Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton feud deepens over Christmas Day

There is one thing that King Charles “would love” for Christmas but won’t be getting as the Wales-Sussex feud ramps up.

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Christmas carols are strangely applicable to royalty. We Three Kings? Check, check and check, if you count future ones. Silent Night? A perfect description for Buckingham Palace’s stay-stum-at-all-costs communication policy. And Little Drummer Boy? They have the whole Household Cavalry Band they can make stand under the Palace windows, playing.

(Ding Dong Merrily On High? Sadly not since the days when Princess Margaret took full command of the HMS drinks trolley.)

This year, if there is one song that is particularly pertinent it’s Come All Ye Faithful, the perfect description of those who will be gathering at Sandringham to gobble down goose, pull crackers and try and put a real dent in the estate’s enviable cellars. On the guest list, a number of new names: Queen Camilla’s children Tom Parker Bowles and Laura Lopes and their families, along with her sister Annabel Elliot.

Now it has been revealed that while King Charles “would love” to have both of his sons, their wives and all five of his grandchildren under one roof this December 25, that won’t be happening for about a hundred reasons, including one particularly blow-dried one.

The 101st reason? Here’s looking at you William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales.

According to a new report from Katie Nicholl in Vanity Fair, the Waleses don’t “want to be in the same room” as Harry and Meghan “let alone spend Christmas with them.”

The king “would love” to have both of his sons, their wives and all five of his grandchildren under one roof this December 25. Picture: Samir Hussein/WireImage

So … no tidings of comfort and joy then, I take it. No good will to all men (or in-laws).

This will be the fifth Christmas that Harry will celebrate far, far away from his own family, in a land where all the toddies are booze-free and all the ’nogs are depressingly vegan – an ocean, a continent and a cultural, psychological and emotional world away from Sandringham.

And despite the King’s firmest of wishes to have his whole family assemble en masse in Norfolk next week, there is no chance His Majesty will be seeing both of his Wales and Sussex grandchildren ending lost while playing hide and seek in his new 5000-tree topiary garden, only to be retrieved by a clutch of determined footmen.

No siree. Because, reportedly, William and Kate won’t have a bar of it.

A royal insider has told the very well-sourced Nicholls: “The king would love nothing more than to have Christmas with his sons and all his grandchildren, but it’s not that simple and there is no chance the Sussexes will be coming.

“It would make things very difficult because there is still so much hostility towards Harry and Meghan, particularly from the Prince and Princess of Wales,” writes Nicholl.

“Spare has driven much more of a wedge between Harry and his nearest and dearest – more so than anyone could have imagined,” the Telegraph’s Camilla Tominey has revealed.

Or, as an old friend of the prince’s succinctly told the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes about William’s relationship with Harry now: “He absolutely f**king hates him.”

“Harry sold his family out to the media for millions of dollars, and William can’t forgive that breach of trust,” the friend told the Beast.

However, Charles has adopted an altogether different position, as a friend of the King explained to Sykes: “Charles has kept the door open to Harry. He has been very explicit about that, saying he loves him. That’s what parents do. William doesn’t have the same forgiving attitude.”

“Charles has kept the door open to Harry. He has been very explicit about that, saying he loves him.” Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

As a second friend told Sykes of the brothers’ relationship: “If things stay as they are, which is basically mutual loathing, you would have to say William would be unlikely to invite Harry to his coronation.”

Really, at this point the far bigger shocker would be if the Waleses had decided to let bygones be bygones, to develop a very specific form of amnesia and had decided to overlook the fact that the Sussexes had tarred and feathered repeatedly, painting them as uncaring, frosty, jealous, thuggish (in William’s case) and thinking that Harry dressing up as a Nazi was a tremendous larrrf.

Strangely it’s proving hard for William and Kate to miraculously forget having been repeatedly thrown under the (double decker) bus by the Sussexes and over the course of years and all done across multiple forms of media including streaming, broadcast TV and print – and all in front of a global audience.

Another factor in all of this is the kids. They are, as we all know, tiny, adorable Petri dishes of persistent colds and are sponges, acutely attuned to the frequencies that adults vibrate at. Which is to say, even if all the adults played very nicely during Charles’ dream family Christmas, it’s hard to imagine them not picking up on the undercurrents.

Kate and William reportedly don’t “want to be in the same room” as Harry and Meghan. Picture: Alkis Konstantinidis - WPA Pool/Getty Images

There is another stumbling block here too: trust.

Charles might want to play big, happy families and teach his grandkids all together how to play pin the tail on the footmen but the fear that whatever the Windsors do, say, eat, sing, belch, whisper or gesticulate might end up splashed across the cover of People or repeated wide-eyed to a nodding Oprah has gone nowhere.

“Charles is also deeply nervous about the risks of conversations being leaked by the Sussex camp,” a source has told Nicholls, which is “why there have been very few of them.”

Since the King’s 75th birthday on November 14, “there has been little communication between the Sussexes and the king”.

Even assuming that this particular concern could somehow be allayed and then if somehow the Mont Blanc-sized mountain of hurts, bad blood and perceived offences could somehow be scaled by everyone involved, then we even get to the question of, would the Sussexes accept a Sandringham invite?

In November, a friend of the couple told the Times: “I can’t imagine the Sussexes would decline an invitation to spend time with His Majesty. As of yet, there have not been any invitations for the holidays.”.

However, in the 15 months since the late Queen passed away, Meghan has shown about as much interest in putting an Aquazzura-shod foot on British soil as taking up Latvian folk dancing.

This year, Harry has returned to the UK on four separate occasions (for two separate court cases, the coronation and the WellChild Awards), all perfect opportunities for Meghan to visit too. Did she? Sadly no, those being the specific days she was suffering from a particularly dangerous hangnail or urgently needed to declutter their lesser second potting shed or lie in a darkened room giving quiet thanks that she never has to open a roundabout or pretend to like Pimms again.

Such is the increase in the guest list this year, the location of this Christmas’s dinner has been moved from the dining room to the larger white drawing room. Picture: Hugo Burnand/Royal Household 2023 via Getty Images

Similarly, the couple has made no secret of the fact that they feel like they were driven out, with Harry saying via a witness statement read out in court last week that he and Meghan had “felt forced to step back from [their royal roles] and leave the country in 2020.”

Which leaves us … right back at square one. William and Kate are putting their feet down, Harry and Meghan are giving off decidedly mixed signals and no one has once told Charles how nice his new topiary is.

So, while brothers fume, royal WAGs refuse to be in the same room (at least one, anyway) and HRH cousins are denied any chance to get to know one another, let us all now pray for the staff at Sandringham.

Such is the increase in the guest list this year, the location of this Christmas’s dinner has been moved from the dining room to the larger white drawing room. My advice to the household: Get in extra ice, extra gin, extra whiskey, extra beds, and extra aspirin. The first truly blended royal Christmas is here.

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.