William and Harry rift was widened ‘beyond repair’ by Cabinet Secretary Simon Case

Cabinet Secretary Simon Case promoted Prince William as a “King-in-waiting” at the expense of Harry, damaging the brothers’ relationship beyond repair, Omid Scobie claims.

The Royal biographer accused the UK’s most senior civil servant of trying to undermine Prince Harry and Meghan Markle by leaking unfavourable stories about the couple to the press.

Scobie claims that when Mr Case was appointed William’s private secretary in 2018, he saw an opportunity to use “PR gamesmanship” to “widen cracks already appearing in the brothers’ relationship to the heir’s advantage.”

Speaking to i from Los Angeles, ahead of the publication of his controversial new book Endgame, Scobie said: “Case was charged with rebranding William. At that point William was called workshy and lazy in the papers, they were quite cruel about him.”

“The way he went about it was a trigger for Harry and Meghan falling out with the institution.”

Mr Case “repositioned William as the heir, the responsible adult in the room, casting Harry, the spare, as the wayward one, the selfish brother with a competing agenda,” Scobie said.

The author claims that Mr Case exploited a media backlash over Harry and Meghan using Sir Elton John’s private jet to fly to Nice by promoting a story that William and Kate boarded a £73 budget Flybe flight from Norwich to Aberdeen for a trip to Balmoral.

“A premeditated publicity set-up: This was all Case’s handiwork,” claimed Scobie, who said he had talked to senior Royal insiders and close friends of family members for his book.

It later emerged that two empty jets were flown on behalf of Flybe 500 miles in order to take the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their children to Aberdeen on a Flybe-branded plane.

Eastern Airways, which operated the flight, said this was an operational matter, but Scobie quotes a Palace aide as saying the Cambridges “looked like even bigger hypocrites than the couple they were trying to show up.”

Sources close to William and Kate have previously said they were unaware Flybe had switched the flights and did not seek any special treatment.

The Cabinet Office was approached for comment about Scobie’s allegations, but did not respond.

Mr Case’s actions “activated a chain of events that have helped damage a brotherly relationship beyond repair,” Scobie writes.

Whatever the human cost, Mr Case’s campaign proved successful. “William is firmly in the role of a decisive king-in-waiting and Harry has been cast by the Palace and the press as a perceived lost soul,” Scobie writes.

In his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry nicknamed the three top palace advisers the Bee, the Wasp and the Fly – believed respectively to be Sir Edward Young, Private Secretary to the Queen, Clive Alderton, working for Prince Charles, and Mr Case.

The Fly was highly efficient but “drawn to the offal of government and media and wormy entrails,” Harry wrote.

Scobie claims that “drastic measures” were required to change the narrative around William, with Case seeking to “elevate” his principal over Harry, who had previously been considered by the public to be on an equal footing with his brother.

Mr Case, currently on medical leave from his job as the country’s most senior civil servant, is understood to have been warned that the book will accuse him of planting negative stories about Harry.

He has previously been criticised over his role in Partygate and for sending controversial WhatsApp messages to Matt Hancock, the then Health Secretary, during the pandemic. Mr Case has yet to appear at the Covid Inquiry to answer questions about his role during the pandemic, and was excused from giving evidence this year on medical grounds.

He is still expected to give oral evidence where he will be questioned about partygate and WhatsApp messages he sent at a later date.

Describing the Royal family as “tone-deaf, racist and financially reckless”, Scobie defended his new book, which accuses the Palace of driving away the Duchess of Sussex out of jealousy over her popularity.

Prince William said the Royal family was ‘very much not’ racist in the immediate aftermath of the Sussexes’ interview with Oprah Winfrey, where Meghan alleged a member of the family asked her what skin colour Archie would have.

Scobie, whose Finding Freedom book charted the Duchess of Sussex’s exit as a working royal, denied being “Meghan’s mouthpiece”.

“Meghan isn’t sneaking secret audiotapes to me. She’s not phoning me or having private meetings,” he told i of his relationship with the Sussexes.

“I’m not friends and never have been friends with them,” claimed the author, who first met Meghan in 2015 and who says she phoned him in 2018 to ask about his mental health when he was harassed online. “I have built relationships with the teams around them.”

Scobie, 42, is close enough to the Sussexes, it would seem, to write that Meghan and King Charles discussed in private letters the Royal figures who she claims questioned baby Archie’s skin colour, an explosive allegation made during Harry and Meghan’s Oprah interview.

Two days after the interview in March 2021, Buckingham Palace released a statement on behalf of the late Queen Elizabeth II. It said the issues raised “particularly that of race” were “concerning”, adding: “While some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately.”

So who was it who was said to have “raised concerns” over Archie’s skin colour? “For legal reasons I can’t name them but I was surprised to discover it was two people. The details of the conversation are in the letters exchanged between Meghan and Charles.

“They may not see eye-to-eye on everything but Charles was quite horrified to learn that this was how Meghan felt. There was a dialogue and then agreed to put it to one side.”

The book states that, whilst the Sussexes are talking to King Charles again, William and Harry continue to grow apart, following the allegations in the Duke of Sussex’s memoir, Spare.

“Harry reached out via a mutual friend to William to see if there was any possibility of having a conversation and it was completely rebuffed,” Scobie said.

“That’s the state of their relationship. While things have improved slightly with Charles, sadly that hasn’t been the case with William.”

There is already rivalry between King Charles and William over the pace of change within the institution and their environmental initiatives, it is claimed. “Even people I’ve spoken to who work at the Palace refer to Charles as the bridge to his successor,” Scobie said.

“It shows he has an inability to usher in the kind of radical change needed. You can see William is already chomping at the bit for his chance to do that.”

Since Finding Freedom, Scobie has himself come under attack. “I never wanted to become the story myself. There was a lot of shitty racist stuff,” the writer born to a Scottish father and Iranian mother, said. “The attention led to changes in my life. You develop a thicker skin.”

Kensington Palace declined to comment on any of the claims made by Scobie.

Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy’s Fight for Survival by Omid Scobie is published by HQ, HarperCollins on November 28 in hardback, eBook and audiobook