It appears that warnings have been dispatched to the British media, emphasizing the importance of not photographing or filming Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet at their school premises.

What instigates this caution is the self-regulatory code adhered to by every UK news and picture desk. According to Clause 6, children should enjoy their school years without unwarranted interference, while Clause 2 reinforces the expectation of privacy. Both stipulations are governed by the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO).

This scenario is reminiscent of a previous incident in January 2020. Shortly after the Sandringham summit, Meghan and Harry’s legal team sent warnings to British media outlets, threatening action over unauthorized photographs of Meghan on Vancouver Island. These precautions acted as a preemptive strike, despite no images at that time having surfaced.

Nearly six years later, the lack of guidance required from editors about respecting the privacy of royal children’s schools is evident in the complete absence of such intrusions during the schooling of George, Charlotte, and Louis.

Since 2022, all three have been attending school without any unauthorized images being circulated. No publications have released prohibited photos, showcasing the media’s adherence to privacy protocols, with no invasive long-lensed shots snapping through hedges or capturing indistinct black-and-white images from afar.

Every image of those children was arranged – first day of term, birthday portraits, the Christmas walk – sanctioned by the palace press office and worked through the royal rota. Consent, given and honored. Nothing else has ever run.

That system is the thing the Sussexes have derided from the start.

They walked away from the rota in 2020 and replaced it with something less accountable: chosen outlets, friendly sources, briefings nobody can check. The old game of divide and rule.

And the British press plays it. No tabloid walks away from a gift, even knowing it is being played, even knowing the story is sugar-coated Sussex nonsense. It has served team Sussex well. It has served the truth badly.

Watch the shape of it, because the shape never changes. A story appears – sympathetic, detailed, sourced to nobody. Denials follow. The backlash arrives on cue.

Then the backlash itself becomes the story: the hostility, the intrusion, the danger. And from that comes the demand. Protection. Sympathy. Another documentary about being hunted.

This is not conjecture, because a court established it. In 2021, their former communications secretary Jason Knauf gave evidence that the couple had discussed briefing the authors of Finding Freedom – a book their lawyers had told the High Court they did not collaborate on.

Harry’s own email said they had to be able to say they had nothing to do with it, while the right background would help. Meghan apologized to the court for forgetting the exchanges and said she had no intention to mislead.

There it is in writing. Brief it, deny it, take the sympathy that follows.

Six years later, the technique is unchanged. Only the target has moved: two small children who chose none of it and a British press that had already agreed, in writing, not to photograph them.

And the courts have started putting a price on the rest of it. The High Court, the judiciary Harry called a stitch-up, found against him and left him facing costs running into millions. His own former aide called the case a suicide mission. The Daily Mail’s publisher demonstrated, at length, that evidence and grievance are not the same thing.

Now they want the protection the rota gives without the arrangement that makes it work.

Then the school run. In her 2022 interview with The Cut, Meghan was in fantasy land again – she said she could never do pickup and drop-off in Britain without a royal photocall and a press pen of 40 photographers. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I have a problem with that.’

No pen. No photocall. A gate, a car park and other parents. The Princess of Wales has done it for four years unphotographed. Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh, did it before her.

Meghan is describing Los Angeles and calling it London. And so far, the only person putting those children in front of a lens has been their mother, on her own Instagram.

Now the rest of it arrives. Archie is seven, Lilibet five, both enrolled and starting school next month. A private house outside London. No return to duties.

The King, we are told, was informed last Sunday – not in July at Highgrove, when he had those grandchildren in front of him for the first time in four years. If that is true, he has been blindsided. More likely they were confirming by telephone what had already been said over tea. Either way, told not asked.

And read the language in the original reporting, because it is doing a great deal of work. Not a move. An extended stay. Montecito kept. The Portuguese house kept.

They are hedging their bets. Nobody who is leaving California keeps the house in California.

Understand what that means, because it is the whole story. A base here, a base there, a bolthole in the sun. Children in British schools until the schools stop suiting. Appearances when the mood takes. A door left ajar at both ends of the Atlantic and a security question hanging over every crossing.

That is not half-in, half-out arriving down the tracks. That is half-in, half-out already parked on the driveway.

On January 13, 2020, in the Long Library at Sandringham, Queen Elizabeth settled this in person. Harry went in alone. He was given the options and pushed for the middle one. She would not have it. You serve or you go. Five days later the palace confirmed the terms, effective that March.

It was among the last great acts of her judgement and it was right. She would not sanction a family that could come and go as it pleased and still draw on the institution’s protection and its name. Not because she was hard. Because she could see exactly where it ended.

That is what makes this a kick in the teeth. Not the homecoming – the quiet dismantling of the one boundary she drew herself, in a room, to her grandson’s face and is no longer here to defend.

The Sussexes believe six years in California proved their case. It proved the opposite. The Spotify deal went. The Netflix deal shrank. The most successful thing either of them has built in six years is a fruit spread – and the Montecito friendships will not notice they have gone. Six years of being paid to be wounded and now the wound needs an English postal code.

There is one version of this that works and nobody will say it aloud. Bring Harry in. Leave her out.

He has the regiments, Invictus, 20 years of WellChild. She has none of it and never wanted the parts that count. But a monarchy that takes a man and not his wife is asking that marriage a question it may not survive – and this family has form for putting a woman outside the tent and living with the consequences for 50 years.

Is the King open to it? He is seventy-seven, living with cancer and he wants his grandchildren. He would take Harry back tomorrow on almost any terms. That is love, not strategy, and it is the weakness in the wall.

William will not be so easily moved. He has time on his side and no appetite for negotiation. He watched the institution absorb one damaging brother and will not do it twice. Does he have a say? Not constitutionally, not yet. In practice, entirely – because nobody sensible builds a settlement the next king intends to tear up.

And Catherine? Hers is the quietest and most consequential opinion in the family. She was written about before she was married and judged before she was known, and she has never once answered back. She did the school runs the Duchess of Sussex calls impossible. She went through a cancer year in public and kept her counsel. If anyone has earned the right to set the price of readmission it is her – and she will never say it in print.

I have covered this family for thirty-seven years. I saw the worst of it: the press and paparazzi excess, the tunnel, the motorbikes, the freelancers who thought a long lens was a license to harass.

That landscape is gone. The code was rewritten and signed up to by the newspapers themselves. The courts sharpened. The market closed.

Harry is coming back to a different Britain and a very different media.

He is still lost in 1997. But it is in his head – the perspective of a 12-year-old boy, carried into middle age and now brought home. Six years and one removal van later, we are about to find out how right his grandmother was.

Robert Jobson is the author of The Windsor Legacy.