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This week, we heard the shocking news that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are moving back to the UK.
Immediately, people speculated that King Charles’ ailing health could be the reason.
However, those familiar with the ins and outs of British tax law for the wealthy have a new theory.
Was this whole excursion to the US a well-timed exploitation of a tax loophole? The calendar backs that up.
The five-year rule
According to The Royalist Substack, Harry and Meghan may be taking advantage
His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), which is a real organization and not a parody name making fun of the UK, has a rule designed to prevent wealthy Brits from skipping town for a couple of years, selling off assets, and returning untaxed.
Essentially, if you leave for just a few years and return, you still need to pay capital gains taxes as if you still had boots planted on some estate called Kingarthurshiremingham or whatever.
Harry and Meghan have now been non-residents for exactly 6 years. Which just so happens to be the required amount of time to be able to return and to have been considered actual non-residents during their absence.
If they’d tried to return a year ago, this would have been considered — by His Royal Majesty’s Royal Taxmen — to be a prolonged and controversial vacation to Montecito.
Could this be about Harry’s visa?
The Heritage Foundation is the bane of existence for millions of Americans. The malevolent think-tank has ruined lives and spends its time and money conjuring up new, sinister ways to ruin more.
Prince Harry has been one of the targets of this pernicious organization.
The group has been working long and hard to uncover any reason for which they might challenge his legal residency in the United States.
Most immigration politics is rooted in either irrational fears or white nationalism. (One could make a solid argument that white nationalism is also the product of irrational fears, but that is neither here nor there.)
In this case, one assumes that Harry is a target because he and Meghan are good people, which doesn’t tend to go over well with the Heritage Foundation or with the Trump regime.
What about Donald Trump?
Another popular theory is that Harry and Meghan are, understandably, fleeing from Donald Trump.
Most Americans cannot do so. Those who can already skipped town.
Donald Trump’s popularity is at an all-time low. It’s about at its minimum level — a level that probably wouldn’t sink if he devoured a live puppy on television.
It seems unlikely that Harry and Meghan would move here while he was still in power (remember, they fled the UK in 2020) only to leave when he might be about to lose control over congress.
We’d say that avoiding the Trump regime is a bonus to leaving the UK but is not, despite what our very own Magda Goebbels tweeted the other day, the primary impetus for their departure.
This is probably about one thing more than anything else
Yes, there’s an obscure tax loophole that most people would never have the wealth or lifestyle to care about. Yes, things in the United States have gotten dramatically worse over the past two years.
But Harry and Meghan could probably move to many places. It seems very likely that Canada, which some see as the US with better weather but tragically smaller restaurant portions, would take them.
Moving to the UK — a nest of vipers where, unlike in the US, many people actively hate Meghan Markle — seems like a deliberate choice.
Prince Harry probably wants to live close to his father before Charles’ well-documented cancer battle hastens his end.
If he gets some sort of arcane tax cut along the way, great. But it’s clearly not what this is about.