The day two rival royal courts went head-to-head... and the Palace IS irritated: REBECCA ENGLISH

It was the day two rival royal courts went head-to-head.

And make no mistake, regardless of the spin put on the day and the oh-so casual insistence by Team Sussex that their trip to Nottingham wasn't a classic Palace away-day, there was no missing the message: Harry and Meghan are 'public figures' who can, frankly, do what they like.

And what they like doing, clearly, is cosplaying at being royal.

For Harry, well, it's all he's ever known. And for Meghan, who knows? But she's a clever cookie and will have cottoned on pretty quickly that these types of events work well in terms of meeting and greeting the public in the most effective way possible.

There's a reason the 'real royals' have been doing it this way for decades.

One could only feel for the King and Queen yesterday, who were the epitome of class and classic royal duty, ignoring with enormous dignity a small but vocal band of anti-monarchist protesters as they arrived to formally open the Welsh parliament in Cardiff.

With Camilla on his arm, unmissable in vermillion (take that, Meghan, in your low-key burgundy stealth wealth!) Charles ignored shouts of 'not my king', as he stuck to the script with an official meet and greet on the red carpet – and a deeply emotional moment with a survivor of the 1966 Aberfan disaster, Gareth Jones, who was so overcome he clutched the monarch's hand.

In another highly sobering encounter, they also met Len Moss, an off-duty nurse who rushed to the Welsh mining village after a colliery waste tip collapsed on to its school and spent two days washing the hands and faces of children taken from the rubble so they could be identified by their loved ones.

Inside the Senedd, the King gave a speech in which he praised the 'spirit of public service' imbued in the building – all pre-scripted, of course, but a phrase heavy with meaning given Harry's very public spat with the institution about what public service means.

Harry's late grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, backed by the then Prince Charles and Prince William, was firmly of the opinion, as we know, that you simply can't be a 'half in, half out' royal, particularly if you also want to pursue lucrative commercial activities.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex memorably snapped back that 'service is universal' and have spent the past six years trying to push back the boundaries of the so-called Sandringham Agreement to what they wanted in the first place.

William, meanwhile, was wisely missing in action publicly, but, I understand, on a long-planned 'duchy day' (privately working on initiatives with his Duchy of Cornwall). 

What was so fascinating about yesterday's events is how little the Sussexes have strayed from their original brief as working members of the Royal Family.

Details of their string of 'official engagements' in Nottingham were revealed in an operational note sent to journalists, including royal correspondents (except the Daily Mail's, it should be noted!), the very individuals Harry once described as 'pirates with Press cards'.

Some were even invited to cover the day's events and share their reports and videos as part of an official Sussex media pool.

This is no criticism whatsoever of fellow journalists. All of us must cover big news stories and report on what we see in a fair and accurate manner. 

What's so remarkable, though, is that this is the way the Sussexes have chosen to fashion their approach to the British media, when they vowed to do the very opposite at the time of their acrimonious departure.

Once again, it seems, they cleave back to the mothership.

Even their staffing yesterday was eerily familiar.

Behind Harry in Nottingham, those with an eagle eye might have spotted the delightful Beth Herlihy, who was employed as a programme coordinator by the prince when he was a working royal (and who also previously worked for William and Catherine at their Royal Foundation).

She and another equally lovely former royal aide Clara Loughran (Harry's former programme manager, who was appointed a member of the Royal Victorian Order in the 2019 New Year's Honours List) have since founded a private advisory firm working with high-profile individuals in the philanthropic sector, whose number one client in the UK is …the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

Both, in other words, have been trained in 'the royal way'. Even the walkabout undertaken by the couple – just hours after their own team pointedly insisted they wouldn't do one because they didn't have the security to manage it, despite the exact timings of their visit being publicly released, presumably in an effort to drum up interest – was royal in all but name.

While courtiers have done their best to make clear the Sussexes have nothing to do with them and should be treated as private citizens (as Harry and Meghan themselves have so frequently requested) events like their trip to Nottingham yesterday come as close to 'official' royal duties as you could get.

The obvious question is: what can the Palace do about it?

Very little, it seems. They've made their point, Harry and Meghan have chosen to ignore it.

There's no doubt that the Royal Household is irritated and is likely to be even more so when it reads an inflammatory briefing by a friend of the couple to Hello! yesterday that the Sandringham Agreement was 'foisted' upon them – and that they never actually agreed to anything. Which many feel tells you a great deal about their current thinking.

But the Palace is absolutely determined not to be stung into reacting. Indeed, if the King's approach yesterday was anything to go by, he will simply ignore the haters – whether they be random protesters or members of his own family – and stoically get on with his public duties.

And the same goes for the rest of the real royals too.