Ah, sorry!
Cut and paste job:
Harry and Meghan Gaslight Special: They Won’t Admit They’re Even in England
Everyone in the Cotswolds is convinced they’ve pinpointed the Sussexes’ lavish new home. They won’t even say they are in the UK
TOM SYKES
AUG 27, 2026
∙ PAID
Six years later, it was a remarkable full circle moment to see a gigantic, vulgar private jet landing on the tarmac at Birmingham airport carrying Harry, Meghan, Archie, Lili and their dogs Pula and Mia back to Britain to live. (Well, Meghan is going to kind oflive here. Harry and the kids are definitely moving back. More on that below.) I’m told this carbon-spewing monster wasn’t booked via Travlayst, the environmentally sustainable travel company that Harry fronts.
Photo by Jonathan Brady-Pool/Getty Images
Despite this performative statement of triumphal return (“It all went great!”) Harry and Meghan are refusing to confirm that they are in the United Kingdom.
At $8 a month, you can afford us, Harry!
The thinking seems to be that it would undermine their own argument about privacy if they briefed about their movements, or maybe they just believe they will have a stronger case to sue newspapers that publish details of where they live or where their kids are going to school if they have never said a word about it (I’m not sure Justice Nicklin would be convinced.)
The bigger point is that every phone in the Cotswolds is going mad, the WhatsApp groups are afire, and everybody from Stow-on-the-Wold to Fleet Street thinks they know where the family are going to be living, and where the kids are going to school (I certainly do).
The level of Kafkaesque absurdity we have now reached is that their relationship with the British media is so toxic, so poisonous, so damaged, that the couple have arrived and are publicly refusing, for legal purposes, to say they have arrived!
I have to say, looking at that jet sitting on the tarmac, it felt like a massive middle finger to the royal family and its carefully nurtured traditions of frugality; the easyJet flight to Aberdeen, the cereal in Tupperware boxes, the potted plants for sale at Sandringham to raise a few coppers. We all know the reality (the Queen bought and sold racehorses with less introspection than you or I might order takeaway), but there was at least a pretense of modesty. The Sussexes have rejected all that fusty old rubbish along with everything else about the royal model; to them it’s an old bad smell in a church, to be spritzed out in time for your wedding. That jet at Birmingham said: screw the lot of you. We have succeeded. We have won. We are free to make our own money, we’ve made a bucketload of it, we are the independent buccaneers on the great ocean wave of free commerce, it’s none of your business who paid for the jet, and, by the way, we’re not even here!
I’ve been told by very reliable sources that they have indeed bought a house near the chocolate box town of Stow-on-the-Wold for a figure between £12 million and £15 million, and the kids will be going to a nearby fashionable school that has something of a “tree-climbing,” let kids-be-kids vibe. I’m not going to identify the house or the school beyond saying that it is not Beaudesert Park, but somebody will, because it is so widely known in all of these Cotswold circles that the whole of Fleet Street is spending today trying to establish whether they’re just sale agreed or if contracts have been exchanged. When massively rich people buy great fat pads in the middle of the country, everybody in the neighborhood talks about it, because a huge number of normal people make their living servicing these estates. That is not a privacy violation. That is the English countryside.
The locals I’ve been on the phone with about the new arrivals are by turns amused, entertained, appalled and titillated.
One source said: “A lot of them simply can’t wait to see if Meghan really is as ghastly as everyone makes out.”
I was surprised to be told the price tags on the houses they have been looking at are between £10 and £15 million, which is quite a lot more than I would have thought they had available to spaff out on a new gaff in England, especially with Montecito mothballed rather than sold: Santa Barbara County records show their company, Rockbridge LLC, bought the estate for $14.65 million with a $9.5 million loan at 2.49 percent, which is still $450,000 a year on the mortgage, plus $150,000 in property tax, plus staff (they’re leaving the chickens, folks, so somebody has to be there), plus the place in Portugal, plus Harry’s massive legal costs from the failed court battle with the Daily Mail coming down the pipe.
It’s a substantial investment, isn’t it? Alison Boshoff had a quote from a friend of Harry’s saying he thinks he’ll be here 12 to 15 years, that he wants to watch the kids “play rugby,” and that Meghan will “come and go,” all of which meshes exactly with what I was told in March: the only way Meghan would be here full-time was if she had a thriving business here. I have yet to see a single item of As Ever for sale outside the United States.
They say they are completely private individuals—er, completely private individuals who are lobbying the British taxpayer to cover a £5 million-a-year security bill?
The two positions are unsustainable together, and I think we can all see that, in the teeth of furious public anger, they are going to get the state-sponsored security: the establishment is cranking into action, we’ve had David Blunkett weighing in and Emily Thornberry declaring Harry a hero, and of the two boxes that need ticking for protection (are you a working royal, and do you live in the United Kingdom), moving back ticks one. I suspect that within a couple of weeks it will emerge that the family is protected.
There’s always an argument from celebrities desperate to keep everything secret: what we get up to is not in the public interest, it’s just interesting to the public.
I’m sorry, but the idea that nobody is allowed to know what country the fifth in line to the throne, an HRH and a prince and a counsellor of state, is living in, or on what basis, or for how long, or under what terms, is self-evidently absurd. If that’s the way you want it, Harry, renounce your titles.
The British media are not going to publish their address, they haven’t done that kind of stuff for years.
Even without the security, it is complete fantasy to argue the position is remotely analogous to any other private individual in the land. If they’d spent the last five years living a low-key existence in Montana, nobody would care. Instead they made a six-part Netflix documentary about themselves slagging off our most beloved institution, they run a big glitzy Instagram account which flogs the stories of the sixth and seventh in line to the throne, Archie and Lilibet.
I suspect their time in the UK is going to be very fraught if they insist on being in a state of permanent war with the media and threatening to sue everyone at the drop of a hat, because the purpose of developing a functional relationship with the British media is that it is through them you get a chance to mediate a relationship with their audience, the British people.
Call me old-fashioned, but I can’t help thinking: surely it would be better if the public didn’t absolutely hate you from the outset for gaslighting them about the fact you are even here!!!!?