Charles should be King of Cop, but has Harry rained on his parade?

Omid Scobie’s hit piece against the royal family has distracted attention from the effort to fight climate change, writes Sean O’Grady – a cause to which the Sussexes claim to be passionately committed

The King’s speech to the assembled heads of state, political leaders, business interests and campaigners was courageous, commendable and correct (AP)

Prince Philip always used to say that the British monarchy would survive for as long as it made itself useful. In Dubai for the Cop28 climate change summit, his son has demonstrated exactly how that can and should be done.

In his latest attack on him and the royal family, royal biographer Omid Scobie has – inadvertently or not – done neither himself, nor Harry and Meghan, any favours. Unforgivably – albeit probably through an accident of timing and production – Scobie’s book Endgame has distracted attention from the effort to fight climate change, a cause to which the Sussexes claim to be passionately committed.

You get the impression that the once-rich seam of royal revelations royal gossip hounds have been mining for the past few years is becoming exhausted. Once Harry and Meghan made the initial claim during the famous interview with Oprah Winfrey, the people involved were inevitably, eventually, going to be exposed. So, sooner or later the King and Kate were bound to be “outed” as supposedly asking racist questions about the colour of Archie’s skin, and it would cause a media storm, as we see.

It’s doubly unfortunate because Charles’s speech to the assembled heads of state, political leaders, business interests and campaigners was courageous, commendable and correct. Within the bounds of constitutional convention, though unafraid to occasionally push at the edges, the King spoke with admirable clarity: “The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth” he told his audience.

A fine piece of phrasemaking – this was an exceptionally well-written address. Usually royal speech-making is an anodyne affair, designed to anaesthetise rather than excite, but this was an exception: “When we see the news that this last Northern Hemisphere summer, for instance, was the warmest global average temperature on record, we need to pause to process what this actually means: we are taking the natural world outside balanced norms and limits, and into dangerous, uncharted territory.

"We are carrying out a vast, frightening experiment of changing every ecological condition, all at once, at a pace that far outstrips nature’s ability to cope.”

Unarguable, but overshadowed by a story that is actually far less sensational than it has grown in the years since Oprah’s jaw dropped at Meghan’s expression of (genuine) distress. Yet there may be less to it than meets the eye. Remember that in that initial programme the reference was hearsay – about a conversation involving Harry and reported to Meghan by him. So she was right to be upset, but it might just be that the conversation wasn’t quite as damaging as it sounded.

We know this because in January this year, in an interview with Tom Bradby, Harry corrected himself, in effect, remarking that the conversation that he’d had was “not essentially racist”, but rather a matter of “unconscious bias”. It was a remarkable, not to say curious, piece of back-pedalling, a “reverse ferret” as we say in journalism, and it did successfully defuse this issue. Maybe it was an effort to repair relations, or to quietly correct the record, but it did dampen the speculation.

Yet now… well, we have another shock episode in the soap opera, but it’s much less dramatic than, say, the Oprah interview. It does feel like the prestige of the institution will carry them through, and no one is really persuaded that Charles really is some kind of beastly racist because there’s scant evidence of it elsewhere. He’s not Nick Griffin, in other words; he’s not even Suella Braverman as far as we know, and if he were he would have done a lot more to stop his son marrying Meghan in the first place.

It will blow over, and leave family matters more or less where they were – badly in need of some reconciliation for the good of all. Meanwhile, the world burns. That’s the real endgame.