An ex royal staffer claimed it’s ‘important’ Prince Harry has the proper security because the threats against him and the Sussex family are ‘huge’
An ex royal staffer has opened up about the “huge threats” Prince Harry faces as he continues to battle for taxpayer-funded security for UK visits.
Former royal butler Grant Harrold says that there is a good reason that Harry takes security for himself and his family “very seriously” because “breaches do happen”. Grant, who worked for the royals for six years, added that the fear of potential “kidnapping plots” will be a major source of worry for the Duke of Sussex, especially when it comes to his two young children: Prince Archie, five, and Princess Lilibet, three.
Harry has won the right to appeal the High Court’s decision that the removal of his official, taxpayer-funded security was lawful, after losing his initial attempts to get it reinstated. Harry’s security used to be automatic as a working royal, but when he and Meghan stepped back from this position five years ago, this was removed.
Now, the Home Office offers him “bespoke” security, which is decided on a case-by-case basis, however, for Harry, this means that he feels unsafe bringing Meghan, Archie, and Lilibet to the UK without ensured police security.
Grant told Techopedia: “People in the armed forces and the police have individual threats due to the nature of what they do but being a member of the Royal Family is also a threat. The threat is huge, there was an assassination attempt on the then Prince Charles in 1994 in Australia which just highlights the risk.
“I think Harry is more worried about his wife and his kids and the risk of kidnapping plots, to be honest, and also the more he does in the public as a celebrity the more he could become a target. So of course, he is going to take his security more seriously and this is very important to him.”
The former royal employee noted that when Princess Kate and Prince William got engaged, she was automatically given protection – however, Harry has claimed in his memoir Spare that this wasn’t the case for Meghan, writing: “The Palace floated the idea of not giving her any security at all because I was now sixth in line to the throne”.
A former head of counter-terrorism for the Metropolitan Police – Neil Basu – said in 2022 to Channel 4 News that Meghan had been subject to “disgusting and very real” threats from the far-right, adding that “people have been prosecuted for those threats.”
In Spare, Harry claimed that the threat level against Meghan was incredibly high even before the couple’s wedding in 2018, writing that the police told them “we’d become the prized target for terrorists and extremists” and that on the wedding day itself, snipers were placed on nearby rooftops due to the “unprecedented” threat level.
The Duke also wrote that when their official security was removed and the couple was in Canada, their head of security begged his superiors not to leave the couple by themselves – with borders quickly closing across the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the couple’s location well known. Harry also claimed his head of security told him “The threat level for us…was still higher than that of nearly every other royal, equal to that assigned to the Queen.”
The Prince’s security is now an operations decision for the Metropolitan Police and it is made on a case-by-case basis, in the same way as other VIP visitors to the UK. Harry said he was singled out in the 2020 decision by the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures. But the High Court ruled in March that Ravec’s ruling was not irrational or unfair.
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