The word yesterday from faraway Montecito, the super-rich enclave of California where Prince Harry lives in cosseted luxury, was that the Duke of Sussex was purring with satisfaction.
Attempts to prise open the secrets of his US visa application had apparently failed. The heavily redacted court documents that did emerge suggested that his immigration status should remain confidential because of fears he could be subjected to harassment.
No wonder a beaming Harry was spotted in the sunshine with reports suggesting a metaphorical weight had been lifted from the King’s 40-year-old son, who had faced accusations of concealing his past illegal drug use.
On the face of it the argument of privacy over disclosure seems to have won. For those who love a conspiracy there was precious little in the material that was published to indicate any subterfuge. But then, the six documents that were released contained page after page of blocked out type. Even the scant details that remained, such as at one point a fleeting mention of the rock star Sting, were infuriatingly vague.
An unredacted extract which referred to ‘whether Prince Harry or Sting or anyone else you can think of who is prominent has a particular visa status’ made no sense because of what had been expunged.
I would, however, caution Harry from putting out the bunting yet.
If it is found that Harry has lied about his drug use and thus broken the law, he could face prosecution or – and this is the nightmare scenario – deportation
If we have learned anything over the last two years since The Heritage Foundation, a leading American think tank, raised Freedom of Information laws to ask how the Duke of Sussex was permitted to enter the United States after openly admitting using a variety of substances in the past (including cocaine, marijuana and magic mushrooms), it is the tenacity it has shown in getting to the truth.
And while we may not have learned very much from the files about whether Harry did – or did not – receive special favours when he emigrated to the US, the fact that campaigners secured access to any documents at all indicates that due process is taking place.
For the Prince, that represents a ticking timebomb. The simple fact is that The Heritage Foundation is not going away. It is a well-respected organisation with its own legal teams and, crucially, possessing contacts embedded in the Donald Trump White House.
It also believes that it will, ultimately, prevail.
What that means for Harry is, at best, considerable uncertainty. If it is found he has lied about his drug use and thus broken the law, he could face prosecution or – and this is the nightmare scenario – deportation.
This would not just be a personal disaster for Harry, who has not ruled out applying one day for US citizenship, but also a crisis for the Royal Family. Under US law, anyone applying for a visa to live and work in America has to tick a box to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question: ‘Are you or have you ever been a drug abuser or addict?’
This unsavoury episode only arose because of the Prince’s candid admissions in Spare, his controversial memoir. He said he had first tried cocaine at 17.
It is these words that could prove central to whether he is allowed to remain in the US or is obliged to leave. ‘At someone’s country house, during a shooting weekend, I was offered a line [of the drug] and I’d done a few more since,’ he wrote.
‘It wasn’t much fun and it didn’t make me particularly happy, as it seemed to make everyone around me, but it did make me feel different, and that was the main goal. Feel. Different. I was a deeply unhappy 17-year-old boy willing to try anything that would alter the status quo.’
Marijuana, he wrote, was better. ‘That actually really did help me.’ He described smoking it at Eton in a tiny bathroom and giggling at the wicked excitement of it all.
In another passage he related how he had a ‘delightful trip’ on psychedelic mushrooms at a party at the Los Angeles home of Friends star Courteney Cox.
After helping himself from a ‘huge box of black diamond mushroom chocolates’ he went to the bathroom and hallucinated that a pedal bin was a head. ‘I stepped on the pedal and the head opened its mouth,’ he wrote. ‘A huge open grin. I laughed.’
To The Heritage Foundation it is not just his brazen admission of drug use that is key but the language he chose, which put a positive spin on this activity.
Harry, they argue, is a high-profile public figure who makes interventions of a political nature. For someone in his position to boast about his consumption of drugs in a bestselling book and the pleasure he derived from it represents an abuse of that position.
It is this which underpins the foundation’s case – its argument is that it is in the public interest to know how Harry answered the drug question on his visa application. It is entirely possible that he ticked the ‘yes’ box, in which case he would have needed a waiver to be granted a visa to be admitted into the States.
If that is the case, campaigners want to know who granted that waiver and why. Their demand to know if Harry was treated differently seems not just reasonable but eminently sensible. The Heritage Foundation’s lawyers also argue that the Duke’s answers raise important questions about the US government’s integrity.
President Trump swept to power on the back of promises to tighten border control and, when it comes to immigration, the application of the rule of law. It is why the advocates demanding the authorities come clean about Harry’s case are convinced that they will win.
While the legal battle to open up the relevant files continues, Washington insiders are optimistic that Mr Trump will eventually step in and simply release them under executive decree.
But would he make such an incendiary move having previously declared that he would not kick Harry out because, as he waspishly put it, ‘he’s got enough problems with his wife’?
One reason why he might consider doing so is because of his anger at the Biden administration, which last year released his late mother-in-law’s immigration records. That decision was said to have outraged his wife Melania, whose mother died in January last year.
At the same time, it can hardly have escaped the President’s attention that Archewell, Harry and Meghan’s charitable foundation, donated almost £200,000 to ex-President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, to fund her women’s wellness centre.
Any one of these might be enough to trigger a provocative Donald Trump to act, if not out of spite, then out of revenge.
As The Heritage Foundation’s Nile Gardiner said of the files released by the US Department of Homeland Security on the orders of a federal judge this week: ‘There is zero accountability and transparency in the heavily redacted documents, so much so that they offer no answers at all.’
Even so, the unsealing of the documents may come to represent the beginning, not the end, of Harry’s nightmare.
