Former UK home secretary Priti Patel apologized to King Charles III over talks about Prince Andrew’s police protection. Priti Patel, the most senior Home Office minister until 2022, emailed the king’s most senior aide Clive Alderton to suggest that reviewing the decision to strip Prince Andrew of his police team “could be something to consider.”
The Metropolitan Police bodyguards were removed in the wake of the scandal over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. In 2022, Prince Andrew settled a lawsuit brought by Virginia Giuffre in which he was accused of raping her while she was an Epstein sex trafficking victim.
Priti Patel told The Sun after the email leaked, “It is disappointing that this correspondence has been leaked into the public domain and I apologize to His Majesty for the embarrassment and difficulties the publishing of this correspondence has caused.”
Prince Harry has twice sued Priti Patel’s former department in an effort to get his police protection reinstated, losing one case and getting permission to take the other to a full hearing. In his memoir Spare, he described his frustration at losing his Metropolitan Police writing, “Meg asked me one night: ‘You don’t think they’d ever pull our security, do you?’ ‘Never. Not in this climate of hate. And not after what happened to my mother.’ Also, not in the wake of my Uncle Andrew. He was embroiled in a shameful scandal, accused of the sexual assault of a young woman, and no one had so much as suggested that he lose his security. Whatever grievances people had against us, sex crimes weren’t on the list.”
However, in February 2020, his police security team told him they were being removed.
“So here we are, I said. The ultimate nightmare. The worst of all worst-case scenarios. Any bad actor in the world would now be able to find us, and it would just be me with a pistol to stop them. ‘Oh wait. No pistol. I’m in Canada.’ I rang Pa. He wouldn’t take my calls. Just then I got a text from Willy. ‘Can you speak?’ Great. I was sure my older brother, after our recent walk in the Sandringham gardens, would be sympathetic. That he’d step up. He said it was a government decision. Nothing to be done,” Prince Harry shared.
