Pictures resurface of Harry, Kate and William as painful reminder of what was

Photos of the Harry and Kate attending the Olympic Games have started circulating and are a painful reminder of what once was — and will unlikely ever be again.

Friday 27th July, 2012 would have to qualify as one of the best days in the history of the royal family that didn’t involve a bloody French battlefield or a horse belting past the winner’s post.

The UK was awash in patriotic fervour, nylon Union Jacks and five per cent ale as London got set to host the Olympic Games.

That night, as 900 million people watched on, the late Queen pulled off one of the greatest ‘ta-da’ moments of all time when her skit with Daniel Craig’s James Bond debuted, before ‘the Queen’ parachuted into the stadium.

If we can all agree that Her late Majesty won the Games, then hot on her heels and coming a very close second were the seemingly inseparable triumvirate that was Prince William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales and Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex who flew the flag for Britain with astounding glee.

This week photos from that moment in time have burbled up through the usual muck and dreck of X, formerly Twitter, and my, they make for some haunting viewing.

On the surface, look at those three: how jolly, how happy, and how comfortable in each other’s company.

Chatting, laughing, giggling, whispering. Except we now know that that Enid Blyton chumminess hid a far-from-storybook reality. The Famous Three, it turns out, was an optical illusion.

Harry whispers to Kate at the Closing Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. Picture: Charlie Riedel/AFP

The trio were constantly laughing together at the London Olympics.

It was the best of times. Picture: Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

With the Olympics set to roll around again next week — bonjour Paree and the first games powered on the back of the baguette — those old Kate and Harry photos make for a melancholy jaunt down memory lane.

They perfectly capture how much has been lost and how much the reality differed from superficial appearances. They’re a reminder of how in-the-dark the world was about what was really going on with Harry.

But back then in 2012, when blissful ignorance reigned, the royal stocks looked like a buy, buy, buy! The future seemed blindingly bright with the younger generation of Crown Inc coming across as a very clean-behind-the-ears, united, one-for-all pep squad.

When, five years later, Harry added fiancé Meghan Markle (now, of course, the Duchess of Sussex) to their pally group, we were officially in a Buckingham Palace bull market. The better quarters of Fleet Street and the public positively mooned over the new couple and the prevailing consensus was simple- these glam, cool kids full of verve and belief in the monarchical mission might save the dog and pony show yet.

Together, William, Kate, Harry and Meghan, were a dynamite proposition.

All smiles for Harry, Kate and Will at Trooping the Colour in 2014. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

No one knew it then but that was to be the high water mark.

Within two years, that ‘dynamite’ would go kaboom and the royal family would never quite be the same again.

However, in 2012, to all appearances Harry and Kate seemed to have a delightfully matey thing going on. It used to be that a reliable cheerer upper was Googling photos of the duo having a giggle together — at the Olympics, on the Buckingham Palace balcony, at a palace tea party, at a lunch to celebrate the late Queen’s 90th birthday, at a BAFTA event, church services, a wedding, at Trooping the Colour, at Trooping the Colour again, another Trooping, during a trip to Belgium, at the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

Harry and Kate’s lives were intertwined professionally too. They shared an office at Kensington Palace and theirs was the unwieldily named Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry. With a certain clockwork predictability the three would be posted off to engagements like a bargain pack of HRHs, a sort of ‘buy two, get one free’ arrangement.

Appearances though are shifty, truck things.

Harry’s time as a “third wheel”, as he put it to ITV’s Tom Bradby last year, “was fun at times but also, I guess slightly awkward at times as well.”

As another Londoner, Oscar Wilde, put it, “the truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

In Spare, Harry does not just offer up something of a biting portrayal of his father and brother but an unfavourable one of Kate too, detailing the distance that existed in their private lives.

He writes that after his brother and sister-in-law had wed in 2011, “they became a Household, and as such were entitled to more staff, more cars, bigger home, grander office, extra resources, engraved letterheads. I didn’t care about such perks, but I did care about respect. As a confirmed bachelor I was an outsider, a nonperson within my own family.”

When in 2013, the year after these Olympics shots were taken, William and Kate were undertaking extensive renovations of their Kensington Palace apartment, and with Harry living “just across the way”, he writes that he had imagined popping around “holding a bottle of wine and an armful of kiddie presents.”

The trio as they host a tea party in the grounds of Buckingham Palace on May 13, 2017. Picture: Andrew Parsons/WPA Pool/Getty Images

Instead, “it didn’t work out that way…I assumed they’d have me over any minute now. Any day. But day after day it didn’t happen.”

For all those public giggles between Harry and Kate, those imagined cosy suppers, all Shepherds’ pies and easy, warm family life, they never materialised. It was a magic faraway tree of a domestic idyll.

Added to which, all the while, Harry was suffering deeply. We now know that his cheeky persona hid incredibly deep psychic pain and trauma from his mother’s death.

So, I can’t be the only one who, looking at those 2012 shots, keeps hearing the words ‘if only’ rattling through my head on a loop. If only William and Kate had somehow realised what Harry was going through; if only he had made it plain; if only feelings and resentments hadn’t been left to ferment and to churn.

When the late Queen entered the Olympic arena on that July 27 to awestruck applause and a UK enjoying a giddy high and a prolonged beer buzz, the future of the monarchy looked safe as (palatial) houses.

Instead, those Harry and Kate 2012 photos are portentous - of how soon things would fracture and fall apart and how falteringly and shaky, a decade on in 2022, Crown Inc would be looking.

What these resurfaced photos of Harry and Kate represent are not just the ghosts of royal history past but the ghosts of what might have been too.

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.