- - Prince Harry Reveals What Sparked Intense Competition Among the Royal Family at the End of the Year

Meredith KileJanuary 1, 2026 at 12:00 AM

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Prince Harry -

In his 2023 memoir, Spare, Prince Harry shared the holiday tradition that caused tension within the royal family

The younger son of King Charles recalled how, at year's end, the Court Circular would tally each royal's official engagements

"Comparisons would be made in the press," Harry said of the "sinister document"

The New Year's holiday is often one for fresh beginnings and looking towards the future. However, Prince Harry revealed in his memoir, Spare, that, for the British royal family, it was also a time for tension and awkward competition.

The younger son of King Charles shared plenty of family secrets in his 2023 book. One memorable reveal came when he detailed his return from a life-changing trip to the South Pole in 2013, just in time to spend the holidays with the rest of the royals at Sandringham.

It was a crowded Christmas that year, Harry said in the book, and it took a toll on his newfound clarity.

"I told myself to make the best of it, use this time to protect the serenity I’d achieved at the Pole," he wrote. "My hard drive was cleaned. Alas, my family at that moment was infected with some very scary malware."

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Prince Harry and Prince William leave the Christmas Day service at Sandringham on Dec. 25, 2013

That "malware" was "largely to do with the Court Circular, that annual record of 'official engagements' done by each member of the Royal Family in the preceding calendar year."

The "sinister document," as Harry called it, is issued daily by St. James's Palace and printed at the back of The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Scotsman, detailing the previous day's events.

"At the end of the year, when all the numbers got tallied, comparisons would be made in the press," Harry shared. "Ah, this one’s busier than that one. Ah, this one’s a lazy s---."

"The Court Circular was an ancient document, but it had lately morphed into a circular firing squad. It didn’t create the feelings of competitiveness that ran in my family, but it amplified them, weaponized them," Harry said.

In true buttoned-up royal fashion, Harry said that the family never spoke directly about the Court Circular or even mentioned it by name.

"That only created more tension under the surface, which built invisibly as the last day of the calendar year approached," he recalled. "Certain family members had become obsessed, feverishly striving to have the highest number of official engagements recorded in the Circular each year, no matter what, and they’d succeeded largely by including things that weren’t, strictly speaking, engagements, recording public interactions that were mere blips, the kinds of things Willy and I wouldn’t dream of including."

It was this perceived disparity in the quality of royal engagements, Harry wrote, that in part made him feel like the Court Circular was a "joke."

"It was all self-reported, all subjective. Nine private visits with veterans, helping with their mental health? Zero points. Flying via helicopter to cut a ribbon at a horse farm? Winner!"

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Prince Harry, Prince Charles and Prince William in 2013

However, Harry explained that it wasn't up to individual royal family members on how much work they did.

"None of us was deciding in a vacuum how much work to do," he explained. "Granny or Pa decided, by way of how much support (money) they allocated to our work."

"Money determined all. In the case of Willy and me, Pa was the sole decider," he said. "It was he alone who controlled our funds; we could only do what we could do with whatever resources and budget we got from him. To be publicly flogged for how much Pa permitted us to do — that felt grossly unfair. Rigged."

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Following the death of his legendary "Granny," Queen Elizabeth, Harry speculated that the competition of tallying various royals' activities and obligations stemmed from "overarching stress about the monarchy itself."

"The family was feeling the tremors of global change, hearing the cries of critics who said the monarchy was outdated, costly," he wrote. "The family tolerated, even leaned into, the nonsense of the Court Circular for the same reason it accepted the ravages and depredations of the press—fear. Fear of the public. Fear of the future. Fear of the day the nation would say: Okay, shut it down."

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King Charles and Prince Harry walk behind the coffin of Queen Elizabeth during her funeral procession on Sept. 14, 2022

Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, stepped back from their roles as senior working royals in 2020. The younger son of the reigning monarch has not attended a royal family Christmas since 2018.

After welcoming their first child, Prince Archie, in May 2019, Harry and Meghan spent that year's holidays privately in Canada. The following year, they officially moved from the U.K. to their new home in Montecito, California, where they welcomed Princess Lilibet in June 2021.

Despite Harry's reunion with his father in September — which prompted speculation about whether he might spend Christmas with the royal family — Hello! reported last week that he and Meghan planned to remain in Montecito for the holidays. The rest of his royal family will continue their long-standing tradition of spending Christmas at Sandringham, the royal estate in Norfolk.

The Duke of Sussex has said his ongoing security concerns in the U.K. make him reluctant to bring Meghan and their children overseas without official protection. That could change in the new year, however, as The Sun reported on Dec. 8 that the U.K. government is undertaking a full-scale review of the prince's security.

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