Royal Family Responds to Prince Harry’s BBC Interview, Supports U.K. Court’s Decision

The royal family has spoken out — through a terse Buckingham Palace statement — after a United Kingdom court denied Prince Harry’s request for security protection, and after Harry said he wouldn’t bring his family back to his home country.

“All of these issues have been examined repeatedly and meticulously by the courts, with the same conclusion reached on each occasion,” the Buckingham Palace statement said, per The Washington Post.

When Harry stepped back from working-royal status in 2020, the Royal and VIP Executive Committee stripped him of the full protection afforded to senior royals in the family, which includes specially trained police officers with access to British intelligence information, according to the Post.

A U.K. court ruled this February that Harry was not entitled to full protection, and the prince appealed that ruling. But on Friday, May 2, the Court of Appeal upheld the earlier decision, with Judge Geoffrey Vos saying that Harry’s legal team had made “powerful and moving” arguments but that those arguments did not “translate into a legal argument.”

In a BBC interview after Friday’s legal setback, Harry said that he only gets full protection if he comes to the U.K. on official business and said that the security downgrade was used as “leverage” when he decided to step back from royal duties.

“I can only come to the U.K. safely if I’m invited, and there is a lot of control and ability in my father’s hands,” he said of King Charles III. “This, at the heart of it, is a family dispute. And it makes me really, really sad that we’re sitting here today, five years later, where a decision that was made most likely — in fact, I know — to keep us under the roof.”

Amid what he said feels like “a good, old-fashioned establishment stitch-up,” Harry said he likely won’t be returning to the United Kingdom with wife Meghan Markle and their children, Archie, 5, and Lilibet, 3.

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“I can’t see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the U.K. at this point,” he said. “And the things that they’re going to miss is, well, everything. You know, I love my country, I always have done, despite what some people in that country have done. So I miss the U.K., I miss parts of the U.K. — of course I do — and I think that it’s really quite sad that I won’t be able to show my children my homeland.”

He also said that he’s not on speaking terms with Charles but wants a reconciliation, especially now that his father is undergoing treatment for cancer. “There’s no point in continuing to fight anymore. As I said, life is precious. I don’t know how much longer my father has, you know? He won’t speak to me because of this security stuff, but it would be nice to reconcile.”