SHADES OF DIANA-The Queen's fears for Harry & Meghan

THE PRESSURE IS FEELING ‘HAUNTINGLY FAMILIAR’

- Kate Russell

Ever since Prince Harry’s marriage to former actress Meghan Markle in May 2018, a photograph of the happy couple has sat on a side table in the Queen’s Audience Room at Buckingham Palace – he in a smart blue suit, she in a figure-hugging dress, both radiating love and happiness.

Now it has vanished. The evidence coming in pictures taken just two days after the couple’s controversial, and revelatory, documentary aired in the UK.

“Could this be symbolic of a wish to remove a disruptive influence from the front line of the monarchy?” asks one mischievous courtier. “Or could it be the Queen trying to protect the privacy that her grandson and his wife so desire?”

It’s unlikely that answers to these questions will be forthcoming, but they do hint at the atmosphere of speculation and concern that has swirled around the royal family since Harry and Meghan’s admissions of pain and vulnerability during their recent African tour – not to mention the hint that the duchess, in particular, is suffering from a lack of support in her new role as a member of the world’s most famous family.

“I haven’t seen anything like it since Charles and Diana’s marriage was unravelling,” the courtier adds. “The clash of traditionalists and modernists, the claims and counter-claims, it’s all hauntingly familiar.”

Perhaps most inflammatory is the suggestion by an anonymous source to US broadcaster CNN that the palace had no idea what to do with the young Duke and Duchess of Sussex – “The institution around the British royal family is full of people afraid of and inexperienced at how to best help harness and deploy the value of the royal couple who have single-handedly modernised the monarchy.”