Who are The Bee, the Wasp and the Fly, the Machiavellian courtiers named by Prince Harry

Prince Harry’s newly released autobiography features an all-star cast of characters, from “granny” (Queen Elizabeth II) until “Pa” (King Carlos III) and willy (Prince William). Not only that… there is also the mysterious trio from the Bee, the Wasp and the Fly.

They are the nicknames that Harry gives to three chief courtiers from the British royal house who, according to his account, handled the most tense negotiations between him; his wife, Meghan, and the royal family, including the agreement regarding his removal from any public responsibility and his move to Southern California in 2020.

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Harry never names the three officers, but makes it clear that he considers them guilty, almost as much as his father and brother, for failing to protect him and Meghan from a poisonous series of negative stories in the London tabloids that Harry says tormented the couple and precipitated his decision to break ties with the family.

Who are the Bee, the Wasp and the Fly that Harry names?

Beyond the juicy details about some actual sexual adventures, shoving fights and drug use containing the book, titled “Spare” (“In the Shadow”) and released on Tuesday after several days of hectic promotion, perhaps the most intriguing aspect is that it offers a revealing, sometimes veiled look inside the institution of the monarchy and its operations behind closed doors. In the experiences he recounts, Harry does not use nicknames or the names of many of the people he criticizes.

The Bee, the Wasp and the Fly, according to Harry, play a central role in the operations (and in his bitter experience of palace culture). They are at the top of an extensive hierarchy that, according to him, caused both he and his wife to become destabilized. This apparatus includes communications secretaries, ladies-in-waiting, and a host of junior assistants who act on behalf of their royal bosses, sometimes to the detriment of other family members.

“All my life I had dealt with courtiers…lots of courtiers,” Harry wrote. “But this time I had special dealings with three of them, all middle-aged white men who had managed to consolidate their power thanks to a series of daring Machiavellian maneuvers”.

Two people with contacts at Buckingham Palace identified these courtiers as Edward Young, the Queen’s former private secretary; Clive Alderton, Carlos’s private secretary, and Simon Case, who was William’s private secretary and is now Cabinet Secretary to the government, the highest position in the British bureaucracy. Both people insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

When we asked the palace about the role of these three courtiers, the answer was that they did not comment on the employees, nor have they responded to the content of the book. The Cabinet office also declined to comment in response to our questions about Case.

In the end, does Harry do what he criticizes the press for?

In the week since excerpts from the book began to leak, Harry has come under fire in some quarters for the litany of complaints he recites and for violate your family’s privacy, which is just the same practice he has long condemned with regard to the tabloids.

That was the impression of some customers who weighed in on Tuesday morning at a Waterstones bookstore in Piccadilly Circus when the book went on sale. “It seems they went for the tabloid look of engage in gossip”, opined a client, James Broadley. He added that the financial motivations for doing so were clear to him, and he was considering purchasing the book anyway.

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Although Harry has freely referred to close members of his family by name, he has avoided doing so in the case of some outside antagonists. For example, Rebekah Brooks, a former tabloid editor who now runs Rupert Murdoch’s News UK news division, was renamed “Rehabber Kooks” by him. Harry filed a lawsuit in 2019 against Murdoch’s The Sun newspaper, among other newspapers, for hacking into her phone.

Two especially persistent paparazzi were baptized Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber (a pun on the names of the twins from “Alice in Wonderland”). He calls another journalist from a tabloid the thumb because he wrote an article, in Harry’s opinion exaggerated, about breaking a bone in his thumb during a rugby game at Eton College.

He cited a well-known essay by historical novelist Hilary Mantel that appeared in the London Review of Books in 2013, in which the author compared the royal family to pandas (“They are expensive to maintain and don’t fit well in any modern environment.”) but no mention of Mantel or the publication.

Harry doesn’t hold back as much in the case of Murdoch himself, who writes that his policies were “just to the right of those of the Taliban.”

A formal world adjusted to iron rules

If we ignore Harry’s complaints, “In the Shadow” actually offers a sobering look at the secluded world and tremendous formalities the royal family lives on: a circuit of formal dinners at Windsor Castle and tartan-clad hunting trips in the Scottish Highlands.

His description of the meeting at Sandringham, in January 2020, places particular emphasis on the role of private secretaries. Although the Queen, Charles, and William were present at the session, it was essentially conducted by two of the three secretaries, according to Harry’s account. Five options were presented to the couple ranging from no change in status to a complete break with the family.

When it came time to choose one of the options, Harry noted, one of the officers gave him a printout of the most radical one. When Harry asked if he had the others printed, he wrote, the adviser replied that his printer was stuck.

“Everyone was staring off into space or at their shoes,” Harry wrote.

This very passive reaction of the queen and the next two people in the line of succession to the throne may seem surprising to us. But some experts on the royal family commented that it accurately captures the Ample room for maneuver that private secretaries havefrom defining agendas to organizing meetings, even with other family members.

“Private secretaries take care of everything, basically,” said Valentine Low, royal correspondent for The Times of London and author of the book “Courtiers: Intrigue, Ambition, and the Power Players Behind the House of Windsor.”

“On the banal side, they write the speeches of their constituents and organize their daily activities,” Valentine explained. “But in fact, they decide their life. They are your guardians. They are practically inseparable.”