After Prince Harry made a very high-profile public appearance last week, a source tells us that his fears for his and Meghan’s safety are growing. The Duke of Sussex, 40, attended the opening ceremony of the Invictus Games in Vancouver on 8 February, as rumblings of a High Court battle over the couple’s personal security in the UK ramped up.

“Harry is extremely worried about Meghan’s safety. He was worried from the beginning, even when they were just dating,” claimed our source. He witnessed the spotlight that his mum was under, which had an impact on him that will probably last for ever. In his eyes, he has genuine reason to be worried, and the amount of grief and abuse Meghan gets is deeply worrying to him.”

The source continued, “She hasn’t been in the UK for such a long time, so the idea of doing public appearances here is very daunting to them. It’s very unlikely that will happen any time soon.”

It’s been almost a decade since Harry first addressed his worries over Meghan’s safety, when she was then just his girlfriend. And the couple have not been together at a public event in the UK since the late Queen’s funeral in 2022.

But our source says this isn’t a surprise, given Harry’s deep-rooted anguish. In November 2016, Harry and Kensington Palace released a strongly-worded statement saying the actress had already been “subject to a wave of abuse and harassment” and called for it to stop.

It also said, “ Prince Harry is worried about Ms Markle’s safety and is deeply disappointed that he has not been able to protect her.” Our source says nine years on, Harry still feels guilty about what his wife endures.

“He feels guilt-ridden for bringing her into a world where she’s subjected to so much scrutiny and criticism over everything,” they claimed.

Harry recently also spoke about his mum, Princess Diana, who died in 1997 when Harry was just 12, saying he felt helpless and was worried about history repeating itself.

After saying he felt very grateful to be living in the States with Meghan and their kids, Prince Archie, five, and Princess Lilibet, three, Harry revealed the lasting impact of witnessing his mum’s every move being so heavily scrutinised.

“It was something that I knew that I couldn’t fix,” he said at The New York Times DealBook Summit, “and it was also a situation that I knew I couldn’t get out of, and the thing that worried me the most was, ‘What’s happened to her, is that going to happen to me? Or is that going to happen to my wife? Or is that going to happen to my kids?’”

While credible attacks on the royal family have been few and far between, there have been a number of high-profile incidents, including a kidnap attempt on Princess Anne in 1974, in which four men were shot. 20 years later, a student fired a pistol just feet away from King Charles (then Prince Charles) while he was preparing to deliver an Australia Day speech in Sydney.

Horrified onlookers at the time saw a younger Charles pushed out of the way by his royal protection officers – the same type of security at the centre of Harry’s High Court battle.

After stepping down as working royals in 2020, Harry and Meghan, 43, were stripped of their right to security while in the UK by the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures, formerly known as the Royal and VIP Executive Committee (RAVEC).

An offer from Harry to fund it himself was denied by the High Court in May 2023, but Harry’s legal team then argued that the decision to remove his security wasn’t lawful in the first place. Last summer, he won the right to appeal the ruling again.

The fight for personal security has become a major thorn in the side of the Sussexes, and not just here in the UK. Canada, where they were for the Invictus Games ceremony, was their temporary home for several weeks after they left the UK, but they packed up and moved to California after Canadian authorities said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would no longer be offering them security.

Adding weight to Harry’s fears, former royal butler Paul Burrell, who worked with the royals in the 1980s and 1990s, recently said the “threat” to the royals was very real and cited King Charles’ incident in Sydney.

“I think Harry is more worried about his wife and his kids and the risk of kidnapping plots. And the more he does in the public, as a celebrity, the more he could become a target,” Paul said.