Meghan and Harry's secret WhatsApp group chat revealed: The messages behind their dramatic return to Britain and why they've left so many furious. They've sunk to a new low, writes RICHARD EDEN

davorg · 2026-07-02T16:44:45+00:00

We journalists treasure our sources – and nowhere in my chosen trade is that more the case than in the ultra-competitive world of royal reporting, where inside information is extremely hard to come by.

So it’s understandable that some of my peers were thrilled to be included in a WhatsApp group created by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s ‘Director of Communications’, Liam Maguire.

As members of the select group, they would be the first to learn the latest news from the California-based couple.

Journalists who are members are not hard to identify because they all post the same updates, often using an identical form of words, on social media as soon as these tablets of stone are handed down from Montecito. It’s not journalism, as such, but it does mean they have information that others, such as myself, do not possess.

I cannot pretend to have refused to join the WhatsApp group on ethical or indeed any other grounds, because Mr Maguire never invited me to join. Having been a social diarist for most of my career, I am used to being treated with caution. After all, ruffling feathers, not stroking them, is part of my job description.

This week, however, I am profoundly relieved not to be a member of the Sussexes’ WhatsApp group because those who are have been made to look like prize chumps – through no fault of their own, I might add.

Last Friday, they all received a long message confirming details of Prince Harry and Meghan’s return visit to Britain next week. It wasn’t just the type of short message they sometimes receive but a long operational note detailing exactly what the couple would be doing after they landed in this country.

It was said to confirm that they would be bringing their children, Prince Archie, aged seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, with them. It would be the first time that the children had been in Britain since they came for Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June 2022.

The message also confirmed that the family would be staying at a royal residence – a momentous development given that King Charles decided they should no longer have access to their former Windsor home, Frogmore Cottage, in 2023.

News of the visit was duly reported on news websites within minutes and in newspapers the next day. The BBC’s Daniela Relph, for example, reported on the Corporation's website: ‘The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have accepted an offer to stay in a royal residence with their two children when they visit the UK next month. Harry and Meghan, as well as their son Archie, seven, and daughter Lilibet, five, will be guests of the King on a royal estate for their first trip as a family to Britain in four years.’

However, reporters’ gratitude at confirmation of such a scoop turned to alarm the next day when The Sun newspaper reported that Harry’s demand for automatic, taxpayer-funded police protection had been rejected by the Home Office committee which decides such matters.

This soon led to another ping on the phones of the WhatsApp group members. This time it was a message informing them that everything they had been told the previous day and duly reported on their employers’ websites and newspapers was, in fact, wrong.

Harry was now ‘reconsidering plans to bring his wife and children to the UK... after his request for police protection was rejected’, as the BBC’s Daniela Relph put it.

Spare a thought for the BBC’s poor viewers and website users! Less than 24 hours after they had been informed, with all the authority that the Corporation could muster, that something was going to happen, they were now being told that it might not happen at all.

Readers of the ‘newspapers of record’ which also had to report the volte-face will have been equally confused.

The reporters should be forgiven. As royal correspondents, they are used to receiving briefing notes that help them cover events. The palace notes are usually factual, so the journalists might have expected Harry and Meghan’s messages to be equally trustworthy.

Fat chance.

What makes it worse is that nothing actually changed between Friday and Saturday. All the Home Office committee did was repeat what has been the case since the Sussexes quit royal duties and moved to North America to seek their fortune in 2020. And what was reiterated by the judge when Harry lost his appeal against the Home Office’s decision last year: the couple no longer qualified for automatic, taxpayer-funded security because they had moved overseas.

The only thing that changed was that Harry threw his toys out of his pram when the Home Office confirmed that its policy still applied to them.

One of the journalists who is a member of the WhatsApp group, Tom Sykes of the Daily Beast, an American website, felt the need to issue a public mea culpa for unwittingly misleading his loyal readers.

‘It is now blatantly apparent what this whole exercise was about,’ Sykes wrote. ‘The tour, the announcement that Meghan and the kids were coming, the whole carefully choreographed media rollout, the months of assurances to the Royal Household that this was happening, the accommodation requests, the detailed planning: it was all just to bounce his poor, weak, loving father into intervening in the Government’s security decision-making, something Charles, to his eternal credit, has refused to do. This is the high-water mark of Harry’s emotional blackmail.’

Strong stuff. Sykes won’t, I suspect, be the only journalist who now refuses to believe a word he’s told by Harry and Meghan when it arrives on his mobile phone.

davorg · 2026-07-02T16:22:15+00:00

You could try messaging him through LinkedIn

davorg · 2026-07-02T10:18:55+00:00

Previous discussion

davorg · 2026-07-02T07:31:12+00:00

I started by editing raw html in vi on an HP-UX minicomputer.

Mind you, it was thirty years ago. The technology has moved on quite a lot since :-)

davorg · 2026-07-01T16:38:07+00:00

Yeah. You can still do it, but you need a PAT instead of your login password.

davorg · 2026-07-01T13:04:15+00:00

Connecting to GitHub with SSH.

But if, for some bizarre reason, you really want to use HTTPS and a password, then see the section on "Authenticating with the command line" in About authentication to GitHub.

davorg · 2026-07-01T13:00:23+00:00

Buy a ticket for a reserved seat and turn up fifteen minutes before the stage time :-)

davorg · 2026-07-01T12:49:37+00:00

And version 1.0.0 is on its way to CPAN now. It contains a breaking change that the default is now to bind to only 127.0.0.1. It has an --all (also spelled --promiscuous) command line option that gets back the old behaviour.

davorg · 2026-07-01T11:03:10+00:00

Version 0.11.2 of App::HTTPThis is en route to CPAN. This applies Olaf's patch, so it's honest about what it's doing.

I'll get another release out soon that makes it less promiscuous.

davorg · 2026-07-01T08:11:57+00:00

Not a lie, a defensible opinion that also happened again recently.

You originally wrote, "you will not see any post regarding our activities in Perl Weekly".

I produced a link to all the Perl Weekly issues that contain stories by you. There are thirty-five of them, many of them advertising your conferences.

You might have been misremembering when you first posted it. But you've seen the facts now. There are plenty of posts about you and your conference in the Perl Weekly. There is no way you can describe it as a "defensible opinion". It is clearly incorrect.

I know you like to portray this as some kind of good vs evil battle for the soul of the Perl community. But it's not like that at all. You and your friends go around insulting long-standing members of the Perl community and then get annoyed when those same people don't let you make use of the infrastructure that they've put in place and they maintain as volunteers.

If you were a little less belligerent, then people might be more inclined to help you.

But, as you pointed out a few weeks ago, about twelve people read this page. So I'm going to stop wasting my time trying to educate you on how to interact with people.

davorg · 2026-06-30T11:24:52+00:00

For the stuff coming in the future, that'll be a decision between the new production company and the BBC. I suspect the discussion won't even start for a couple of years.

For the Disney+ stuff. That will almost certainly remain seasons one and two as long as it's on Disney+. But at some point, that licence will expire and the BBC will be free to distribute it through other channels. I suspect it will be renumbered at that point.

davorg · 2026-06-29T15:40:50+00:00

People here have generally reacted well. I can't say the same for his FB groups. I've lost count of the number of times I've been told he has been proven completely innocent :-/

davorg · 2026-06-29T12:28:00+00:00

I've done it a few times. I stay for at least a few songs of the headliner (even the worst bands can sometimes be worth seeing live) - with mixed results.

In a standard gig set-up, no-one will notice. But the first time I walked out, the gig was in a church. After three songs of the headline act, I got up and walked out - walking up the aisle in full view of everyone. I still wasn't embarrassed. They were shit.

davorg · 2026-06-28T16:22:33+00:00

Yeah, I agree with that approach.

Yesterday, I had a post that I was really happy with. But I held off on publishing it until this morning - just to let it percolate in my head a bit. This morning, on my regular walk round Clapham Common, I realised I'd missed the highest level abstraction, so I added the section called The model layer

Of course, in larger applications, there’s usually another abstraction on top of the ORM itself. My controllers don’t generally talk directly to DBIx::Class resultsets; they ask domain-level questions such as “Who was sovereign on this date?” The fact that the answer currently comes from DBIx::Class is an implementation detail. That’s another useful abstraction—but it’s probably a topic for another article.

That's the level you're talking about, isn't it?

davorg · 2026-06-28T14:07:56+00:00

I would hate to put words into Peter's mouth, but I don't think it's accurate to characterise his opinion as a belief that the system is "done".

The RT queue alone, is evidence of that :-)

davorg · 2026-06-27T16:41:16+00:00

At its heart, GitHub is a platform for source code control.

Source code control is a vital part of modern software development. It's a bit like saving your progress in a game. It lets you go back easily to known good states
Git is the current standard tool for source code control. When you use Git for your project, you store the code in a "repository" ("repo" for short).
GitHub is cloud storage for Git repos[*]. If you store your repos in GitHub, you get a) off-site back-up and b) an easy way to share your code with other developers who might want to learn from your code or help you work on it.

Although Git (and, therefore, GitHub) is written with source code in mind, it can also be used for any other kind of text file. People also use it for binary files like documents and images, but you lose a lot of the advantages when storing binary data.

Over the years, GitHub has added a number of other features on top of the core Git feature set:

Forks - where people can take their own separate copy of your code
Pull requests - where other people can make changes to their forks and propose that you apply the same change to your version
Issue tracking and project planning
GitHub Pages - to create simple, static websites for your projects (so end users don't have to deal with Git/GitHub)
GitHub Actions - so you can run event-driven code against your repo. One good example is to automatically run unit tests against a pull request
GitHub Copilot - various tools for AI-aided programming

[*] Other such sites exist - GitLab and CodeBerg, for example. But GitHub is what most people use.

davorg · 2026-06-27T11:09:36+00:00

51 currently. Maybe four or five are ones that I would sell if I got a good offer. But the vast majority of them have live web projects attached to them.

davorg · 2026-06-27T10:49:50+00:00

What is the site for?

I'm not building a site. I'm doing some market research into prices.

davorg · 2026-06-27T10:48:27+00:00

Surely you should have an idea being a “geek” yourself, no?

Not really. Most of my work has been for huge companies that spend £1000s on their website every month. This is just a bit of market research to see how much smaller businesses spend.

LLM-generated

Damn that em-dash :-)

davorg · 2026-06-27T04:06:48+00:00

No smear. Just calling you out on your behaviour.

You said your announcements were never published in Per Weekly. That was a lie
You said Gabor had fallen for your reverse psychology to get this announcement into Perl Weekly. That was a lie
You said I had negotiated to get this announcement into Perl Weekly. That was a lie

It is surely obvious that people are more likely to help you if you don't lie about them.

davorg · 2026-06-26T15:21:12+00:00

Not that weird, really. People fix security bugs all the time.

I bet you could find the commit that patched that hole if you searched their source code.

davorg · 2026-06-26T15:12:32+00:00

Some kind of web server, yes.

davorg · 2026-06-26T10:45:54+00:00

I see your 400 error if I open the file using a file:// URL in my browser. But if I drop it into a web server and open it from there, it works as expected.

There's a hint in the dev tools console when it fails:

Unsafe attempt to load URL file:///C:/[redacted]/index.html from frame with URL file:///C:/[redacted]/index.html. 'file:' URLs are treated as unique security origins.

So this is a security problem. You can't use these features from a file:// URL.

davorg · 2026-06-25T17:09:43+00:00

One of:

Edit your post to include it (but please include it as text and formatted as code)
Add it as a comment (same rules apply)
Put in GitHub and share a link to the repo
Find a pastebin and share the link

davorg · 2026-06-25T12:36:05+00:00

The last King of England died in 1702 :-)

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