Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

Harry and Meghan have placed the Queen in an impossible position

(Getty images)

In the Queen’s Christmas message, she observed that 2019 had “felt quite bumpy” at times. Her implication was that a new year could well bring happier, more stable times. Unfortunately for Her Majesty, it isn’t how 2020 is panning out.

The pseudo abdication of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex from the Royal Family, just in time for the early evening TV news yesterday, will come as a bitter personal blow to the Queen. It also presents the monarchy with a problem that may come to dwarf even the terrible ongoing publicity about Prince Andrew’s friendship with the late Jeffrey Epstein.

Harry and Meghan’s announcement came, we are told, despite the Queen not having been given prior notice of their intentions. It presents Her Majesty with a truly unenviable choice. If she allows the Sussexes to keep their royal titles then everything they say or do in their new, freewheeling and globetrotting ventures will reflect directly upon how the monarchy is perceived.

This isn’t great news for Prince Charles, the ever-patient heir to the throne. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be particularly acutely affected too. Today is the Duchess’s birthday. But this isn’t the first time Harry and Meghan have upstaged their fellow royal. The couple’s notorious ITV interview with Tom Bradby, in which Harry admitted he and his brother were on ‘different paths’, came smack in the middle of an overseas tour by William and Kate, playing havoc with a carefully prepared royal media grid.

As a grandmother, the Queen will know this is simply not fair on William as he prepares himself for his royal destiny. As a daughter, she will remember witnessing the difficulties posed by the impossibly glamorous Duke and Duchess of Windsor for her own father.

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