Prince William’s savage Prince Harry move

Prince William’s birthday post for King Charles shows just how bad relations are between the warring royal brothers.

COMMENT

Snip, snip. Snip, snip. That sound you can hear, that noise that sounds like 24-carat plated scissors from the environs of one of Buckingham Palace’s lesser sitting rooms?

Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex is being cut out of the picture.

Tuesday was King Charles’ 75th birthday, a milestone that most septuagenarians spend contemplating their fragile mortality and eating a Woolworths chocolate mud cake, but this is His Majesty we are talking about. Instead, he opted for what the Palace was putting about the place as a normal working day, one which saw him nip off to Oxfordshire to launch his Coronation Food Project before later hosting a small gathering for close friends back at Clarence House.

(Here’s hoping that Queen Camilla had remembered to blow up the 99 pence pack of Tesco balloons she bought for the occasion and had finished the party bags. Gold Krugerrands are not easy to fit, you know.)

Meanwhile, William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales got to work marking the King’s day by putting out a social media post that managed to be high on big smiles and low troublesome younger siblings.

The images the Wales account shared seemed intent on driving home the closeness of William and Charles, both in a personal sense, with that chummy shot of them with their arms around one another, and in a royal sense, in the inclusion of a photo of them all done up in their military bib and tucker from this year’s Trooping the Colour.

Wishing His Majesty The King a very happy 75th birthday!🎂 pic.twitter.com/emO3gzXiRf

— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) November 14, 2023

Harry? Harry who?

Nearly four full years since the Megxit klaxon sounded, forcing the royal family to brace for the Sussexes’ bumpy US landing, William is pulling no punches when it comes to making clear how he feels about his pesky sibling.

Take the choice of the photo of Charles and William taken in Klosters in 2004 from an official photo call. Over the years, far more of these grin-and-bear-it moments have included all three men, His Majesty and both of his sons.

Clearly Kensington Palace has gone out of its way (in between cranking out the interminable stream of videos hyping the Earthshot Prize, despite it being over a whole week ago) to find a shot of just the King and his heir, sans Harry.

(Though sweetly, that 2004 holiday was Kate’s first time away with the royal family and the first time that her relationship with the prince was confirmed with the Sun running the headline, “Finally … Wills gets a girl”.)

Prince William could have chosen this shot with Harry in from Klosters in 2005 but he chose one without his brother. Picture: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Team William’s decision to excise Harry from the narrative comes after 12 months that have seen the brothers’ relationship go from crappy to Titanically bad.

In the last year Harry has revealed, via in his heart-on-his-sleeve, cheque’s-in-the-mail memoir Spare, that William had clocked him in a Kensington Palace altercation and that both the prince and Kate had encouraged him to wear that infamous Nazi uniform to a dress up party.

The inclusion of damaging and negative morsels about not only the Princess of Wales but Camilla too has reportedly only added to Charles and William’s upset with the duke. Earlier this month, a source told the Telegraph: “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.”

Today, there are more signs than in an RTA warehouse that, post-Spare, everyone left with a functioning HRH wants little to do with Montecito’s partially-employed duke.

For example, Harry “did not receive any personal well-wishes” from the King or William for his recent birthday, according to the Telegraph.

Nor have father or son seen one another in person since June last year for the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations, despite Harry having been back in the UK on at least three other occasions in the meantime.

Harry reportedly didn’t receive any personal well-wishes from William or Charles for his birthday. Picture: Oli SCARFF / AFP

When Harry was briefly on home soil in September, his request to stay at a royal property was denied, though His Majesty did offer to find him a fold-out sofa somewhere at Balmoral.

As “one well-placed insider” has told the Telegraph’s Camilla Tominey of the father and son, “they don’t speak much, if at all.”

While back in the before times, Charles would reportedly call both of his sons on a Sunday evening, now he only “converses weekly with William” and has “remarkably little contact” with Harry.

Similarly, over in the Daily Mail, royal editor Rebbeca English has reported that there is “barely any level of communication” between His Majesty and his errant progeny.

The subject of Harry, according to English’s sources, is one that still brings the King “great pain”.

She reports that there is “undeniable anger at the anguish the King believes Harry caused the late Queen in the last years of her life”.

An indicator of exactly how shoddy things stand right now, consider that the BBC was still reporting that at 8pm on the evening of His Majesty’s actual birthday that the Duke of Sussex “will be” calling his father, that is, he has not already done so.

And yet running in a parallel track is the fact that Harry’s tumultuous exit from the royal enclosure has only helped Charles and William’s relationship.

William and Charles are more united than ever. Picture: Kin Cheung – WPA Pool/Getty Images

As a source told English, the King and the Prince of Wales “are firmly united now.

“This was happening anyway as the late Queen got older, but there’s no doubt what happened with Harry brought everything into sharp relief.”

What is clear is that while the duke has slipped further and further away from his father, the diametric opposite has happened to William and Charles. How far away can we really be from them getting matching flat caps or reconquering Normandy as a bonding activity?

For further proof of the increasing closeness between the generations, photos of Camilla and Kate from the Remembrance Sunday ceremony shows the two looking decidedly pal-y, as they also were at this year’s Ascot.

Meanwhile, the erasure of the Duke of Sussex continues apace. In February it was revealed that Harry and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex were being turfed out of their UK home Frogmore Cottage before, in August, the official royal website was updated to reflect the mothballing of the Sussexes HRHs

At last weekend’s Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall, which brought the working members of the royal family out in full supportive force, Harry’s Invictus Games were celebrated. Yet, based on videos available of the evening, the duke’s name was not uttered once, though was included in the programme for the event available online.

(To be fair here, the Festival is put on by the British Legion and not the Palace.)

Still, the impression is that Harry’s name now cannot even be uttered in One’s presence.

With William and Kate’s Charles birthday post, they are making one thing abundantly clear. The duke is gone and they are doing their best to make sure he’s being forgotten too.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and royal commentator who has worked with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.