Harry Faces a £34 Million Legal Bill, Charles Is Angrier at William Than at Harry, the Courtier He Called 'The Wasp' Quits

0:00 Ah Calorogus Shark Media. Hello and welcome to Palace Weekly. I am your host, Mark Francis. It's been a week in which the board finally moved. The King's most powerful adviser, the man Prince Harry, once nicknamed the Wasp, announced he is leaving. Britain acquired its fourth Prime Minister of the Rain, Harry's long War where the Daily Mail was handed at number and the number has eight figures in it, and King Charles opened the Commonwealth Games by stepping out of a doctor who tardis, because if you're going to reassert control over your own rain, you may as well do it with a time machine. For weeks, this story has been all weather and no movement, everyone perpetually furious, nothing actually changing. This week things changed. So the question to hold on to is a simple one. When the pieces finally move, which way are they going? Let's get into it.

0:59 We begin with the single most consequential thing that happened all week, and almost nobody outside royal circles will have heard his name. Sir Clive Orderton is stepping down. He has been Principal Private Secretary to the King and Queen and for practical purposes, the most influential official of the entire reign, and he will leave the role next year around his sixtieth birthday, staying on afterward in what he called a less formal capacity for the rest of his life. Read his CV and you understand the weight of it. He first worked for Charles's Prince of Wales, became Principal Private Secretary in twenty fifteen, and stood at the King's side through the death of Queen Elizabeth, the accession, the coronation, the cancer diagnosis, the Sussex departure, and the long Andrew saga.

1:44 If a difficult decision was made at the Palace in the last decade, Orderton was usually in the room. You may also know him by another name, and Spare Harry appeared to christen him the Wasp, describing a courtier who was charming, arrogant, a ball of the jazzy energy, outwardly deferential, but capable if crossed, of delivering such a sting that you'd cry in confusion. Sir Clive has never responded to the nickname, which is rather the point of being good at his job. The Palace called it a planned retirement with a long, tidy handover in twenty twenty seven. Others read the tea leaves differently. Dan Wooton on The Megan Kelly Show called the retirement line rubbish. There A reason, he argued, is that Alderton was trying to stop Harry and Meghan returning and was doing his damnedness to try and save King Charles from himself. The Royalist offered the mirror image from the Harry friendly camp. Charles is reasserting his authority and reclaiming the throne, and that lines up rather neatly with the theory we sat with last week.

2:44 The recovered king gifted time by a medicine, taking back control of his own family. Whether Alderton is a casualty of that shift or simply a fifty nine year old who would like his weekends back, The most powerful hawk in the King's court is on his way out, and the timing writes its own story. Meanwhile, the constitutional furniture rearranged itself with almost no fuss. Andrew Burnham kissed hands as Charles's fourth Prime minister in barely three years. Photographed with the King in the rarely seen Chinese dining room, all white dragons and dragon legged tables, the faces rotate, the monarch remains the fixed point, and in a much sharper reminder that a world exists beyond the soap opera, Iran's Revolutionary Guard named the British monarchy directly. In a warning tied to reports that American bombers had flown from the array of Fairford. Buckingham Palace declaimed to comment, which was the correct and only response. The King himself cancer and all kept up a genuinely full diary. The Palace confirmed a steep visit to Spain as being planned for twenty twenty seven, the first since Queen Elizabeth was hosted by King Juan Carlos back in nineteen eighty eight, and in Glasgow, Charles and Camilla opened the twenty third Commonwealth Games by emerging, I promise I'm not making this up from the doctor who tardis to cheers inside the hydro arena as part of his sequence that whisked viewers passed Edinburgh Castle, locke Ness an inevitably bow Moral. He then delivered a rather lovely speech about the baton relay, carrying a message to clear plastic from the oceans, and declared the Games open. The Daleks mercifully stay at home. It

4:16 is a strange and slightly wonderful thing that the most reliably dignified figure in this entire story is also the one most willing to climb out of a police box on live television. More palace in just a moment. Now on to money, because this week money was the water everyone was swimming in. Harry's crusade finally got its price tag. Lawyers for Associated Newspapers say their bill has climbed past thirty four million pounds, and they're asking the judge to award costs on an indemnity basis, which recovers more than the standard approach. The claimant's insurance runs to roughly sixteen point two million. If the judge goes on the indemnity route, that cover could fall short by million, leaving Harry and his fellow claimants personally on the hook. Closer put Harry's own share somewhere around twenty five million dollars, and all that talk of Elton John riding to the rescue dismissed by his own camp as ungrounded. Harry, a source said, is far too proud to ask friends for handouts, and they simply have to take out a loan, A prince applying for a loan. The sentence alone tells you the direction of travel. And it wasn't only Harry counting pennies beggins as Ever, Brand saw its website traffic for roughly forty six percent between January and June. A CBC investigation found Harry's visits to Canada generated the highest security costs of any internationally protected visitor over five years, and the Royal Collection's trust income collapsed from nearly fourteen million pounds

5:48 to three and a half as the post coronation tourism boom finally exhaled. Everyone King and Duke alike is watching the meter, which brings us to the week's most enjoyable reversal. Last week, deed Crown mocked the tabloids for their one permitted adjective, William forever and always furious. This week, the irritation appears to be running the other way entirely. Tina Brown reports that Charles is currently less annoyed with the prodigal Harry than with his elder son. The arithmetic is unkind. Charles carried out engagements on one hundred and seventy five days this past year, while managing cancer treatment, whereas William took five confirmed family holidays in seven months and returned to a first week back consisting of a rugby mansion, a walk through a museum garden, and Harry's donation of one point one million pounds to children in need cannily raised the question of what exactly the Prince of Wales is doing with twenty three million a year. The furious air it turns out maybe one his father is quietly furious with Harry himself spent the week being of all things liked. He turned up at the time one hundred sports gala in New York, told the room his father is doing great and called sport medicine. He bickered with James Cordon about whether it's footballs, and the reconciliation drumbeat kept steady time. Charles's once again offered him a room at Buckingham Palace, this time for September's Well Child Awards, and Harry dithered too long to accept. Last time, Ingrid Seward framed it as a chance for Harry to show his father he knows how to behave. There was even a trial balloon floated and promptly popped about an overseas

7:20 roll possibly Australia, possibly Governor General in the spirit of the Duke of Windsor decamping to the Bahamas. The Palace gently noted that the King does not actually get to hand out that job and is not about to reinvent the monarchy for one family member. Not everyone in the family is charmed, and the caution is worth logging. Camilla, by several accounts, supports the King's reunion with Harry because she loves the King, but hasn't forgotten a word of what was said about her, and reportedly suspects Harry could turn on the family the moment things don't go his way. Her priority, one source put it, is not letting Charles be blindsided twice, and William, we are assured, remains immovable, reportedly telling Keith that under no circumstance answers should she extend so much as an olive branch to his brother.

8:03 So the door Charles's holding open is being watched warily from both sides of it more palatine. The moment, now to the soap opera, which ran at its usual volume, began's guest turn on Masterchefstrada arrived trailing in tiny tempest her team and reportedly asked producers not to use the word royalty, and a judge duly used it in the introduction. The episode then drew one point six million viewers, the show's best Sunday and weeks, so the threatened boycott went the way of most threatened boycotts. Along the way, we learned that Archie and Lilabet eat Brussels sprouts, that Meghan considers food a love language, that Harry phoned in a FaceTime cameo which some viewers found charming and others found staged.

8:46 Both camps, as ever, were catered to. Meghan also made her first public appearance in Munths at a LA screening of Cookie Queen's, a documentary she and Harry produced about girl Scouts in their Cookie season. She used it to share a lion. Harry apparently tells her on hard days that he flew helicopters for ten years and even in the storm above the storm, the sun is always shining. So genuinely nice sentiment and a reminder that underneath the brand, traffic and the boycott arithmetica two people trying to talk each other through a rough patch. The louder row was an Instagram post, Megan shared a set of summer holiday photographs, among them Archie and Lilibet at Althorpe, the Spencer Estate where Diana is buried, the family walking an avenue of lime trees carrying bouquets. Even sympathizers winced. Tom Sykes captured the genre precisely. Some kissed holiday content that pauses briefly for then we went to a grave. Piers Morgan made the sharper version of the point, asking why a couple who left to the world about children's online privacy would post their own children to millions. Whether the post was ten or attack, He is a taste question and tastes questions of the tabloid's favorite cane precisely because they never resolve.

9:53 When broadcast to Mark Donlan went further and speculated that the Sussex children would one day make life a misery for their cousins. The Sussex's spokesperson broke along silence to call it disgusting to cast two small children as future antagonists, and on that narrow point, they are hard to argue with. The quieter degradations continued for Andrew. He was not invited to the family's Bowmorl gathering. The City of London is now drafting the legislation specifically to allow it to strip his freedom of the city, and a new Disney documentary revisited the murder conviction of his ex wife's former dresser under the cheerful title The Duchess and the Killer. Sarah, for her part, is reportedly chopping a tell all documentary of her own, one production source predicting it could be as sensational and as embarrassing to the family as the Sussex's own opera Sit Down The Yorks Endure Downward. The King in between all the pieces moving had a couple of small human moments worth keeping. At the Sandringham Flower Show, he was pestered by a persistent fly, Camilla was handed citronella repellent for her trouble, and when a well wisher his own age told him he was looking good, Charles laughed and replied, it gets much harder, doesn't it. And in Cambridge he padded into Europe's first purpose built eco mosque in a pair of grain knitted socks, joking to a group of school children that he hoped he hadn't ruined their holidays by dragging them in before praising the building as a remarkable example of integrated faith activity. A monarch in his socks blessing a mosque is a quietly radical image and a direct continuation of the faith story

11:24 we've been tracking these last few weeks. And then quietly came the realist thing anyone said all week. Visiting a cancer hospital in Manchester, Kate spoke about her own treatment, how she lost the ability to read or focus and turned instead to coloring, which she described as a way of playing and losing yourself, something that didn't require a finished product. You have to support yourself, she told the patients, Alongside all the things you can't control. Your body changes physically and emotionally, and it puts everything in perspective and you hold onto what's important. No unnamed source, no spin, no frame, just a woman who was it's been through it, telling other people going through it that there is a way through, which is in the end, what all this movement is actually about. Strip Away the courtier and the loan and the Instagram grief and the tartis and the story is an old man with cancer working one hundred and seventy five days a year moving the pieces while he still can't. The advisor eased out, the sun offered a room. The door held open a careful inch, because the only clock in this whole songa that genuinely ticks, is his. Everything else, as always is weather. And there you have it. If you'd like to email us or addresses the Palace intrig at gmail dot com. If you're on Spotify, leave us a comment. If you're on Apple, hit that button up there that says listen uninterrupted and get this show commercial free for just five bucks a month.

12:44 We really appreciate your support. By Mark Francis my thanks to John McDermott. This is Pallace Weekly. Good terms