lifetime of lager and dissolutely playing Call of Duty 4 on his Kensington Palace chintz sofa.
The fascinating thing in all of this is the question of power because it looks more and more like father and son are locked in some sort of mutually assured destruction pact.
Harry, via his memoir, has the potential to derail Charles' reign by spilling some highly unflattering beans about the royal family, and all of the (I'm guessing) slights, hurts, and indignities he suffered at the hands of his father and brother Prince William. All of that and that one time Harry was forced to go to bed without getting his jam roly poly for pudding.
It is in the Duke of Sussex's hands to transform Charles' current image from grief-stricken son and surprisingly impressive new king to one that reminds the world that he was a philanderer and allegedly, a pompous, thin-skinned egomaniac who also happened to be, on occasion, a crap father.
Charles is concerned over what Harry will write about Camilla in his memoir. Photo / AP
That's a magnitude of damage that I have no idea how the Palace could even begin to counter. A stream of overly sympathetic profiles in the Sunday newspaper supplements? Some new initiative involving moving injured puppies into St James's Palace? Banishing Prince Andrew, Sarah, Duchess of York and her Mills & Boon novels to the Outer Hebrides?
The King, however, has a couple of aces up his crisply starched sleeve. Barring Harry and Meghan from the coronation would make the series of humiliations they suffered at the hands of Buckingham Palace during the Queen's funeral pale in comparison. It would be a public rebuke and repudiation of the couple, whose US careers, built on the back of their royal status, have thus far anaemically spluttered along.
For the Sussexes, such a move by Charles would be a very serious blow for their marketability.
That is not the only card that the 73-year-old King has to play with given that, mysteriously, his Californian grandchildren Archie and Lilibet Mountbatten-Windsor remain plain old Master and Miss on the royal website. Under the 1917 Letters Patent, they are entitled to become a prince and princess but Palace's silence on this front is looking increasingly ominous.
Again, like the coronation invitation, might there be a bit of a carrot and stick approach going on here?
As royal biographer Katie Nicholl told the Beast: "My understanding is that Charles is not averse to granting them titles, but he expects to see respect from the Sussexes in return."
All of which feels like a game of royal chicken that could be about to escalate spectacularly badly.
Because, let's assume Harry's book comes out stuffed with plenty of unflattering, if not downright bruising, revelations about Charles and Camilla, at which point the King puts the Sussexes' coronation invitation through the Palace's only remaining working shredder not burned out by Prince Andrew's overuse.
Where do the Sussexes have left to go?
In this scenario, having been shown up and rejected, Harry and Meghan will truly have nothing left to lose. And the prospect of the Sussexes, backed into that final corner? Now, that is a prospect that should really alarm the King, his aides, Camilla and the jack russells.
The whole mess could be the royal equivalent of November 1983 when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear Armageddon after the Russians got it into their heads that Nato was preparing to strike.
Maybe someone inside Buckingham Palace needs to get their hands on Margaret Thatcher's diaries to see how she handled such a high-stakes, highwire crisis – the King could be about to need some pointers.
Daniela Elser is writer and a royal commentator with more than 15 years' experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles
