Sealed and delivered: Royal wedding invitations dispatched

LONDON (AP) — Time to check that mailbox.

Kensington Palace said Thursday that invitations for the wedding between Prince Harry and his American fiancée Meghan Markle have been dispatched.

Some 600 people have been invited to the May 19 nuptials at noon at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. All 600 have also been invited to a lunchtime reception given by Queen Elizabeth II at St George’s Hall.

Harry and Markle will also celebrate with some 200 guests at a private evening reception given by Charles at Frogmore House, a royal mansion near Windsor Castle.

The palace declined to comment on who is on the list.

The invitations, which are beveled and gilded along the edges, feature Prince Charles’ three-feather badge embossed in gold. They feature italic writing on thick white card, and are issued under the name of Charles, father of the groom.

The invitations revealed the dress code for wedding guests: Uniform, morning coat or lounge suit for men, or day dress with a hat for ladies.

The stationery was made by Barnard & Westwood, which has held the Royal Warrant for printing and bookbinding since 1985.

Windsor Castle is a smaller venue compared to London’s Westminster Abbey, where Harry’s brother Prince William and Kate Middleton married in 2011. That royal wedding packed in 1,900 guests.

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In February 2015, the Registrar General Department entered into a contractual agreement with VRC, formerly known as Sunshine Shredder, to digitize its company files as part of a long-overdue transition from paper-based records to a modern, paperless system. The initial cost of the contract was a staggering $89,000 for the first month, followed by an ongoing monthly fee of $85,000. Notably, the agreement lacked a clearly defined project timeline or end date, raising immediate concerns about fiscal oversight and accountability. Tragically, while scanning commenced, the project quickly revealed an alarming absence of quality control and verification protocols. The digitization process, meant to enhance access, accuracy, and operational efficiency, was executed with such poor foresight that the resulting digital records are effectively unusable by the Company Section. The core issue lies in the contract specifications. VRC was commissioned to scan and input data into only three (3) fields, despite the operational requirement being six (6) fields for full functionality within the Department’s systems. This fundamental oversight rendered the digitized records incomplete and incompatible with current needs. Attempts to rectify this monumental error have proven financially unviable. Discussions to incorporate the additional fields revealed that doing so would triple the cost an egregious escalation with no guarantee of improved results. To make matters worse, in 2024, when the Registrar General’s office relocated to a new building, the internal scanning unit comprising trained staff who could have potentially salvaged or improved the process was dismantled. These personnel were reassigned to other departments, effectively dissolving any in-house capacity for quality control or intervention. This sequence of decisions paints a troubling picture of systemic mismanagement, questionable contractual negotiations, and a lack of strategic vision. The public deserves transparency, and those responsible for this financial and operational fiasco must be held to account. A project intended to usher in digital transformation has instead become a cautionary tale of waste and ineptitude at the expense of taxpayers and national record integrity.

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