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’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.
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)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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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)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.
But the family will need to feel they can trust the Sussexes not to disclose their secrets.
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