Chapter One
The Committee Nobody Had Heard Of
A meeting in Whitehall
On the record. At the end of February 2020, a small committee met in London to decide something most people in Britain never knew was decided at all.
It was not a meeting anyone would notice. There were no cameras outside, no statement afterwards, and no list of names in the newspapers. A handful of officials sat around a table in the Home Office, the government department that looks after the police and the country's safety. They had papers in front of them, and one question to answer.
Who in Britain is guarded by armed police, and who is not?
The committee had a long name: the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures. It also had a short one, made from an older title, and that is the name this book will use. It was called RAVEC.
What RAVEC does
In plain words. RAVEC is the committee that decides which members of the royal family, and which public figures, are given protection by specially trained armed police officers, paid for by the taxpayer.
The officers it sends are from the Metropolitan Police, London's police force, from a unit known as Royalty and Specialist Protection. They are the quiet men and women you sometimes glimpse at the edge of a royal photograph: a short haircut, a dark suit, an earpiece, eyes everywhere except on the camera.
The committee is made up of senior officials from the Home Office and the police. There is also a voice from the royal household, because the people being protected are members of the royal family, and the household knows where they live, how they travel and what their year looks like.
For many years RAVEC did its work without anyone outside government thinking about it. A working member of the royal family had protection. That was simply how it was. The question RAVEC faced in February 2020 was one it had never had to answer before.
What do you do with a prince who is leaving?
The men in dark suits
It helps, before we go on, to picture what this protection actually looks like, because most of us only ever see the edges of it.
In plain words. Royal protection officers are police officers first. They join the Metropolitan Police like anyone else, serve for years in ordinary policing, and are then selected for specialist training: firearms, advanced driving, first aid, and the hundred small habits of watching a crowd. A senior royal will usually have several officers working in shifts, so that someone is always on duty, day and night, at home and abroad.
They plan every journey in advance. They check the route, the building, the exits and the nearest hospital. They travel in the car with the person they protect, and when there is a walkabout, they are the people a step behind, never quite in the photograph and never quite out of it.
On the record. The government does not publish how much royal protection costs, or how many officers are involved, and it never discusses the arrangements for any individual. Successive Home Secretaries have said that to give details would put the people being protected at risk.
So when the committee decided, in February 2020, that Harry would no longer have this protection automatically, it was not deciding about a car or a bodyguard. It was deciding about a whole system: the officers, the planning, the intelligence and the training behind them. That system was what Harry would spend the next six years trying to get back.
Others who had stepped outside the circle
Harry was not the first member of the royal family to find that protection depends on role.
What was said. Over the years, newspapers have reported that other members of the wider family lost their automatic protection when they were not carrying out royal duties full time. In 2011, for example, it was widely reported that the Queen's granddaughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, would no longer receive round-the-clock police protection, except when attending official events. The palace did not discuss the reports.
In plain words. The principle, as it is usually explained, is that protection goes with the job. The more public duties a person carries out, the more exposed they are, and the more the state has an interest in keeping them safe. A member of the family with a private life and a private job is treated differently.
Contested. Harry's supporters said this comparison was unfair. Harry, they pointed out, was not a distant cousin. He was the son of the future King, a former soldier who had served in Afghanistan, and one of the most famous people in the world. The threat to him, they argued, did not shrink because his job had changed.
The prince who was stepping back
To understand that meeting, we have to go back a few weeks, to the beginning of January 2020.
On the eighth of January, Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, posted a message on their own social media account. They said they intended to step back as senior members of the royal family, to work towards becoming financially independent, and to divide their time between Britain and North America.
The palace had not been told the wording in advance, and the announcement landed like a stone through a window. Within days, the Queen called the family together at Sandringham, her country house in Norfolk, to settle what would happen next. That meeting, and the agreement that came out of it, is the story of our next chapter.
For now, all we need to know is this. By the end of January it was settled that Harry and Meghan would no longer carry out royal duties. They would no longer be working members of the family. And from the end of March, the new arrangement would begin.
Which left the question nobody had yet answered out loud. A working royal is protected because of the work: the visits, the crowds, the public diary. If the work stops, does the protection stop with it?
The answer
On the record. RAVEC gave its answer on the twenty-eighth of February 2020.
Harry would no longer receive the automatic, round-the-clock police protection that came with being a working royal. Instead, the committee decided, his security would be handled in what it called a bespoke way. When he came to Britain, his visit would be looked at on its own, case by case, and the committee would decide each time what protection, if any, he needed.
The committee was chaired at the time by Sir Richard Mottram, a senior civil servant with a long career behind him in government departments. Years later, in court, the decision and the way it had been reached would be examined line by line. We will come to that. But in February 2020, almost nobody outside the room knew the decision had been made.
A family on the move
By then, Harry and Meghan were no longer in Britain at all.
They had spent the Christmas holidays on Vancouver Island, on Canada's west coast, with their son Archie, who was not yet one year old. Meghan had flown back there in January, while the arguments in London were still going on. Harry joined her soon after.
On the record. For a short while, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada's national police force, helped to protect the family. But at the end of February, the Canadian government said that this help would stop in the coming weeks, once the couple were no longer working members of the royal family.
What was said. In Canada, the question of who would pay for the family's security became a public argument of its own. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, a campaign group, gathered tens of thousands of signatures on a petition asking the Canadian government not to pay for the couple's protection. Polls in Canadian newspapers at the time suggested that most Canadians agreed.
Then, in March 2020, the world changed. The coronavirus pandemic closed borders and emptied airports. Just before the borders shut, the family flew from Canada to Los Angeles, in California, where Meghan had grown up.
On the record. Days after they arrived, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, wrote on social media that America would not pay for their protection, and that they must pay for it themselves. Harry and Meghan's spokesperson replied that they had no plans to ask the American government for security, and that the arrangements would be privately funded.
So, in the space of a few weeks, a prince who had grown up with armed police at his shoulder had lost his protection in Britain, lost the help of the Canadian police, and been told in public that America would not step in either. From now on, whoever stood between Harry and danger would be someone he paid for himself.
Why it mattered so much to him
To most of us, security is an alarm on the front door and a lock on the car. To understand why this decision cut so deep with Harry, we have to remember the August night in 1997 that has shaped so much of his life.
His mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash in a road tunnel in Paris, while photographers on motorbikes chased the car through the city. Harry was twelve years old. He has said, many times and in many places, that he sees the cameras and the chase as part of what happened to her.
What was said. In the years that followed, Harry spoke openly about how that loss shaped his fear for his own wife and children. He linked the press, the photographers and the question of protection together, as one story. For him, this was never a question about a line in a government budget. It was a question about his family's safety, and about history repeating itself.
That is the heart of this book. To Harry, the decision RAVEC made in February 2020 was a decision about whether his children would be safe in the country where their father was born. To the committee, and to many people who watched what came next, it was a decision about a man who had chosen to stop doing the job the protection was paid for.
Both of those things can be true at the same time. Much of what follows is about which of them a court would agree with.
The precedent nobody wanted
There is one more parallel that hangs over this story, and it is a painful one.
On the record. After her divorce from the Prince of Wales in 1996, Diana, Princess of Wales, was no longer a working member of the royal family in the same way. She chose to give up the protection of the royal police officers who had guarded her for years. On the night she died in Paris, she was not accompanied by a royal protection officer. She was travelling with a bodyguard employed privately by the Fayed family.
What was said. Over the years, former royal protection officers have written and spoken about that decision. Some have said that they believe a trained royal protection team would have handled that night very differently. Others have said that nobody can know what might have happened.
In plain words. We cannot say whether police protection would have changed what happened in the Alma tunnel. Nobody can. But we can say that, to Harry, the story of his mother and the story of his own protection were never two separate things. When a committee in Whitehall decided that he, too, would be outside the circle of royal protection, he did not see a new rule. He saw history.
What was not known
Contested. For a long time, nobody outside the committee knew how the decision had been made. Who had been in the room? Had Harry been asked for his views before it was decided? Had the experts who usually measure the danger to a person, the risk assessors, been asked to look at his case in the normal way?
Harry would later say that he had not been given a fair chance to put his side, and that the usual process had not been followed. The government would say that the committee had acted properly, that a special case needed a special approach, and that the bespoke arrangement was a sensible answer to a situation nobody had faced before.
Those two accounts did not agree. And in the end, it was not a newspaper, a palace official or a politician that would decide between them.
It was a judge.
The road to court
At first, there was little to see. The family settled in California, first in Los Angeles and then in a house in Montecito, on the coast near Santa Barbara. A daughter, Lilibet, was born in June 2021. Harry and Meghan built a new life: a foundation, a production company, books and interviews.
But the decision of February 2020 did not go away. Each time Harry came back to Britain, for a family occasion, a charity event or a court hearing of his own, the question of his safety came with him.
What was said. People close to Harry described his worry about bringing his wife and children to Britain without the protection he believed they needed. Harry himself would later say, in a written statement to the court, that he did not feel safe bringing his family home.
In 2021, his lawyers began a challenge in the courts. They asked for what is called a judicial review.
In plain words. A judicial review is a way of asking a judge to look at a decision made by a government body and check whether it was made lawfully and fairly. The judge does not simply decide whether the decision was right or wrong. The judge decides whether it was made in the proper way.
That one distinction would matter enormously. Harry was not asking a judge to be kind to him. He was asking a judge to find that the committee had broken the rules.
Two questions, not one
As the case went forward, it became clear there were really two separate fights.
The first was about the decision itself: had RAVEC acted lawfully and fairly in February 2020, when it took away his automatic protection and put the bespoke arrangement in its place?
The second was about an offer Harry had made. If the government would not pay for his protection in Britain, then he would pay for it himself. Could he? Could a private citizen, however famous, hire the Metropolitan Police?
That second question is the story of Chapter Three, and its answer surprised many people. The first question took longer, and it went all the way to the Court of Appeal, one step below the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land.
The man in the middle
There is one more thing to keep in mind before we go further, because it runs through every chapter of this book.
The person at the centre of this story is not a stranger to the system he was fighting. Harry served ten years in the British Army, including two tours of duty in Afghanistan. He knows what it is to be guarded, and he knows what it is to be a target. He has spoken about the danger he believes he faces because of his military service, as well as because of who he is.
What was said. In his memoir, Spare, published in January 2023, Harry wrote about his time in Afghanistan, including the number of enemy fighters he said he had killed. Some commentators and former military figures warned at the time that saying this in public could add to the danger he and his family faced. Harry's supporters said he had written it to speak honestly about war and its cost.
Contested. Whether that passage made his family less safe is a question people still argue about. It is one of many places in this story where the same fact can be read in two completely different ways.
Where we stand at the end of Chapter One
Let us put the pieces in order.
In January 2020, Harry and Meghan announced they were stepping back. By the end of that month, the Queen's family had agreed what that would mean. In February, a committee most people had never heard of decided that Harry's automatic police protection in Britain would end, replaced by a case-by-case arrangement. In March, the family moved to California, and the President of the United States said America would not pay to protect them.
And somewhere between those dates, a question was born that would follow the family for years: was this a sensible decision about a man who had left his job, or a dangerous one about a father and his children?
To find out how the family came to that point, we have to go back to a cold Monday morning in Norfolk, in the second week of January 2020, when the Queen called her son and her two grandsons to a meeting at Sandringham.