King Charles Should Bring Harry Back as New 'Path' Emerges—Tina Brown

Prince Harry may have a new pathway to returning to royal life if King Charles III's top aide retires, royal biographer Tina Brown says.

The Duke of Sussex gets on notoriously badly with Sir Clive Alderton, who he described in his book Spare as "weedy" and "arrogant."

However, Brown suggests the king's private secretary may be eying up a potential retirement and says this could open the door for another look at whether Prince Harry could still have a royal future.

"If Alderton goes it could create a new, friendlier path for negotiations with Harry to be given the security protection he seeks and to resume some curtailed version of his royal duties," she wrote on her Fresh Hell Substack blog.

Prince Harry, center, is seen in a composite image alongside King Charles III, left, and Sir Clive Alderton, right, his father's private secretary. Tina Brown suggests that Alderton's retirement could pave the way for a... Karwai Tang/WireImage and Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images

"It could also represent a great face-saver for Meghan who must realize by now that the dull demands of second-division royalty are less onerous than grinding out serial rebranding flops.

"Enough with the feuds. Families, including this one, need to stick together. William, whatever his abiding resentments toward Harry for his intemperate broadsides in Spare, should now suck it up and let his father give Harry something to do."

Beyond the negotiation of better police protection, Harry would also likely have to either drop his lawsuit against the British government or see it run its course.

He is currently suing the Home Office for stripping him of taxpayer funded bodyguards and, having lost twice at the High Court, he is looking ahead to a Court of Appeal hearing over two days in April.

Brown also suggests the Sussexes could be put to good use on overseas tours, some of which have given the royals a bumpy ride in recent years.

"William and Kate dread foreign tours that take the princess away from the children and cut into what William (to his advisers' irritation) calls his 'me time,'" she wrote.

"So, unload the lesser but important red-carpet junkets onto the Sussexes who, chastened by five years in the wilderness, would export some modern royal flair, especially to ex-colonial trouble spots."

Brown is likely referring to the Commonwealth realms, countries outside the U.K. that count Charles as their king, a number of which have active debates on whether to cut ties with the monarchy.

In 2022, William and Kate's tour of Jamaica, Belize and the Bahamas was branded a "disaster" after hostility and PR missteps, while in Australia in October the king watched as an Australian senator accused him of genocide on the floor of the country's parliament.

Harry, in his book, nicknamed Alderton "The Wasp" and said he "was lanky, charming, arrogant, a ball of jazzy energy. He was great at pretending to be polite, even servile.

"You'd assert a fact, something seemingly incontrovertible—'I believe the sun rises in the mornings'—and he'd stammer that perchance you might consider for a moment the possibility that you'd been misinformed: 'Well, heh-heh, I don't know about that, Your Royal Highness, you see, it all depends what you mean by mornings, sir.'

"Because he seemed so weedy, so self-effacing, you might be tempted to push back, insist on your point, and that was when he'd put you on his list."

"A short time later, without warning, he'd give you such a stab with his outsized stinger that you'd cry out in confusion," Harry wrote. "Where the f*** did that come from?"

Jack Royston is Newsweek's chief royal correspondent based in London. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter) at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.

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