Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, are home – and it is thought Harry’s uncle, Earl Spencer, will be on hand to help them get settled. It makes absolute sense. The Sussexes stayed at Spencer’s estate, Althorp, during their summer trip to see the King.

Earl Spencer promised in his stirring eulogy at Princess Diana’s funeral in Westminster Abbey to protect his nephews: “On behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.”

Those two sisters, Lady Jane Fellowes and Lady Sarah McCorquodale, have remained close to Harry too. They are reliable, dependable and can provide a sense of stability for Harry and his young family as they find their feet again in the UK. They can also tell his children stories about their late granny, Diana, going right back to her birth and all the way up to her moving burial on the island at Althorp – far from the prying eyes of the press.

Earl Spencer, too, will be a mine of stories, not least because he is about to publish his own memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister. So there is nowhere else on earth closer to Harry’s mother than Althorp.

There is a cloud on the horizon, though. If the Sussexes do grow closer to the Spencers, there will once again be two rival courts at work involving these two families. Even before Charles and Diana separated in 1992, they and their allies had split into two courts. In that same year, Andrew Morton published his explosive biography, Diana – Her True Story, with revelations passed on from Diana about the parlous state of the royal marriage.

For years, the separated couple were marooned in a miserable world of briefing and counter-briefing, culminating in the infamous 1995 Martin Bashir interview with Diana on . In a sign of the toxic world Diana had to negotiate her way through then, it emerged in 2020 that Bashir had used forged bank statements to win the trust of Diana and Earl Spencer.

Harry has no constitutional power nor does he have any official role in the royal court. But if previous Sussex revelations to Oprah Winfrey and in their Netflix series are anything to go on, Harry and Meghan are not about to follow the old royal convention of “Never complain, never explain.”

An informal royal court would reinvigorate the Sussex PR brand. One of the reasons they’ve come back to Britain is presumably because that brand was losing its power. Meghan’s As Ever enterprise isn’t booming as it once did. Their TV ventures have dwindled, and several of their broadcasting ideas have gone into abeyance.

A new court on home turf would boost interest. And there would be more royal titbits to convey. Stranded in California, far from the genuine royal court, they had little new to say, once they’d splurged all the details of the first few years of their relationship. Perhaps there could be a new series; there would be a whole new set and cast of characters.

Here’s hoping Earl Spencer might calm the troubled waters between the two courts. A distinguished historian, he has written extensively about the greatest royal schism of all – the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I. Might he use his historical scholarship and understanding to heal another mighty royal split – between the Courts of Sussex and Wales?