There was a bump in the road as soon as they started, but there are tentative signs that the King and Prince Harry are on the path to peace.
The world’s most high-profile family rift has often overshadowed the reign of Charles III, but insiders have expressed optimism that father and son can bury the hatchet after their aides met last week.
It is still early days yet, but the meeting in the Royal Over-Seas League, a London club created in 1910 to foster international unity, has at least got their two offices talking again after a long period of silence stemming from Harry and Meghan’s decision to quit Britain five years ago.
“It’s something to build on, a good first step,” a well-placed source told The i Paper after details of the supposedly secret meeting leaked earlier this week. On Harry’s side, there is hope that it is a building block towards his reconciliation with the monarch, who is continuing treatment for cancer and has not shared his prognosis with his younger son.
At Buckingham Palace, officials are not giving much away, but both sides have expressed frustration that the meeting was revealed by the Mail on Sunday, with pictures of the aides chatting on a balcony.
A first step to reconciliation is building trust, and the immediate exposure of their talks led to mutual suspicions about who was behind the leak.
The Queen’s funeral marked one of the few meetings between Harry and Charles since the Duke of Sussex left Britain in 2020 (Photo: Loic Venance/AFP/Getty)
Who gained from it coming out in public? Cynics have suggested that Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, need to reassert their link to the Royal Family to boost interest in their commercial brand. But Harry has long complained about palace aides briefing against him, and those close to him profess to be mortified by the leak.
The two sides have both reassured each other that they did not intend for last Wednesday’s meeting to be made public. The talks saw the Royal Household’s communications director, Tobyn Andreae, chat informally to Harry and Meghan’s new chief communications officer, Meredith Maines, who had flown over on a 48-hour trip to London, and Liam Maguire, their new PR representative in the UK and Europe.
The idea for the visit from California was to introduce Maines to representatives of some of the Duke of Sussex’s key charities, a small number of journalists, and other “stakeholders”, ahead of Harry’s planned trip to Britain in early September for a series of engagements supporting the UK charities he still represents, including WellChild, whose awards ceremony he attends every autumn.
After five years of public feuding, Harry had already made it clear he wanted to build bridges. “I would love reconciliation with my family. There’s no point continuing to fight any more, life is precious,” he said in a BBC interview in May after losing a court case over his security arrangements. “I don’t know how long my father has left; he won’t speak to me because of this security stuff.”
In that spirit, he and Meghan appointed a new communications team to shake up their image in Britain, promising to engage with parts of the UK media the couple had shunned since leaving for a new life in first Canada and then California. They also requested a meeting with Andreae, wanting to “deconflict” so that when Harry comes over to Britain, both sides are aware of what the other is doing and can try to avoid awkward clashes.
Harry and Charles’ once close relationship has deteriorated to the point the Duke of Sussex found out about his father’s cancer diagnosis in the media (Photo: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty)
It is a long way from that to members of the family ending their differences, but it is still a huge leap of progress compared to the last year.
For a while after the Sussexes started their new life, their team talked regularly to their opposite numbers at Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, even when their bosses were not on speaking terms.
They had to speak in March 2023, for example, to coordinate an announcement that Harry and Meghan had decided to exercise their right for their children, Archie and Lilibet, to be known as Prince and Princess, as grandchildren of a monarch.
But even that stopped when the King objected to Harry suing the Government over his loss of automatic armed police protection on his trips to the UK, arguing that even being seen to be talking to his son put him in an embarrassing position.
When the 76-year-old monarch was admitted to hospital in March after suffering a reaction to his cancer treatment, Harry found out from media reports.
In the past year. Harry’s efforts to speak to Charles have become increasingly desperate, resorting to ringing aides who were waved away when they brought the phone to the monarch.
They have not seen each other since last February, when the Duke flew over to speak to his father and was given 45 minutes at Clarence House after the King had announced his cancer diagnosis. Charles has been “too busy” to see him every time he has travelled to the UK since.
The first test of whether the “peace summit” heralds anything more significant will be in early September when Harry comes to Britain for his charity engagements. Aides have no idea yet whether a meeting between the King and Harry can be arranged.
Charles will see the chance to reunite his sons William and Harry as potential prize if peace talks are successful (Photo: Max Mumby/Getty)
Beyond that, there is the question of whether the Sussexes can ever make up with William and Kate, who have taken an even harder line against Harry and Meghan than the monarch and will prove a tougher nut to crack, according to insiders.
As director of communications for the entire Royal Household, Andreae could have been seen to be representing the Waleses as well as the King, but there appears to have been no discussion about it and no expectation on Harry’s part of improved communication with Kensington Palace at this stage.
The biggest prize, for those who want a reconciliation, is for the whole family to come together again. King Charles has seen his grandson Archie, 6, only a handful of times and his granddaughter Princess Lilibet, 4, only once.
Harry has insisted it is not safe for him to bring his wife and children over to Britain unless they are given armed police protection, something that is only likely under the current arrangement if they are attending a big state event.
“I’m trying to think of a big event that they could come over for, but there isn’t really one in the near future,” Joe Little, a veteran royal watcher and managing editor at Majesty magazine, said. “Sadly, the most obvious event is a royal funeral.”
Chances of a reconciliation between the Waleses and the Sussexes still appear remote (Photo: Samir Hussein/Samir Hussein/WireImage)
One option is for the King to invite Harry and his family over for a summer stay at Balmoral, where, once they are ensconced on the 50,000-acre Highland estate, they are within the security cordon and secluded from prying eyes. But this summer may be too early for that.
The removal of automatic armed police protection for the Sussexes remains a big stumbling block. Harry has vowed to write to the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, urging her to re-examine the way his family’s security is assessed. He wants representatives from the Royal Household, particularly the King’s private secretary, Sir Clive Alderton, removed from the decision-making process and to leave it to a board of security experts. But there is no sign so far of any desire to appease him on that.
Harry, at least, has dropped his demands for an apology from his family, and there remains hope in some quarters that they can all find some sort of compromise, even William and Kate eventually. “Time is a great healer,” one of the Prince and Princesses’ friends said some time ago.
But the family will need to feel they can trust the Sussexes not to disclose their secrets.