Meghan Markle 'Still Terrified' About Returning To The UK As Husband Harry Longs For Reconciliation
and Meghan Markle are facing renewed concerns about UK security, particularly for their children, following the loss of a legal bid for police protection.
The Duchess of Sussex, in particular, is reportedly "terrified" about returning, while Harry feels emotionally distant from his family and seeks reconciliation.
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry also hope to retain royal titles for Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, but insiders and royal experts see this as unrealistic.
Sources close to the Sussexes have revealed that Meghan remains deeply uneasy about the idea of returning to the UK, especially with their children.
The anxiety follows Harry's recent legal setback, in which he lost his appeal to have his UK police protection reinstated after stepping down from his royal duties. The ruling has only deepened the couple's fears about visiting the country.
Royal commentator Duncan Larcombe explained that Meghan's concerns are rooted in very real threats.
"Meghan understandably feels scared about coming to the UK with the children. The threats are real and genuine," he noted, per The Express.
Larcombe continued: "The threat is from lunatics, radical protesters that might want to make a name for themselves by jumping in front of them. Then, of course, you have the worst type, the terrorist threat. And there's no doubt Harry – and his family, as a result – is a huge target."
Despite her confident demeanor during interviews and media appearances, sources close to Meghan say she remains deeply unsettled by the idea of bringing her children into what she perceives as a vulnerable situation.
One insider told The Mirror, "In some ways she's feeling stronger and she wants to share that, but she's still terrified of putting her kids at risk by coming back to the UK – any parent would panic if they were in Meghan's shoes."
Meanwhile, Harry is said to be feeling the emotional weight of separation from his family, especially during significant royal occasions, such as Trooping the Colour and Father's Day.
According to the source, "He knows that things could've been so different if things had gone another way, but it's been five years since they left the UK and the chances of them coming back, even for a visit, seem slim to none."
"It's heartbreaking," the insider added about the drawn-out royal rift.
Meanwhile, Harry and Meghan are said to be quietly working to ensure their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, retain their royal titles. However, ongoing tensions within the royal family continue to complicate matters.
According to The Guardian, "Prince Harry wants to keep the HRH [His/Her Royal Highness] titles for his children so that when they grow older they can decide for themselves whether they want to become working royals, or stay out of public life."
However, insiders have reportedly reacted with "bemusement" at the idea, suggesting it's unlikely Archie and Lilibet will ever serve as working royals.
One source added that, given how far removed the Sussex family now is from the monarchy, maintaining such titles may not be practical or supported.
Complications surrounding Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet had already emerged, particularly regarding the securing of UK passports for the young royals.
Sources claim that the process was slow and complex, and even led Harry to consider adopting the surname "Spencer," Princess Diana's maiden name, as a workaround.
"There was clear reluctance to issue passports for the kids," one insider close to the Sussexes told the outlet, adding, "the king hadn't wanted Archie and Lili to carry the titles, most of all the HRH, and the British passports, once created, would be the first and perhaps the only legal proof of their names."
Some royal commentators are also pushing back against the idea that Harry and Meghan's children might one day serve as working royals.
Royal expert Kinsey Schofield, host of the To Di For Daily podcast, criticized the notion in a recent interview with Fox News Digital, calling it far-fetched.
"It's utterly absurd for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to believe their children might one day choose to become working royals," she said.
She continued: "That kind of entitlement isn't just wishful thinking — it borders on delusion. These are American children who've been raised oceans away from the monarchy, with no exposure to the customs, culture, or continuity that define royal life."
According to her, Prince Harry made a definitive break from royal life years ago: "Harry closed that door himself the moment he boarded Tyler Perry's private jet and handed over his life story to a ghostwriter for 'Spare.'"
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By the time polls closed at 10pm on 4 July 2024, the Labour Party knew they were likely to return to government - even if they could not quite bring themselves to believe it. For Sir Keir Starmer, reminiscing 10 months later in an interview with me, it was an "incredible moment". Instantly, he said, he was "conscious of the sense of responsibility". And yes, he confessed, a little annoyed that his landslide victory was not quite as big as Sir Tony Blair's had been in 1997. "I'm hugely competitive," the prime minister said. "Whether it's on the football pitch, whether it is in politics or any other aspect of life." Sir Keir watched the exit poll with a small group of advisers as well as his wife, Victoria, and his two teenaged children. Even in that moment of unsurpassable accomplishment, this deeply private prime minister was caught between the jubilation of his aides and the more complex reaction of his children, who knew their lives were about to change forever. 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For some, especially on the left of the Labour Party, this government's difficulties began with an over-cautious election campaign. Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the trade union Unite, told me that "everyday people [were] looking for change with a big C. They were not looking for managerialism". It's a criticism with which Pat McFadden, a senior cabinet minister, having run the campaign, is wearily familiar. "We had tried other strategies to varying degrees in 2015, 2017, 2019, many other campaigns previously - and they'd lost. "I had one job. To win." Having made his name as a prominent member of Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet, Sir Keir won the party leadership in 2020 offering Labour members a kind of Corbynism without Corbyn. But before long he broke decisively with his predecessor. In the campaign this meant not a long list of promises, but a careful approach. Reassurance was the order of the day: at the campaign's heart, a focus on what Labour wouldn't do: no increase in income tax, national insurance or VAT. Yet a big part of preparing for government was not just the question of what this government would do, but how it would drive the government system. For that, Sir Keir turned to Sue Gray. Having led the Partygate investigation into Boris Johnson, Gray was already unusually high-profile for an impartial civil servant. Her close colleagues were stunned when in 2023 she agreed to take up a party political role as Sir Keir's chief of staff. "It was a source of enormous controversy within the civil service," says Simon Case, who until a few months ago as cabinet secretary was head of the civil service. Sue Gray's task was to use her decades of experience of the Whitehall machine to bring order to Sir Keir's longstanding team. She started work in September 2023, and the grumblings about her work began to reach me weeks, or perhaps even days, later. Those in the team she joined had expected her to bring organisational clarity. Tensions came when she involved herself in political questions too. Gray also deliberately re-prioritised the voices of elected politicians in the shadow cabinet over unelected advisers. Questions about what exactly her role should be were never quite resolved, in part because Rishi Sunak called the general election sooner than Labour had expected. Gray spent the campaign in a separate office from the main team, working with a small group on plans for the early days in government. Yet those back in Labour HQ fretted that, from what little they gleaned, that work was inadequate. A few days before the election those rumours reached me. I WhatsApped a confidant of Sir Keir to ask what they had heard of the preparation for government. "Don't ask," came the reply. "I am too worried to discuss it." What is unquestionable is that any prime minister would have struggled with the backdrop Sir Keir inherited. Simon Case described to me how, on 5 July just after Sir Keir had made his first speech on the steps of No 10, he had thwacked a sleepless new prime minister with "the heavy mallet of reality". "I don't think there are many incoming prime ministers who'd faced such challenging circumstances," he said, referring to both the country's economic situation and wars around the world. The King's Speech on 17 July unveiled a substantial programme, making good on manifesto promises: rail nationalisation, planning reform, clean energy investment. But those hoping for a rabbit out of the hat, a defining surprise, were disappointed. In so many crucial areas — social care, child poverty, industrial strategy — the government's instinct was to launch reviews and consultations, rather than to declare a decisive direction. As cabinet secretary, Case could see what was happening — or not happening — across the whole of government. "There were some elements where not enough thinking had been done," he said. "There were areas where, sitting in the centre of government, early in a new regime, the prime minister and his team, including me as his sort of core team, knew what we wanted to do, but we weren't communicating that effectively across all of government." Not just communication within government: for us journalists there were days in that early period where it was utterly unclear what this new government wanted its story to be. That made those early announcements, which did come, stand out even more: none more so than Chancellor Rachel Reeves's announcement on 29 July that she would means-test the winter fuel payment. It came in a speech primarily about the government's parlous economic inheritance. That is not what it is remembered for. Some in government admit that they expected a positive response to Reeves's radical frankness about what the government could and could not afford to do. Yet it sat in isolation - a symbol of this new government's economic priorities, with the Budget still three months away. Louise Haigh, then the transport secretary, remembered: "It came so early and it hung on its own as such a defining policy for so long that in so many voters' minds now, that is the first thing they think about when they think about this Labour government and what it wants to do and the kinds of decisions it wants to make." The policy lasted precisely one winter. Sir Keir and his chancellor have argued in recent weeks that they were able to change course because of a stabilising economy. McFadden was more direct about the U-turn. "If I'm being honest, I think the reaction to it since the decision was announced was probably stronger than we thought," he admits. At the same time the chancellor stood up to announce the winter fuel cuts, news was unfolding of a horrific attack in Southport. Misinformation about who had carried out the attack fuelled the first mass riots in this country since 2011, when Sir Keir had been the director of public prosecutions. Given the nature of the crisis, the prime minister was well placed to respond. "As a first crisis, it was dealing with a bit of the machinery of government that he instinctively understood - policing, courts, prisons," Case says. Sir Keir's response was practical and pragmatic — making the judicial system flow faster meant that by mid-August at least 200 rioters had already been sentenced, most jailed with an average term of two years. But in a way that was not quite clear at the time, the riots spawned what has become one of the defining attacks on the prime minister from the right: that of 'two-tier Keir'. The idea that some rioters were treated more harshly than other kinds of protesters had been morphed over time into a broader accusation about who and what the prime minister stood for. Sir Keir had cancelled his family holiday to deal with the riots. Exhausted, he ended the summer dealing with questions about his personal integrity in what became known as 'freebiegate'. Labour tiptoed cautiously through its first year - will it now decide to escape its own shadow? Why Labour is strengthening ties with China after years of rollercoaster relations Britain's energy bills problem - and why firms are paid huge sums to stop producing power Most of the gifts for which he was being criticised - clothing, glasses, concert tickets - had been accepted before the election but Sir Keir was prime minister now. Case told me there was a "naivety" about the greater scrutiny that came with leading the country. Perhaps more than that, there was a naivety in No 10 about how Sir Keir was seen. Here was a man elected in large part because of a crisis of trust in politics. He had presented himself as different. Telling voters that he had followed the rules was to miss the point — they thought the rules themselves were bust. By the winter of 2024, the sense of a government failing to get a grip of itself or a handle on the public mood, had grown. A chorus of off-the-record criticism, much of it strikingly personal, threatened to overwhelm the government. There were personal ambitions and tensions at play, but more and more insiders - some of them fans of Gray initially - were telling me that the way in which Sir Keir's chief of staff was running government was structurally flawed, with the system simply not working properly. Gray announced in early October that she had resigned because she risked becoming a "distraction". In reality, Sir Keir had sacked her after some of his closest aides warned him he risked a mutiny if he did not. Sue Gray was approached both for an interview and for her response to her critics but declined. To the end she retained some supporters in the cabinet including Louise Haigh. "I felt desperately sorry for her," she says. "It was just a really, really cruel way to treat someone who'd already been so traduced by the Tories - and then [was] traduced by our side as well." Sir Keir appointed Gray. He empowered Gray. And he dispensed with Gray. This was the prime minister correcting his own mistakes - an episode which came at a high political price. Yet on the world stage the prime minister continued to thrive, winning praise across political divides in the UK and abroad. Jake Sullivan, Biden's adviser, was impressed by Sir Keir's handling of US President Donald Trump, describing the Oval Office meeting where the prime minister brandished an invitation from the King as "the best I've seen in terms of a leader in these early weeks going to sit down with the current president". It's an irony that it is Sir Keir, who made his reputation trying to thwart Brexit, who has found for the UK its most defined diplomatic role of the post-Brexit era — close to the US, closer than before to Europe, at the fore of the pro-Ukraine alliance, striking trade deals with India and others. And it has provided him with something more elusive too: a story — a narrative of a confident, pragmatic leader stepping up on the world stage, acting as a bridge between other countries in fraught times. The risk, brought into sharp relief during the Israel-Iran conflict in recent days, is that Trump is too unpredictable for such a role to be a stable one. The international arena has sharpened Sir Keir's choices domestically as well. Even while making welfare cuts that have displeased so many in his party, the prime minister has a clearer and more joined-up argument about prioritising security in all its forms: through work, through economic prudence, through defence of the realm. And yet, for plenty of voters Sir Keir has found definition to his government's direction too late. Labour's poor performance last month in the local elections plus defeat at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election were a blow to Sir Keir and his team. It's far from unheard of for a governing party to lose a by-election, but to lose it to Reform UK on the same night that Nigel Farage's party hoovered up councils across England made this a distinctively new political moment. Two days afterwards, Paul Ovenden, Sir Keir's strategy director, circulated a memo to Downing Street aides, which I've obtained. It called for a "relentless focus on the new centre ground in British politics". The crucial swing voters, Ovenden wrote, "are the middle-age, working class, economically squeezed voters that we persuaded in the 2024 election campaign. Many of them voted for us in 2024 thinking we would fix the cost of living, fix the NHS, and reduce migration… we need to become more ruthless in pursuing those outcomes". For more than 100 of Starmer's own MPs, including many of those elected for the first time in that landslide a year ago, the main priority was ruthlessly dismantling the government's welfare reforms - plunging the prime minister as he approaches his first anniversary into his gravest political crisis yet. The stakes were beyond high. For the prime minister to have backed down to avoid defeat on this so soon after the winter fuel reversal raises questions about his ability to get his way on plenty else besides. So, if this first year has done anything, it has clarified the stakes. This is not just a prime minister and a Labour Party hoping to win a second term. They are trying to prove to a tetchy and volatile country that not only do they get their frustration with politics, but that they can fix it too. None of that will be possible when profound policy disagreements are on public display. Starmer's Stormy Year: A year on from the landslide election win, the BBC's Henry Zeffman talks to insiders about the challenges Labour has faced in government (BBC Radio 4, from 30 June 2025) Top picture credit: PA and Getty Images BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.
