‘All-time low’: How one phrase from Prince Harry destroyed King Charles

For years there was hope the Duke of Sussex could patch things up with the King – but then he uttered a phrase that changed everything.

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Ah, those Brits. They are nothing if not nifty at long, protracted and bloody fights.

A few favourites: The Hundred Years’ War, which was really 116 years long, the 335-year war between Cornwall’s tiddly Isles of Scilly and the Netherlands (they forgot to sign a peace treaty) and the Seven Years’ War.

That one involved France, Austria, Saxony, Sweden, Russia, Prussia, Hanover and the UK, which is to say a bunch of royal houses so intermarried they probably took breaks to send one another their usual Christmas circulars and to check in on their grandmama.

Which is why I often wonder, how long will the Great Sussex Strop last?

We are a comparatively short three and a half years into the froideur that has seen a British duke and his wife flounce off to the US to share their feelings like leaky emotional taps, and yet sadly, there is no end in sight.

It has been more than three years since Prince Harry and Meghan Markle fled to the US. Picture: Timothy A. Clary/AFP

In fact, without any of us knowing it, things took a turn for the worse earlier this year thanks to just two words from Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and the person behind (I’m guessing) @PartiallyEmployedOfMontecito.

The month was January, a date that shall long live in royal infamy, when Harry’s magnum opus of resentment and childhood anguish was finally released.

While the world was reading about how the Duke of High Dudgeon lost his virginity behind a pub and about the injustice of being forced to buy his own sofa, it turns out a few words managed to leave the King “devastated”.

The Telegraph’s Camilla Tominey, who broke the news a million years ago that Harry was dating some stunner of a Suits actor few outside of fans of the show had heard of, has been back this week to paint a far-from-pretty picture about how things stand between His Majesty and the Sussexes.

In short: A whole lot of hurt and a whole lot of hopelessness, just like anyone stuck in that ridiculous Taylor queue yesterday.

Tominey writes: “While one former aide makes the point that ‘like any father, he loves his son very much’, it is no secret that, behind palace gates, the King was ‘devastated’ by Harry describing [Queen Camilla as] his ‘wicked stepmother’ [and] as ‘dangerous’ and a ‘villain’ who left ‘bodies in the street’.”

And here’s where you have to keep one very important thing in mind about the King. He might be one of modern history’s most famous cheaters, but he only ever, ever strayed with one woman; a woman he has spent decades moving heaven and earth for such that she can assume her place by his side.

King Charles was reportedly ‘dismayed’ by Harry’s digs about Camilla. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

For more than 30 years, Charles has been wholly devoted to Camilla, a woman who knows her way around a pair of wellies, an Aga and a decent bottle of shiraz, with his fidelity to his horsey paramour having extended to going against his mother, his family and his homeland at various points in time.

There is, if you think about it, a certain romance to it all. It might not seem it, but theirs is quite the love story.

Which is why, when His Majesty read those two blasted words – “wicked stepmother” – his son would seem to have crossed the Rubicon; that he crossed a line in the sand that dealt a disastrous blow to any chance of reconciliation and a regal hug coming Harry’s way any time soon.

This chimes with what one of Her Majesty’s longstanding chums told the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes recently, saying of Harry’s Camilla comments in Spare: “I think Harry knew exactly what he was doing, and the result is predictable. Charles loves Camilla. He made her queen. He doesn’t react very well to criticism of her”.

“There might have been a chance of reconciliation had it not been for the book,” a friend of the king and queen told Sykes.

“But Charles was dismayed and deeply hurt by what Harry said about him and about Camilla in his book.”

To anyone out there optimistically clutching onto hope that with this new Carolean age well under way and the duke’s various media projects concluded for now, we might see father and son reunited – look away now.

“Royal relations remain at an all-time low,” Tominey writes, and “while the Sussexes may be impatient for an apology, their royal relatives appear in no hurry whatsoever to bury the hatchet.”

Charles has been devoted to Camilla for decades. Picture: John Stillwell/Pool/AFP

Interestingly, a royal source has said that “the Netflix documentary was viewed as largely anodyne and nothing much to worry about”, however, when Spare hit shelves, it “took everything right back to square one”. (No one tell the streaming giant that the big splashy ‘doco’ they spent tens of millions of dollars on was viewed with the same nonchalance by Their Majesties as when they find out they have inherited another Scottish estate. Bof, as the French would say, which translates to a combination of a Gallic shoulder shrug and ‘whatever’).

Even if Charles was in a mind to overlook the grievous slight that Harry had done to his darling wife’s reputation by casting her as Snow White’s evil queen sans apple, there is another key factor preventing His Majesty or anyone with an HRH picking up the phone with the Sussexes.

It could all end up as fodder for a future bestseller.

“There’s not a lot of trust left to allow the family to maintain a good and open relationship,” the insider told the Telegraph.

“How do you speak openly without it ending up in volume two?”

With the Sussexes nearly reduced to having to host their next royal broadside on Instagram Live, their stockpile of tales of palace woe surely exhausted, then the threat they pose to the stability of the monarchy now seems to be somewhat defanged.

Buckingham Palace, by the sound of it, is essentially moving on.

Harry's comments dashed hopes of a reconciliation.

“In the run-up to the Queen’s death and the Coronation, there had to be an institutional response,” one insider told Tominey.

“But with no major royal events on the horizon, the Sussexes are no longer the subject of strategy meetings.”

“It’s like a form of grief,” a source told the Telegraph. “There’s anger at what happened, but sadness at what could have been.”

However, there is still one tiny glimmer of hope that maybe one day things might improve, hugs might be shared and American grandchildren bounced on a regal knee.

Inside Charles and Camilla’s private quarters, even now, there are reportedly still photos of the entire Sussex family in prime position.

Maybe, just maybe, to nick a line from Alexander Pope, Charles still “hopes humbly then”.

I told you, the King is a man with a very large heart.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.