The ex-Vanity Fair editor added that William ‘was said to have been appalled’ when he noticed the missing photo. ‘He knew his brother well enough to predict a Category 5 storm brewing.’

On January 7, 2020, the Sussexes announced their decision to step down as senior royals in a statement posted on Instagram.

‘After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution,’ the couple posted to their Instagram page.

‘We intend to step back as “senior” members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty The Queen.’

They went on to declare their plans to divide their time between the UK and North America, and to ‘focus on the next chapter’, carving out a new progressive role for themselves.

Their bold move forced the Queen to summon Harry and her heirs, Charles and William, for a round table discussion to discuss the future of the monarchy on January 13.

As the eyes of the world turned on the unprecedented event, it was grandly dubbed ‘The Sandringham Summit’ by the press, as a slew of media vans and satellite dishes descended on the area to cover the monumental moment.

Shortly after, the Queen issued an unprecedented statement about the ‘constructive discussions’ at Sandringham and said the Firm was ‘entirely supportive of a Harry and Meghan’s desire to create a new life as a young family‘.

Their hopes of a ‘half-in, half-out’ role were dashed in a subsequent statement from Buckingham Palace that confirmed the Sussexes will ‘step back from Royal duties’ and no longer ‘formally represent The Queen’.

While retaining their private patronages, the Sussexes ‘will not use their HRH titles as they are no longer working members of the Royal Family’, the statement read.

The 2019 speech was one of the most high-profile in years, as alongside Prince Harry’s public dissatisfaction with the Royal Family, The Firm was still reeling from Andrew’s public shaming after his bombshell interview about Jeffrey Epstein.

Alongside Harry, the disgraced Andrew also never made the cut in that year’s photo display.

Harry shuts down name debacle

_

While at the St. Regis World Snow Polo Championship in Aspen, the announcer referred to Prince Harry as “Harry Wales.” The moment was seemingly awkward for the ex-royal, as the surname is a part ofPrince William‘s title.
A spokesperson for Harry told Daily Express it was “a mistake.”

_

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle‘s use of their titles often sparks controversy due to their decision to leave the royal family.
“Why not renounce your titles as duke and duchess?” Anderson Cooper asked the veteran during his Spare press tour.
“And what difference would that make?” Harry replied.

_

Meghan Markle, who complained about being a working royal, clarified her reasoning behind using the Duchess of Sussex titles while promoting her lifestyle brand As Ever.
“Well, when I got married, I changed my name. But it’s a complicated one for people to understand, because a last name is not typical in that construct,” Meghan told The Circuit.

_

“It’s not, but it’s, it’s used roughly, or loosely, rather. It sounds so silly to say. And I get it, because I’m American, and then I went there, and I started to understand. But then you come back and as an American, you go, ‘I’m so confused,'” Meghan Markle continued. “It’s a dukedom.”
When Meghan’s With Love, Meghan series first premiered, she told Mindy Kaling, “I’m Sussex now.”
However, the television moment confused fans, who began calling her Meghan Sussex.
The Suits star later clarified what her legal name is during a web show appearance.

 

Why Prince Harry Quietly Dropped His Royal Title — Source

Prince Harry went incognito during a recent trip to Aspen … quietly dropping his title to keep a low-profile.

In case you missed it, the Duke of Sussex enjoyed a vacation to Aspen with a pal last week. During their visit to the snowy Colorado city, Harry and Nacho Figueras competed in the St. Regis Snow Polo Championship. The pair were surrounded by celebrities at the competition, but Prince Harry went relatively unnoticed.

Prince Harry apparently wanted to keep a low profile in Aspen

“Harry was introduced as Harry Wales, with no royal title mentioned,” an insider told Page Six of the name he competed under. “He was there to play polo with his best friend Nacho,” the source went on. “No titles, just fun.”

Why Harry chose the name Wales is unclear, however. As well as being a Prince, Harry uses the Duke of Sussex title, and he and Meghan Markle formally use Sussex as their last name. You’d assume, then, that Sussex would be his first choice.

That said, perhaps Sussex would be too obvious and, let’s not forget, Wales was Harry’s original surname. He was born His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales and went by the name Harry Wales while serving in the British military. This is because royal convention dictates that princes and princesses use their father’s territorial designation as a last name.

For that reason, Harry’s brother, Prince William, also used Wales as his surname during military service. Now Prince William actually is the Prince of Wales – following King Charles’ ascension to the throne – and his three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis, go by the Wales surname.

Following his low-key trip to Aspen, Harry headed home to Montecito, California, where he’s spending the holidays with Meghan and their kids … AKA the Sussex family.

How Princess Eugenie ‘quietly wounded’ Kate Middleton at her first Sandringham Christmas, according to body language expert

It’s that time of the year again when the Royal Family makes its annual visit to Sandringham for the Christmas holidays in what has been a cherished tradition for many years.

While Kate Middleton is now well-versed in the art of the royal walkabout, she appeared rather nervous during her first visit to the monarch’s Norfolk estate after marrying Prince William in 2011.

And it appeared at least one royal didn’t help matters after a body language expert revealed how the future Queen was ‘quietly wounded’ by her husband’s cousin, Princess Eugenie.

A clip of the pair exiting St Mary Magdalene church after Christmas morning service showed how Eugenie seemingly snubbed the ‘non-royal’ who had married into the Royal Family, body language expert Judi James told the Daily Mail.

The video showed Eugenie ‘push past’ Kate after the newlywed appeared to glance in her direction, hoping to ‘engage’ her in conversation.

‘Was this really a case of “Move over, blue blood coming through” as Eugenie pushed past Kate here? Perhaps Eugenie didn’t see Kate and maybe it had no bearing on her attitude towards the future queen,’ Ms James, who analysed the video, said.

‘But a more forensic look at the body language here makes it hard to come down on the side of Eugenie, especially as Kate looks so quietly wounded by her action.’

Responding to the perceived slight, Kate – who picked an elegant plum coat with a matching hat for the occasion – turned away from Eugenie’s direction, as Ms James explained the cues that reflected poorly on the latter.

Eight months after her fairytale wedding to Prince William, Kate (pictured), then 29, joined the Royal Family for their annual festivities at Sandringham in December 2011

Ms James said it was striking to note the absence of any ‘small gestures of friendly support’ from Eugenie towards Kate, considering it was her first time at Sandringham.

While Kate ‘appears to look at Eugenie with the kind of expression that might convert into a smile’, the York princess responds with a ‘set’ facial expression.

‘William was standing a way behind her, and Eugenie slid through the gap between them,’ she continued.

‘It looks from Kate’s body language as though she’d been left in a small social hole where she had no one close to speak to while she had the world’s cameras trained on her.’

Ms James also pointed out that Eugenie would have been partly justified if William and Kate had been standing together, but this was not the case.

She also questioned why Eugenie felt the ‘need to leapfrog over the royal pecking order to get away’ rather than waiting behind Kate, William and his brother Harry.

‘These are public and photographic moments in the royal calendar. You don’t just push past because you think you left your heated rollers turned on at home or whatever,’ she quipped.

While she acknowledged that Eugenie’s intention may not have been to ‘be any form of a mean girl’, Ms James said it was ‘understandable why some more negative assessments’ are being made about their interaction online.

‘Ongoing fan theories suggest this was a reaction from a true royal to a non-royal who has “married in” to the family,’ Ms James concluded.

According to royal author Katie Nicholl, the monarch gave Kate a manual that advises on the Order of Precedence in the Royal Household.

Described by Ms Nicholl as ‘a guide for new recruits’, the royal manual stated that when Kate was not with William, she would be ‘required to curtsy, or bob, to blood royals,’ including Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.

While it ‘might have felt slightly strange’ as the young woman ‘occasionally socialised together’, it was a necessary requirement in a bid to avoid overwhelming the Queen.

As part of her Sandringham training, spearheaded by Sophie and now Queen Camilla, Kate was also briefed on the strict order of events at Sandringham.

A far cry from the relaxed nature of a Middleton family Christmas, the new princess was told to pack five outfit changes a day, including a full-length evening gown and jewels for the lavish Christmas Eve dinner.

But while Kate may have been somewhat prepped for the upcoming Sandringham Christmas, she was, the royal author added, ‘particularly sad’ not to be with her beloved sister, Pippa, who was ‘heartbroken’ over a recent break-up.

It was the princess’s sudden rise to fame as a ‘global superstar’, following her wedding to William, that was ‘rumoured to be at the root of the split,’ Ms Nicholl revealed in her book Kate: The Future Queen.

Meanwhile, she also faced another rather challenging task: what does one buy members of the Royal Family for Christmas?

Unlike the Middletons, who will have opened their gifts on Christmas Day, the royals gather around a trestle table in the Red Drawing Room on Christmas Eve for their light-hearted gift exchange in a nod to the family’s German heritage.

The game sees the sovereign (then the late Queen), hand out ‘joke’ £5 presents in strict order of seniority, and has been a Christmas mainstay within the royal household since the 19th century.

Having been advised to avoid repeating the mistakes of the late Princess Diana, who had ’embarrassed herself’ by gifting the family ‘ostentatious’ gifts, Kate leant into the humorous tradition and even purchased Prince Harry, a ‘grow your own girlfriend kit’.

Meanwhile, when it came to the late Queen, Kate’s gift was inspired by her own grandparents – as she revealed in an ITV documentary to mark Her Majesty’s 90th birthday in 2016.

She recalled: ‘I can remember being at Sandringham, for the first time, at Christmas. And I was worried [about] what to give the Queen as her Christmas present. I was thinking, “Gosh, what should I give her?”‘

She continued: ‘I thought, “I’ll make her something”, which could have gone horribly wrong. But I decided to make my granny’s recipe of chutney.’

Fortunately for Kate, the monarch relished her new granddaughter-in-law’s gift, with the princess admitting she was especially delighted to find it had been placed on the dining table the following day.

She added: ‘I think such a simple gesture went such a long way for me and I’ve noticed since she’s done that on lots of occasions and I think it just shows her thoughtfulness, really, and her care in looking after everybody.’

The royals first started celebrating Christmas at Sandringham when Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, took ownership of the house.

While Queen Victoria preferred spending the holiday season at Windsor Castle, the Firm returned to Sandringham House for Christmas in 1988 and the lavish Norfolk residence has remained their official meeting point ever since.

Prince Harry’s controversial comment at Christmas that sparked Meghan Markle’s bitter family feud

While it is no secret that Meghan Markle is estranged from the Royal Family, there was once a time when she was fondly welcomed into the Firm.

A month after Prince Harry had popped the question in November 2017, the Suits star was invited to join her new fiancé at the annual Christmas Sandringham celebrations – an unprecedented move given she was, at that stage, not a working royal.

Then, just days later, Meghan’s family were left publicly reeling after Harry made a rather controversial comment in an interview when discussing the couple’s first Christmas together in Norfolk.

Speaking to presenter Sarah Montague for an episode of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that he was guest editing on December 27, Harry, now 41, described the royals as the ‘family Meghan never had’.

‘She’s done an absolutely amazing job. She’s getting in there and it’s the family I suppose that she never had,’ he said.

He added that his family ‘loved having’ the former actress and said the festivities were ‘fantastic’.

Taken to imply that the Firm had somehow filled a family-shaped hole in Meghan’s life, Harry’s comment received particular public backlash from Meghan’s half-sister, Samantha Grant, now 61.

Taking to social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to hit back at the prince’s words – Ms Grant, the daughter of Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, insisted that Meghan’s family were ‘always there with her and for her’.

‘Our household was very normal and when dad and Doria divorced, we all made it so it was like she had two houses. No one was estranged, she was just too busy’.

She also went on to praise her ‘completely self-sacrificing father’, adding: ‘She always had this family, Marrying merely extends it.’

Meghan’s parents – Doria Ragland and Thomas – divorced when the actress was just six years old. She has two half-siblings, Samantha and Thomas Markle Jr, from her father’s first marriage.

In a scathing interview in March 2019, Ms Grant revealed that it was Harry’s comments about that Sandringham Christmas that prompted the bitter feud with her sister, adding that she believed Harry had not been ‘given the full story’.

During the Channel 5 documentary Meghan and the Markles: A Family at War, she accused Meghan of having ‘no heart’ and added: ‘Something was not right. Though we weren’t the classic family together on schedule for every holiday, we were family.’

‘It was starting to feel like she wasn’t reaching out to the family,’ Ms Grant said.

Eight years since Harry’s controversial comment was publicly broadcast, Meghan’s fractured family relationships are now well documented.

Just last week, the Duchess, now 44, was reported to have ‘no plans’ to visit her 81-year-old father in hospital after he underwent a life-saving leg amputation in the Philippines.

After failing to get hold of him by email or phone, the Duchess – who has not seen him since her 2018 royal wedding – ‘reached out’ to her father in the form of a hand-delivered letter.

However she is thought to believe his relationship with the media – understood to be something she addresses in her letter – means they are unlikely ever to reconcile.

She has so far not had a reply to her letter, the Sunday Times reported.

However, before she wed Prince Harry, Meghan once shared an incredibly close bond with her father. In a blog post on her now-defunct lifestyle blog The Tig in 2014, she paid tribute to her ‘thoughtful, inspiring, hardworking daddy’.

In the gushing Father’s Day tribute, the actress described Mr Markle as ‘the person who believed in this grand dream of mine well before I could even see it as a possibility’.

She went on to fondly praise him for the ‘blood, sweat and tears this man (who came from so little in a small town of Pennsylvania where Christmas stockings were filled with oranges, and dinners were potatoes and spam) invested in my future so that I could grow up to have so much’.

Since then, their relationship has deteriorated, with the pair’s rift first beginning when Mr Markle worked with a paparazzi photographer near his home in Mexico to stage photographs of him being fitted for a suit ahead of the Sussexes wedding.

Shortly afterwards, he suffered two heart attacks and was forced to pull out of travelling to the UK for the couple’s royal wedding ceremony at Windsor’s St George’s Chapel in May 2018.

Instead, King Charles, then Prince of Wales, offered to walk her partway down the aisle when he learnt of the Duchess’s plans to walk alone.

According to royal author Robert Hardman, Meghan was said to have asked her new father-in-law if the pair could ‘meet halfway’, with the gesture seen as a poignant sign of the Firm fondly embracing their new member.

Mr Markle has never met the Sussexes’ two children – Prince Archie, six, and four-year-old Princess Lilibet.

But in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail from his hospital bed in the Philippines, Mr Markle said that while he has not heard from his daughter since his illness he would ‘love to speak to her’.

‘I’ve always said I am open to reconciling with my daughter,’ he added.

‘I have never stopped loving her. I don’t want to die estranged from Meghan.

‘I want to meet my grandkids. It might be nice to meet her husband too.’

Meghan’s relationship with the Royal Family has also become estranged following the momentous fallout of her and Harry’s decision to step back from their duties and relocate to America in early 2020.

Their controversial decision, later dubbed ‘Megxit’, was a far cry from the close family unit Harry had fondly detailed in his Radio 4 interview.

However, while the Sussexes have often relayed negative accounts of their short-lived time in the Firm, Meghan herself has spoken rather fondly about her first Sandringham Christmas.

In her 2022 Netflix Documentary Harry & Meghan, the Duchess described her first experience at the royal Norfolk estate as ‘amazing’, adding that it was ‘just like a big family like I always wanted’.

‘I remember so vividly the first Christmas at Sandringham,’ Meghan recalled. ‘Calling my mum, and she’s like, “How’s it going?” And I said, “Oh my gosh, it’s amazing,”‘ she said.

She also reminisced on being seated next to the late Prince Philip, ‘H’s grandfather’, at the Christmas Eve banquet, describing their animated conversation as ‘wonderful’.

During the late Queen Elizabeth II’s annual Christmas broadcast addressed to the nation that year, Her Majesty made her fond feelings for Meghan clear.

The monarch referred to welcoming ‘new members’ into the family as they entered into the New Year, while a framed photograph of Harry and Meghan was also displayed in the background as she spoke.

Sadly, while Harry and a then-pregnant Meghan went on to attend the Sandringham festivities in 2018, they have not partaken in the esteemed royal tradition since.

This Christmas will mark the sixth year the Duke has spent away from his family. While the royals will gather in Norfolk, the Sussexes are instead opting to spend the holiday season more than 5,000 miles away in their $14million Montecito mansion.