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Good morning from William Cash, the Mace Editor-in-chief
Escape from LA
Is the US too expensive for Harry and Meghan?
Is the court judgement relating to the £34.4 million that Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex – and other celebs including Elton John, Baroness Lawrence and former Lib Dem deputy leader Sir Simon Hughes – have been ordered to pay in legal costs to Associated Newspapers related to the Sussexes’ shock return to the UK?
One wonders. Prince Harry has been given just a week to pay almost £10 million in the first tranche of legal costs relating to his failed privacy case claiming that he and his fellow celebrities were victims of “unlawful information gathering”, including hacking. All charges were dismissed by Mr Justice Nicklin.
Reversal in fortune
Yesterday the judge ruled that the duke and celebrities should have the costs calculated on “indemnity basis”. He ordered an initial payment of £9,544,355 by Friday, 28 August and refused to cap the total costs. Associated Newspapers are also demanding an initial £111,767 in individual costs from Harry. With the duke and celebrities’ legal insurance capped at £16.2 million, this means a likely £18 million shortfall in the total sought by the Associated Newspaper who have previously said they will “go for the jugular”.
It’s not clear how the £18 million bill will be shared. But it seems likely that – despite some financial subsidy from the estate of Max Mosley, the late head of Formula 1 who loathed the press after he was exposed for hosting orgies – Harry will be having to write a series of very large cheques.
Poor decisions
Facing such costs, I can’t help think that Harry and Meghan’s talent for making poor commercial decisions and burning through millions of dollars may also have something to do with the move back to the UK. The court costs will be painful, to say the least.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see their $23 million Provence-style Montecito mansion – known as the Chateau of Riven Rock – on the market at some point soon. It’s also been reported that Meghan has an acting role lined up in a new Guy Ritchie series. Maybe she needs the money.
Profit in loss
Other than Harry’s nasty legal bill, there are other good reasons to sell. Annual property taxes for the year 2025 were over $152,000. On top of this, the monthly payments on their $9.52 million mortgage have been estimated at between $40,000 and $43,000. Ouch. Add in your garden and pool maintenance, plus security, and some experts have said the couple could still be having to pay out as much as $650,000 a year to keep the Chateau running, even if they are living back in the UK.
Cash crisis
In her illuminating piece for Mace, Lucy Carrier-Pilkington asks if the move back to the UK will bring peace within the warring royal camps. Having lost his court case and media privacy battle, Harry has apparently agreed to a gagging order on laundering any more Windsor dirt.
But will this result in a media truce? And what are the chances of any hatchet-burying with his “arch-nemesis” (as he described his brother in Spare) Prince Wiliam and the Princess of Wales.
In May 2025, regarding his security concerns, he said: “I can’t see a world in which I would bring my wife and children back to the UK at this point.”
So far, the press surrounding the return of the Sussexes has been fairly positive, far more positive than coverage of the couple’s activities in the US. The reaction from the palace and the government has also been relatively positive although, unsurprisingly, we’ve heard nothing from the Prince of Wales camp.
Who handles Harry?
The hope must be that the return of the Sussexes might herald a new dawn for their damaged public image. But who will be masterminding this volte face in the royal spinning wars?
The problem is they have already burned through 11 press secretaries since their 2018 marriage and the word in UK comms-land is that few will want to work for them for fear of being burned or spat out.
Even in the early royal honeymoon years, comms aides Jason Knauf and Sara Latham stepped back from royal duties due to the difficulties faced working for the couple. The "Megxit" exodus to California in 2020 triggered immediate departures, including press aides and UK team members.
Their California era saw the departure of Toya Holness and Christine Schirmer who managed initial US launches; next they parted ways with Hollywood crisis management firm Sunshine Sachs Morgan & Lylis in late 2022; other short-lived roles included chief of staff Josh Kettler, global press secretary Ashley Hansen and director of communications Emily Robinson, culminating in chief communications officer Meredith Maines stepping down after less than a year.
Difference of opinion
All this serial staff departure drama has made me decide that The Mace should reinstate our “Courtier” column, looking at the royals’ behind-the-scenes comms world. Previously, I hear, there was often a mismatch between the couple’s reactive media demands and an apparent reluctance to follow professional PR advice.
The sole person now in charge of Harry and Meghan’s comms is a Brit called Liam Maguire whom Harry has known for years through the Invictus Games. One royal media insider said they have a “skeleton” PR operation and Maguire wasn’t being paid anything like the vast sums contracted to Meredith Maines. Maybe they are tightening their belts. If the Montecito pile ends up on the market, I’ll be quick to remind readers that money tends to be at the root of most sudden expat departures.
School for scandal
A Times story that caught my eye is that the government is to pay EY and KPMG almost half a billion pounds to train civil servants – less than two years after Labour promised to put the brakes on splurging out on “external consultants”.
The two Big Four accountancy firms will provide ad-hoc “learning and training services” to the civil servants between this September and March 2028 while Labour gets their “school of government” operational. For their year-and-a-half of work, EY and KPMG, will receive up to £456 million, which is “the largest single contract the Cabinet Office has awarded to Big Four firms since the records of Tussell, a government contracts analytics group, began in 2012”.
KPMG will be pocketing a whopping £319 million with EY receiving £137 million. This for “co-ordinating training programmes” including AI skills, “as and when government departments need them while they wait for the school of government to reopen”.
Money for nothing
This sounds like a lot of money paid for people to wait around and do very little and is just another example of why the economics and culture of the civil service urgently needs reform. Indeed, it has been revealed that many civil servants are spending fewer than two days a week in the office, despite rules that require them to be at the office at least 60% of the time.
Senior mandarins have claimed that officials are meeting the target – publishing figures showing that departments have a monthly staff occupancy rate of 60 to 100%. However, the government departments in question do not even have enough desk space for all the civil servants they employ – calling into question the validity of those figures.
Office politics
New analysis by the think tank Centre for Government Reform reveals that the true staff occupancy rate is far lower, with some civil servants spending as little as one and a half days a week in the office. Ameer Kotecha, chief executive of the Centre for Government Reform, said ministers needed to “come clean and start being straight with the public about the true numbers, rather than hiding behind figures that don’t stand up to scrutiny”.
“Civil servants are being paid to work in offices they aren’t turning up to. Ministers talk tough on productivity and have issued a mandate that civil servants should be coming into the office a minimum of 60% of the time.”
No fixed address
The autumn issue of The Mace includes an in-depth civil service special report but we have no idea where to send copies as figures revealed last week show that at least 3,800 civil servants are not required to go to the office.
The Department for Work and Pensions alone has over 2,400 staff on permanent work-from-home contracts. Alongside them, 688 people at Defra and 492 people in the Department for Education are permanently at home. In some cases, civil servants have not attended the office in more than two years.
I am keen not to waste postage on sending magazines to civil servants who haven’t collected their post in years. As Alex Burghart, shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said: “Flexible working is one thing, but with thousands of staff never turning up at the office, taxpayers have a right to ask if they’re getting value for money.”
Gaming the system
Earlier this year, civil service whistleblowers revealed that staffers are able to game the system by declaring overtime and are racking up extra annual leave through a set-up that lets them choose their start and finish times. Civil servants are also supposedly abusing the system by leaving their laptops open at the end of working from home to rack up extra hours, as well as counting commuting time as part of their workday.
A former member of staff at the Pensions Regulator, a public body sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions, said: “A common practice was for staff to leave their laptops idle from around 4pm, only returning at 5:30pm to shut them down so they could log another 90 minutes into their flexi balance.”
The source said: “People routinely claimed travel time between home and the office as working time – others counted time spent dropping off or collecting children from school, or even breaks taken for activities such as cycling, framed as part of mental wellbeing.”
Read our Mace investigation into civil service work practises here.
Networking with Nigel
Former press officer John Gill’s promotion to deputy director of external affairs at Reform UK, just before the party launches its new “business day” on 3 September – the day before the party’s conference at Birmingham’s NEC – is indicative of how it is ramping up its "business engagement" with Great Britain PLC.
With the party on the ropes for much of the summer over donor and funding issues, the question being asked around the PA world is: will business leaders from FTSE companies be showing up to the NEC this year? Or, like last year, will they send second-tier representatives?
Brummie wonderland
The Mace will know by 3 September as I’ll be attending the party’s first “business gala dinner with Nigel Farage” in the main NEC arena. This is not quite the swanky Raffles Hotel on Whitehall where the Tories held their annual summer donor party with a glitzy event sponsored by Carphone Warehouse founder David Ross, who I was glad to see has been made a life peer in Keir Starmer’s resignation honours.
Tickets to Reform’s gala dinner are £350, which includes “drinks and networking” at 6.30pm and the “VIP dinner” at 7.30pm. Those sponsoring fringe events at the NEC this year include Google, the Adam Smith Institute, the NFU, Build for Britain, Cavendish, First Bus, Cadent Gas, Fuels Industry UK, the Nuclear Industry Association and the Tax Payers Alliance.
Back on track
It looks like summer setbacks – with a pointless by-election in Clacton and a temporary dip behind Labour in the polls – has not damaged the curiosity of lobby groups and trade associations to engage with Reform on a more serious level than in 2025 when corporate delegates could be found in the roped-off Heathrow Airport Lounge which is returning again. I am told the number of corporate delegates is “double” last year.
Google is a breakthrough sponsor and I hear a big telecom firm is on board, but they are still not getting blue chip FTSE firms from the financial services, big tech, defence, health and retail sectors that they may have liked. Reform’s courtship of big business remains a slow waltz not a tango. Getting more FTSE big business on board is partly why Matthew MacKinnon, head of external affairs at Reform, has brought Gill in to help assemble a network of industry experts within key sectors to provide input to Reform’s policymaking unit which is headed by academic James Orr, a senior adviser to Farage.
Targeting business
Gill’s promotion is indicative of how Reform has been prioritising its engagement with leading UK businesses and trade bodies since its sweeping wins in the local elections of 2025 and 2026.
We will have the full exclusive story of how Reform have been courting British business over the last year in our autumn issue.
In his quick-fire Mace Questionnaire, below, Gill says a favourite maxim of Ronald Reagan has stuck with him as a golden rule in his comms career: “There is no limit to what a man can do, or where he can go, if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.” Wise words for all politicians to keep in mind.
The Strategist: Michael Prescott
Managing director, Hanover
"Better to be the most overdressed person in the room than the scruffiest" Read more >
Industry Watch: John Gill
Deputy Director of External Affairs, Reform UK
“There’s no limit to where a man can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.” Read more >
Leader in Public Affairs: David Sheen
David Sheen, Public Affairs Director, UK Hospitality
“Take a risk, offer innovative solutions” Read more >
The Advocate: Grace Pritchard
Downing Street Director of News and the Prime Minister’s Political Spokesperson. Read more >
The Mace Shadow Profile: Andrew Griffith MP
Shadow Business and Trade Secretary
“The Conservative Party started doing so many unconservative things that in 2019 I felt I had to get elected and change it. Let’s just say there’s more still to do!” Read more >
The Mace Questionnaire
Marshall Manson, CEO FleishmanHillard UK. Read more >
Industry Reacts
Is the Burnham bounce over? Proposals to release prisoners early – including child killers - has brought the new PM into the firing line. The Mace talks to industry experts about the controversial new measures that have cut short the PM’s political honeymoon. Read more >
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