Charles should be King of Cop, but has Harry rained on his parade?

Omid Scobie’s hit piece against the royal family has distracted attention from the effort to fight climate change, writes Sean O’Grady – a cause to which the Sussexes claim to be passionately committed

The King’s speech to the assembled heads of state, political leaders, business interests and campaigners was courageous, commendable and correct (AP)

Prince Philip always used to say that the British monarchy would survive for as long as it made itself useful. In Dubai for the Cop28 climate change summit, his son has demonstrated exactly how that can and should be done.

In his latest attack on him and the royal family, royal biographer Omid Scobie has – inadvertently or not – done neither himself, nor Harry and Meghan, any favours. Unforgivably – albeit probably through an accident of timing and production – Scobie’s book Endgame has distracted attention from the effort to fight climate change, a cause to which the Sussexes claim to be passionately committed.

You get the impression that the once-rich seam of royal revelations royal gossip hounds have been mining for the past few years is becoming exhausted. Once Harry and Meghan made the initial claim during the famous interview with Oprah Winfrey, the people involved were inevitably, eventually, going to be exposed. So, sooner or later the King and Kate were bound to be “outed” as supposedly asking racist questions about the colour of Archie’s skin, and it would cause a media storm, as we see.