King Charles’s Chief Courtier — ‘The Wasp’ — To Retire, Bolstering Buzz That Harry and Meghan Are Aiming for Comeback

As Prince Harry gears up for another return to Britain next month, the impending retirement of King Charles III’s and Queen Camilla’s private secretary, Sir Clive Alderton — whom Prince Harry calls “The Wasp” — could offer the Sussexes the opportunity for a royal reset after years of rift.Sir Clive, who has served the Crown for 20 years, announced last month that he will step down from duty in May. “It has been the greatest imaginable honor to serve the King and Queen in my present role through such historic times and with unforgettable humor,” he reflected in his retirement note. He vows that support will endure “in a less formal capacity, for all of my life.”The Private Secretary to the Sovereign — Sir Clive is the 25th occupant of that office since the role atop the Royal Household was formalized in 1805 — announced his plans to retire weeks after Prince Harry returned to Britain. Sir Clive, as the senior operational officer in the Royal Households, would have been involved in the decision to withdraw the offer to Prince Harry to stay at Buckingham Palace, the 755-room estate that serves as the Crown’s administrative nerve center. The prince called that “disappointing.”Then again Sir Clive, who formerly served as Britain’s ambassador to Morocco, would also have been involved in the 11th hour reunion between the king, the queen, and the Sussexes —including their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet. Vanity Fair characterized the planning for that tea summit at Highgrove House as “cloak and dagger.” Not present were Prince William and Princess Kate, who were instead at a polo tournament at Windsor.Clues abound that Prince Harry has clashed with his father’s most senior courtier. In the prince’s memoir from 2023, “Spare,” he does not mention Sir Clive by name but appears to refer to him as in descriptions of the “charming” and “jazzy energy” of “The Wasp” — whom he describes as “weedy,” “arrogant,” and “so self-effacing” but ultimately poisonous. The prince adds that the Wasp “was great at pretending to be polite, even servile” but that “without warning, he’d give you such a stab with his outsized stinger that you’d cry in confusion ‘Where the f— did that come from?’” The Wasp is one of three servants the prince describes as “men in grey suits” whom he alleges ruined his relationship with his family. “Spare” also features vivid descriptions of physical altercations between Princes William and Harry.Sir Clive also sits on the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures, a body of the Home Office that determines the level of security offered to the royal family and high-profile public figures. The question of security has been at the crux of Prince Harry’s row with the Crown. When he and Ms. Markle stepped from being“working royals” in 2020, the Home Office stripped them of the comprehensive protection accorded to the rest of the family, a move that the Sussexes have repeatedly castigated as putting their family at risk. Last year, Prince Harry lost a legal case seeking to reinstate his previous security arrangement. The prince insisted that he had been “singled out” for “inferior treatment,” but a judge ruled that Sussex’s “sense of grievance” was not a legally salient reason to impose comprehensive security. Instead, RAVEC maintains that the prince’s protection be assessed on a case-by-case basis.Prince Harry, the Times of London reports this week, now hopes to return to the land of his birth “every few months.” He already has a trip on the books for September to support two charities he patronizes — WellChild and the Invictus Games. The king, 77, who is being treated for an undisclosed form of cancer, is currently on vacation at the Crown’s summer retreat, Scotland’s Balmoral Castle.Sir Clive, who made £300,000 a year as private secretary, holds the right to be referred to as “The Right Honourable” for the rest of his life by virtue of his appointment in 2022 to His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, a body whose antecedents stretch back to the Anglo-Saxon “witan” of the seventh century of the common era. That word means “wise men” in Old English.

King Charles’s Chief Courtier — ‘The Wasp’ — To Retire, Bolstering Buzz That Harry and Meghan Are Aiming for Comeback

King Charles’s Chief Courtier — ‘The Wasp’ — To Retire, Bolstering Buzz That Harry and Meghan Are Aiming for Comeback

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