It was eight months ago that I first got a call from a trusted contact telling me something I never thought I’d hear – Prince Harry had finally realised the error of his ways.
Having grown dissatisfied with bad advice from US-based image experts, he was instead starting to consult with people ‘from his old life’ as a working royal, belatedly realising that what he had back in Blighty worked for him.
Whatever he had been doing – and he has privately admitted this with more than a dollop of humility – was no longer ‘reputationally sustainable’. Well, that’s the understatement of the century.
‘Harry is turning away from all sorts of Hollywood publicists and is seeking counsel from his old friends and associates,’ my source said at the time.
‘He is clearly reaching out thinking, “I need to do something different because what I’m doing is clearly not working”.’
The launch of his Californian ‘household’, revealed in today’s Mail on Sunday, is the result of nine months of overtures to old advisers and Zoom calls with former Palace PR experts.
How ironic that Harry now favours the rigid hierarchical structure of the kind he has consistently railed against since ‘escaping’ Kensington Palace.
Sometimes the grass isn’t always greener, even if it is a manicured seven-acre lawn in exclusive Montecito.
The launch of his Californian ‘household’ is the result of nine months of overtures to old advisers and Zoom calls with former Palace PR experts
Harry appeared in a recent post by his wife after they attended Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter tour
After all, a royal household is all he’s ever known.
While Kensington Palace ultimately defers to Buckingham Palace (and Prince Harry controversially believes that royal households occasionally throw ‘principles’ under the bus for the sake of the greater good), the Sussex operation will protect and promote only one family – the Sussexes.
The hope is also that a formal structure will stem the endless, unhelpful media reports of ‘high staff turnover’.
Team Sussex has always appeared to be a tangled web of talent agents, brand managers and PR reps working across various external agencies and for Archewell, the couple’s charitable foundation.
Harry will hope that his new core team of 11 men and women will work to improve his reputation in the UK. A YouGov poll last month found that only 27 per cent of Britons have a positive opinion of the Duke of Sussex.
For a prince who was once adored by his home nation and respected for his service in the Army, it is quite the fall from grace – something, I am told, that is not lost on Harry. With the launch of his first commercial venture on the horizon, it makes business sense to try to rekindle the love that the Press and public once had for him.
Also, when his Invictus Games arrives in Birmingham in 2027 he doesn’t want to bring his negative baggage in tow. It will help the success of the Games if he’s a few more rungs up the royal popularity ladder.
Who knows, maybe this crack team will help prevent a repeat of embarrassing episodes, like the one he had outside a Fulham house earlier this month, when a camera caught him ringing doorbells, trying to locate the home of his old friend, John Vaughan.
I am told that Harry had wanted to surprise John with a gift for his godchild.
If it was hurtful for Harry to discover that the Vaughans had long since moved to the country, it must be wounding still to realise the nation has moved on without him, too.
Yet, he believes, he still has a role to play in British public life. After all, Queen Camilla achieved the public redemption he seeks, following the opprobrium heaped upon her after Diana’s death.
As a mutual friend told me this week: ‘There’s nowhere for Harry to go but up.’
