Prince Harry’s family feud takes a new twist
In a stunning sign of the depth of the estrangement between Prince Harry and the Royal Family, it has emerged that the Duke of Sussex seriously considered dropping his royal surname in favor of his late mother’s maiden name, Spencer.
Sources told the Daily Mail that Harry raised the idea during a trip last year to the United Kingdom for the funeral of his uncle, Robert Fellowes. During the visit, Harry stayed at the Althorp Estate with his maternal uncle, Charles Spencer, the ninth Earl Spencer and brother of the late Princess Diana. Spencer famously delivered a confrontational speech condemning the royals at her funeral in which he referred to Harry and William as her “blood family.”
According to the Daily Mail’s well-connected social columnist, Richard Eden, Harry reportedly sought advice on legally changing his surname from Mountbatten-Windsor to Spencer, a move that would have amounted to a very symbolic severing of ties with the House of Windsor.
While the report says that Spencer talked Harry down and the idea is not expected to go any further, the fact that Harry seriously explored it underscores the ongoing toxicity of his relationship with the royal family, particularly his father, King Charles; his brother, Prince William; and his stepmother, Queen Camilla.
According to a friend of the duke cited by the Mail, “They had a very amicable conversation and Spencer advised him against taking such a step.”
The friend added that Earl Spencer pointed out the legal and symbolic hurdles, warning that such a move would not only be complex but would likely deepen already raw tensions with Harry’s family of origin.
Had the change gone through, it could have affected not only Harry’s public identity but also the names of his children, Archie and Lilibet, both of whom currently use the surname Mountbatten-Windsor—a hybrid of the Queen’s family name and that of Prince Philip, who adopted the Mountbatten name upon becoming a British subject in 1947. Had Harry moved forward with a surname change, his daughter, Princess Lilibet, whose middle name honors Diana, would have become Princess Lilibet Diana Spencer.
Such a gesture would have been particularly painful to King Charles, who holds the Mountbatten legacy in high regard. Louis Mountbatten, the first Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was a beloved mentor to Prince Philip. The Queen and Prince Philip decided in 1960 to designate Mountbatten-Windsor as the family name for their direct descendants.
In his memoir Spare, and in numerous high-profile interviews since, Harry has laid bare what he sees as the coldness and dysfunction at the heart of the royal household. His allegations have included neglect, press manipulation, and emotional cruelty—claims that have harmed the Windsors’ carefully curated public image and fractured personal relationships behind palace doors.
Names and titles are a fraught issue for Harry and Meghan Markle. The couple were granted the Duke and Duchess of Sussex titles by Queen Elizabeth on their wedding day in 2018, and their children were officially recognized as Prince and Princess following Charles’s accession to the throne. But their ongoing use of royal titles has often been called hypocritical.
Harry’s office has been approached for comment.
Markle “steps back” from her weird jam business
The unfathomable and chaotic progress of Meghan Markle’s branding empire continued this week with a bizarre interview with Fast Company magazine in which she implied she might not restock her online As Ever store anytime soon.
Fast Company makes much of the fact that As Ever products such as jam and flower sprinkles sold out in 45 minutes, without making the very obvious point that a) this is an easy outcome to engineer by not having much stock and b) not having anything available for your customers to buy when you have momentum is generally considered bad business.
Incredibly, it appears Meghan now “wants to take a step back” from the logistically complex business of actually selling stuff. Already? Why, yes! Fast Company says her plan during this stepped-back phase is to “gather data from the launch and figure out exactly what As Ever could be,” adding, “She says she’s planning to announce new products in the first quarter of 2026.”
What?
Meghan is quoted as saying, mysteriously: “I want to really focus on the hospitality angle of As Ever, but as we take the learnings, we can understand what the customer’s needs are seasonally.”
Clears as mud? Good.
