Communications between the King and Prince Harry remain pretty poor, according to a royal insider. Photo / Getty Images
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When sources close to the King were asked some months ago whether the monarch planned to give an interview to mark his 75th birthday, the reply was rather telling. Insisting any celebrations would be “minimal” and “family-orientated”, one palace insider joked: “This is not Netflix, you know!” Another added: “His Majesty is not given to fuss over such things as it is, but he is [also] acutely conscious there have been many set-piece royal events of late and his firm thinking is that events to mark his birthday will be minimal.” The consensus behind palace gates is that there have been “enough fly-pasts and marches”. Instead, the King will mark the official start of a programme to tackle food waste, called the Coronation Food Project, this weekend.
Yet with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex still estranged from the royal family, any private festivities are likely to be a muted affair. The King hasn’t seen his younger son, Prince Harry, his daughter-in-law Meghan or his grandchildren Archie, 4, and 2-year-old Lilibet since last year’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations - and it’s fair to say a lot has happened in the subsequent 18 months.
Although post-Oprah tensions appeared to ease somewhat at the late Queen’s funeral, when the King gave permission for Harry to wear his military uniform for the vigil at his grandmother’s coffin in Westminster Hall, the airing of the couple’s incendiary Netflix documentary weeks later and the publication of Harry’s explosive autobiography, Spare, in January, put paid to any hope of reconciliation. When the Duke travelled alone to the King’s Coronation in May, he only stayed in London for 48 hours, barely having any contact with his father or brother, Prince William.
The Sussexes were unable to join their nearest and dearest at Balmoral for the first anniversary of the late Queen’s death in September, and although Harry popped into Windsor Castle to pay his respects, he had to stay in a nearby hotel because he had not given due notice of his intention to visit the royal residence in Berkshire. Then, when he turned 39 a few days later, during the Invictus Games in Düsseldorf, Germany, he did not receive any official royal acknowledgment of his birthday. The Telegraph understands that the Duke did not receive any personal well-wishes from his father or brother, either.
According to one well-placed insider: “Communications between the King and Prince Harry remain pretty poor. They don’t speak much, if at all.”
It perhaps doesn’t help that the “workaholic” King hasn’t ever been an easy man to pin down. Unlike most families, who communicate by text and WhatsApp, senior royals such as Charles III are rather more “old school”, preferring to communicate by telephone or letter. Traditionally, he would always schedule a call with both of his sons on a Sunday - but while he still converses weekly with William, there is remarkably little contact with his other “darling boy”.
One reason for the ongoing impasse is the King’s “disappointment and dismay” at how Harry has treated his “wicked” stepmother, Camilla. Accusing the Queen, 76, of engaging in “briefings, leakings, and plantings”, he described her in Spare as “dangerous” and a “villain” who left “bodies in the street”.
“I have complex feelings about gaining a step-parent who I thought had recently sacrificed me on her personal PR altar,” he wrote, citing an instance when Camilla allegedly leaked one of her early conversations with William. (The Telegraph subsequently reported that it was, in fact, Camilla’s former assistant who had leaked the conversation and that she was subsequently let go.) Referring to an incident in 2019 when William was “seething” because “Pa and Camilla’s people had planted a story or stories about him, and Kate, and the kids,” Harry added: “Give Pa and Camilla an inch, he said, they take a mile.”
According to her companion the Marchioness of Lansdowne, while the claims understandably “hurt” the Queen, “she doesn’t let it get to her. Her philosophy is always, ‘Don’t make a thing of it and it will settle down - least said, soonest mended.’” The King, on the other hand, appears to have taken the extraordinary salvo very much to heart. “If there’s one thing that winds that man up, then it’s attacks on his wife. He’s very defensive of Camilla,” said one source.
William has been similarly enraged by Harry’s depiction of his sister-in-law Kate as cold and unfeeling in Spare. “Both know that they’ve brought their wives into an institution that has required them to make huge sacrifices. Negative press coverage is one thing, but they don’t expect members of their own family to stick the boot in.”
Another sticking point is Harry’s apparent refusal to move on. While forward-looking Meghan, 42, appears intent on rebranding herself in America, her husband is still waging war on the British media - and by association, the palace, with various ongoing court cases. He is currently taking action against News Group Newspapers, the publishers of The Sun and the defunct News of the World, and Associated Newspapers, the publishers of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail Online, and Reach plc, formerly Mirror Group Newspapers, for allegedly illegally obtaining information. He has repeatedly accused the palace of conspiring with the press to brief against him, and trials due to start in the New Year are likely to heap further embarrassment on the King.
The royal family will also be wary of the imminent publication of Endgame, the second book by Omid Scobie, who wrote Finding Freedom, a 2020 hagiography of the Sussexes, which Meghan has admitted she has contributed to, via a friend. Although the couple appear to have distanced themselves from Scobie in recent months, not inconveniently, his latest literary offering promises to reveal moments the royal family should be “ashamed of”, and “take an accurate look at whether” the royals are still models of “civility and decorum”. As one palace insider pointed out: “As Omid doesn’t actually have any royal contacts beyond Team Sussex, it’s likely to be a rather one-sided affair.”
Another journalist still believed to be in contact with Harry and Meghan is the ITV News anchor Tom Bradby, who was the only British broadcaster to interview the Duke when Spare hit the bookshelves. Eyebrows were raised last week when Bradby - who conducted William and Kate’s only television engagement interview, but has subsequently fallen out of favour with the Prince - followed up a story in Byline Times claiming that the King “pushed” Harry and Meghan into commercial deals in the US by withdrawing £700,000 ($1.44 million) funding for a trial year in Canada.
In reality, as this newspaper has previously reported, the couple were having conversations with the likes of Quibi, a now-defunct rival to YouTube, from early 2019. Contrary to Harry’s claim on Oprah that they “didn’t have a plan”, the Duchess is understood to have been in talks with Netflix about her Pearl series at about the same time - months before the couple announced they were stepping down as senior royals. The ITV News package, which featured prominently on the News at Ten on October 26, despite unfolding events in the Middle East, repeated the claim that the couple had their annual allowance stopped when they refused to remove from legal papers the name of a palace aide they claimed had leaked a story about them moving to Canada to The Sun newspaper on January 7 2020.
The employee denies leaking the story and has been cleared by both a police and palace investigation of any wrongdoing. Two days later, the couple released their bombshell Megxit statement, setting out their quest for a “progressive new role” that would see them “work to become financially independent”. ITV News claimed it had “learnt of an ultimatum, issued by the royal household that may have precipitated the final rift between Charles and Harry and Meghan”, adding “it was the leaking of Harry and Meghan’s decision to leave for Canada that we understand led to a complete collapse of trust”. Yet two days after the alleged “leak”, the couple announced their royal departure on a slick new Archewell website containing well-prepared content that showed a huge amount of forward planning had gone into the move.
Harry and Meghan were still receiving £700,000 a year from the King after they released their Megxit statement. The Telegraph understands that the late Queen was reimbursing their rent for Frogmore Cottage, their former Windsor home, where £2.4m ($5m) in renovations were paid for with taxpayers’ money out of the Sovereign Grant.
Royal sources suggest that there were several reasons why they were financially cut off. Foremost was the fact that they would no longer be undertaking any official engagements after their planned departure to the US in March 2020, when they themselves had expressed a desire to become “financially independent”. As it became clear behind the scenes that they were doing commercial deals, the late Queen, and the King, reportedly became “rather fed up” that the couple “seemed to want to have their cake and eat it”.
Both were already independently wealthy, with Harry’s inheritance from his mother and the Queen Mother thought to top £10m ($20.65m), and Meghan having allegedly boasted of having “several million” in the bank, thanks to her role in the US legal drama Suits. The multimillionaires’ repeated gripes about paying for their own security - which was funded by the public purse when they were working royals - understandably raised eyebrows among the royals and their staff.
Little wonder, then, that royal relations remain so frosty. If the King were to make one birthday wish on November 14, it would undoubtedly be for a sustained period of silence from the Sussexes and their supporters.
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