bitchy | Mail: Prince Harry’s multi-year security case cost the British taxpayers £656,324

Prince Harry’s UK security case is finally done. He lost his “final” appeal in early May. I’ve seen some reports about a few other avenues Harry could pursue, but he is unlikely to keep fighting this in the British courts. It is what it is – a years-long story of punishment and betrayal, with the Windsors clearly trying to keep Harry in as much danger as possible if and when he visits the UK. Harry ended up speaking to the BBC about the situation just hours after he lost the appeal, speaking about how his family discouraged other governments from providing security to the Sussexes, how the withdrawal of his security was an establishment stitch-up, and how he’ll basically only have police security in the UK nowadays if his father expressly invites him (and Charles isn’t inviting him). Well, now the Mail has information about how much all of this cost, and how much Harry will probably have to pay.

Prince Harry’s latest doomed battle with the Home Office over police bodyguards cost British taxpayers £100,000, new figures revealed today. The Duke of Sussex lost his case at the Court of Appeal last month, saying in a BBC interview straight afterwards that ‘I wish someone had told me beforehand’ there was ‘no way to win’.

Today the Mail can reveal the Home Office has put its legal costs in the case at £656,324, which includes £554,000 for the original case a year ago which the High Court ruled Harry had ‘comprehensively lost’. Since then, during which time Harry appealed the decision, an additional £102,000 has been incurred by government lawyers.

It is likely that, as the losing party, Harry will be ordered to reimburse taxpayers all or most of the costs, putting him on the hook for as much as £1.5million, when his own legal costs are added. Last year, after he lost the original case, a judge said Harry should repay 90 per cent of the public’s costs.

On May 2, England’s second most senior judge, Master of the Rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos, sitting with two other judges, ruled that while ‘these were powerful and moving arguments, and it was plain the Duke of Sussex felt badly treated by the system…I could not say that the duke’s sense of grievance translated into a legal argument’. Sir Geoffrey ruled the original security decision had been a ‘predictable’ and even ‘sensible’ reaction to Megxit – when Harry stepped back from being a senior royal and quit Britain.

Hours after the Appeal Court’s ruling, Harry went nuclear in a BBC interview filmed in California, launching a blistering attack on the King who ‘won’t speak to me’ and claiming there had been ‘an Establishment stitch-up’. He accused the royal household of ‘interfering’ in his long-running battle in His Majesty’s courts to reinstate his police bodyguards. He said of his children Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet: ‘I think it’s really quite sad that I won’t be able to show my children my homeland’, adding he does not even know ‘how much longer my father has’ to live.

Bitter Harry, 40, raged that ‘the other side’ in the court case had ‘won in keeping me unsafe’. He declared himself ‘obviously pretty gutted about the decision’, but he added: ‘It’s certainly proven that there is no way to win this through the courts – wish someone had told me that beforehand. But yeah, the decision has been a surprise as well as not a surprise.’

[From The Daily Mail]

My hope is that British taxpayers see these figures and wonder why Harry had to go to these lengths just to try to convince the establishment that his life and his family’s lives were worth protecting. I hope British taxpayers also understand that the Windsors are the ones who have made it impossible for the Sussexes to even visit the UK, however briefly. Anyway, it cost Harry over $1.5 million for this multi-year effort, all to learn that the Windsors don’t give a sh-t about him, his wife or his kids. It’s profoundly sad.

Photos and screengrabs courtesy of BBC News and Avalon Red.