Prince Harry must prove three things to King Charles to heal royal rift

Prince Harry's impending visit to the UK next week is filled with anticipation as rumours the Duke of Sussex is set to meet his father King Charles are churning.

Harry's solo trip for the WellChild Awards comes six months after he was last in his home country, which saw him lose his High Court appeal into changes into his security arrangements in the UK. During his last visit, he shared hopes to reconcile with his father, King Charles, 76.

But, previous events have been unsuccessful into repairing severed ties between the Duke of Sussex and his family as any hopes that the Queen’s death, or indeed his father’s cancer diagnosis, would bring Prince Harry and the royal family closer together, are yet to materialise.

Those dark clouds bore no silver linings and, if anything, the cavernous divide between Harry and his loved ones has only grown wider, not least after the fallout from his disastrous security court case loss and subsequent bombshell BBC interview in May this year, in which he appeared to heap blame on his father for putting his and his family’s lives at risk.

As to what his late grandmother would make of Harry’s astonishing fall from public favour, royal expert Katie Nicholl believes she’d have been truly dismayed by recent events.

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“I’m sure she would be deeply saddened and disappointed by how things have played out with the Duke of Sussex,” she says. “But I think nothing would really surprise her when it comes to Harry and Meghan because she saw so much herself. She had to live through the Oprah Winfrey interview [Harry and Meghan’s controversial 2021 televised chat with the US talk show host] and the devastating fallout from that while the Duke of Edinburgh was seriously ill in hospital.

“And, of course, she had to deal with the fallout of Harry and Meghan leaving. So I think there would just be a great sense of sadness that it had all come to this. Harry not speaking to his father or his brother, being estranged – ostracised, even – from the family, was certainly not anything she ever wanted.”

The Duke of Sussex is due to arrive in his homeland in a matter of days on a solo trip, where he will attend the annual WellChild Awards in London. It is the first time that Harry has made the journey across the Atlantic for almost six months and was last here for his High Court hearing into changes into his security arrangements in the UK.

Last month, it emerged that senior aides to the King and Duke of held a meeting in London in what was described as a step towards restoring the relationship between Harry and the Royal Family.

And this could potentially pave the way for the first meeting between father and son since February 2024, when the King first revealed his cancer diagnosis.

Royal author Phil Dampier agrees that, considering Harry’s past form, his late grandmother would not have been too surprised by the Prince’s recent dramas.

“I think she was very upset and exasperated by his antics even while she was alive,” he says. “She specifically laid it down at the Sandringham Summit [the infamous meeting at the Queen’s Norfolk residence where she, Harry, Charles and William discussed the Duke of Sussex’s future following his and Meghan’s decision to step down as working royals] that he couldn’t be ‘half in and half out’.

“If he’d said, ‘I just don’t want to be a royal, I can’t cope with it. I’ve met this girl and I want to live abroad,’ I think most people would have accepted it. But to then go and criticise the royals for the way he’d been treated… I think she was horrified and I think she would continue to be so today.

“If she was still alive, I think she’d be trying to bang a few heads together.”

Following his humiliating court of appeal defeat at the beginning of May, in which he sought to overturn changes made by the Home Office regarding his publicly-funded security arrangements, Harry once again lashed out at his family in a no-holds-barred interview.

In a crushing blow to anyone hoping for a royal reconciliation, the Prince said, “I can’t see a world in which I would bring my wife and children back to the UK at this point.”

The interview took a darker turn when he accused certain members of the Firm of “knowingly putting me and my family in harm’s way”, and suggested he believed that a “sense of threat” might force him back into the fold.

The Duke of Sussex also admitted he didn’t know how long his father “has left” and that any hopes of a truce were in the King’s hands – but claimed his father “won’t speak to me because of this security stuff”.

Katie believes the onus is on Harry in terms of prompting a reconciliation.

“The reason his father is not speaking to him is because he fears that anything he might say will be made public in some shape or form,” she says. “Let’s not forget that details of private conversations between Harry, Charles and William at an event as intimate as the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral were chronicled in Spare.

“So much has been aired publicly, which has been incredibly damaging for the monarchy, that the King is understandably wary of speaking to his son. Charles has had his fingers burned. And so the ball is in Harry’s court to prove that he can earn back his father’s – and his family’s – trust.”

Of course, it’s not just Harry and Meghan who have grown increasingly distant from the royal family. So too have their children – Archie, six, and Lilibet, four – who are now sadly cut off from their grandfather, King Charles, their aunt and uncle, The Prince and Princess of Wales, and their three young cousins, George, Charlotte and Louis.

For the late Queen, who was never happier than when surrounded by close family, this would be the bitterest pill to swallow.

“I think she would have been absolutely devastated by the fact that the King’s not seeing them [Archie and Lilibet]. They are sixth and seventh in the line of succession at the moment, so she would be very upset,” says Phil. “And I don’t think she would have liked the fact that Harry’s never met [Meghan’s father] Thomas Markle, or that the kids have never met him.”

As for Harry himself, Phil says he’ll be feeling somewhat adrift without his grandmother’s guiding hand.

“I like to think he would be missing her,” he says. “I think he should be missing his father as well, I think he should be missing his brother – he should be missing everyone.

“But he’s got himself into this situation and even if he’d won that case, I don’t think Meghan would particularly want to come back and spend much time in this country. I think she knows how unpopular she is, so I don’t think she’s going to come back, she’s not going to bring the kids. I don’t see any immediate resolution to it.

“In fact, I don’t actually think that William and Harry will ever repair their relationship. It is permanently damaged, unfortunately.”

While the cracks in the royal family may appear deeper than ever, Katie is hopeful that the Prince and his father might one day patch up their differences.

“I think there is still a chance that there can be a reconciliation,” she says. “The King is a magnanimous man and not a malicious man, and he’s also a man who wants a relationship with his youngest son, with his daughter-in-law and with the grandchildren.

“I think there is a far greater hope for a reconciliation with Charles and Harry, than with Harry and William. And I think it’s going to take time.

“It’s really down to Harry to prove that he can be trusted and that he’s prepared to listen to his father and drop this campaign, this mission he seems to be on, to trash his family and to hurt those who were once closest to him.”

Harry’s approach to family relations is a far cry from that of the late Queen, who was very much in favour of forgiveness and building bridges. Despite once reportedly branding her “that wicked woman”, she grew fond of her daughter-in-law, Queen Camilla, over the years and also forged an amicable relationship with Prince Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, whose two daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, she loved dearly.

Phil says that, unlike Harry, “The late Queen wasn’t somebody who would hold grudges – she was somebody who would always try to resolve problems.”

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