Here are some photos of King Charles and Queen Camilla at Buckingham Palace yesterday. They attended a ceremony “to present new Standards and Colours to the Royal Navy, the Life Guards of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment, The King’s Company of the Grenadier Guards and The King’s Colour Squadron of the Royal Air Force.” An exhaustive description for “the king got to wear his fancy uniform.” Camilla wore a very “Kate” ensemble – I think Kate even has that exact hat and those boots.

Yesterday, I started following the Independent’s live blog of the preliminary court hearing in Prince Harry and Hugh Grant’s case against the Sun. At one point in Thursday’s proceedings, News Group Newspapers’ counsel claimed that NGN had no “secret agreement” with Buckingham Palace to delay lawsuits for years, and NGN’s lawyer cited an unnamed palace source who “insisted there was no secret agreement.” That’s right – why believe Harry’s words, stated on the record, when anonymous palace sources are insisting (to the Sun) that no secret agreement existed? Case closed! In case you need this point underlined, unnamed palace sources also ran to the Daily Beast to test out some rebuttals to Harry’s case. Meaning, NGN, Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace are all in alignment, but none of these palace sources are willing to go under oath and f–king swear that there was no secret agreement. Some highlights from the Daily Beast:

Friends of the Windsors are feeling chatty: Friends of the royal family have scoffed at Prince Harry’s characterization of an alleged $1 million-plus payment to Prince William as evidence that a “secret agreement” was constructed by the family with a major newspaper publisher and that Harry was kept in the dark over phone hacking claims, with one source questioning how the payout could be described as secret if Harry knew about it. Another friend of the family said Harry’s suggestion that the family would have maliciously conspired against Harry or sought to protect Queen Camilla at his expense was “hurtful and mistaken.”

William’s secret settlement: A friend of William’s has now questioned Harry’s version of events, telling The Daily Beast: “It hardly seems like much of a secret if Harry knew about it.”

But the secret settlement does exist: But media lawyer Mark Stephens, a partner at leading law firm Howard Kennedy, told The Daily Beast that just because Harry knew about the deal did not mean it couldn’t be described as “secret”. “Secrets are never entirely secret—there are of course always some people who know. What is more important is whether there was an agreement at all, and the palace now seems to be conceding that yes, some deal or settlement exists. That’s the important point.”

Harry’s claim that Charles shut down attempts to sue NGN to protect Camilla: A long standing friend of the king and queen told The Daily Beast: “Dragging Camilla into it is hurtful and mistaken.” Asked if Camilla and Charles were upset by the allegations made by Harry, which echoed remarks in his book, Spare, in which he described Camilla as “dangerous” and prepared to “sacrifice” him, the friend said, “They are fully focused on the coronation in just a few days’ time. They won’t be distracted.”

[From The Daily Beast]

“It hardly seems like much of a secret if Harry knew about it.” I’m stuck on this too, not because “well if Harry knew about it, that means it wasn’t a secret.” I’m stuck on it because how did Harry learn about it? Harry and William have barely been in communication since 2020. Kensington Palace’s staffers are briefing AGAINST Harry, not TO Harry. How did Harry discover the secret settlement? My theory – and I have absolutely nothing to back this up – is that Harry learned about the settlement not from within the royal family, but from someone in NGN’s organization. As for Charles’s position that every time Harry mentions Camilla’s name, it’s somehow “hurtful” to Charles – for the love of god, Camilla is the entire reason the whole f–king family is in this mess. She’s ground zero.

In general though, the lack of specificity from “royal sources” is an admission in itself. They can’t come out and say “there was no secret agreement and no secret settlement” on the record because that’s a damn lie and they don’t know how much Harry knows or what kind of evidence he has of their duplicity. It’s amazing to see how Harry has boxed them in.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.