Queen and Prince Harry set for Remembrance Day showdown

The Queen and Prince Harry are set for a headline-grabbing showdown with a very public collision of important events.

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The Queen is a funny woman. No really. Stop scoffing. I’m serious. Take the that time she took the mickey out of some American tourists near her 50,000-acre Scottish bolthole, Balmoral.

When Her Majesty, dressed in a coat and headscarf, encountered the group, they reportedly eagerly asked her, “Have you ever met the Queen?”

“No,” she responded but, pointing to her protection officer Richard Griffin, she declared “he has.”

Boom-tish.

Perhaps one of the most notable examples of that keen sense of humour came back in 2016 when she agreed to make a cheeky video with grandson Prince Harry to promote his Invictus Games.

In the 40-second clip, the duo sit perusing an Invictus brochure when his phone rings – a call from then US First Lady, Michelle Obama and husband Barack indulging in some trans-Atlantic ribbing.

The video cuts back to the Queen, pink cheeked and clearly having a ball, offering up a droll, “Oh really.”

Her affection and joy in that moment and in her grandson’s achievement are absolutely apparent and watching the video now is a delight.

The closeness between the pair is full display, something that these days feels like a relic of the past.

In hindsight, who else but Harry could have gotten Her Majesty to take part in such an irreverent public outing?

Harry made a cheeky Invictus Games video with the Queen in 2016.

But we are a long – VERY long – way from that moment and in the coming week, the pair’s relationship is set to face perhaps its biggest test to date.

Sunday November 14th is Remembrance Sunday, an immutable event in the Queen’s diary every year. Having lived through World War Two, the monarch has never missed the wreath-laying ceremony at London’s Cenotaph that takes place to mark Armistice Day, aside from on a few occasions she was out of the country on official tours or during her later two pregnancies in the 1960s.

This year the sombre tribute to those who laid down their lives for Britain will also serve as her return to work after what has been the biggest health crisis of her reign.

Since October 20th, when Buckingham Palace first announced that she was cancelling a planned tour of Northern Ireland, mystery, and growing concern, has surrounded the question of Her Majesty’s wellbeing.

Her secret hospitalisation, which turned into something of a farce when it was exposed by The Sun, followed by the more recent decision to wipe two weeks worth of events from her diary, all coming hot on the heels of her using a walking stick and the news that her evening martini had gone the way of the dodo all only added fuel to the furrowed brow fire.

We still, more than two weeks on, have no idea what might be wrong with the Queen or what exactly doctors were testing her for during her hospital stay and the episode has all served as an acute reminder of the finiteness of the time she has left in the top job.

All of which will mean that her appearance on one of the balconies of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (where she now watches proceedings on Remembrance Day) will be all the more freighted this year; what was always a significant day in the royal calendar will now be even more so.

However, the remaining working HRHs back in London won’t be the only members of the royal family taking part in headline-grabbing events that week – no siree.

In fact, on November 10th, Harry will be appearing in New York at the Salute to Freedom Gala for the Intrepid Museum’s inaugural awards where he will present “Intrepid Valor Awards” to veterans and military families “living with the invisible wounds of war.”

While the now-California based prince’s appearance at the Gala awards night has been in his diary since long before Her Majesty’s recent health woes, the stage is now set for a very near, and very awkward, collision of public engagements.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Harry are headed for a collision of big public engagements. Picture: Steve Parsons – WPA Pool/Getty Images

To understand why this is such a big deal, you have to cast your mind back to last year’s Remembrance Day, which was anything but the sombre, by-the-book outing it normally is.

It emerged that the Duke of Sussex had requested that a wreath be laid on his behalf back in London at Cenotaph, a request that was promptly denied. (That decision, palace aides later told the Times, reflected Her Majesty’s view that “either you work for the royal family or you don’t. You don’t make the royal family work for you.”)

Meanwhile, Harry and Meghan staged their own quasi-official ceremony, visiting the Los Angeles National Cemetery to pay their respects with a photographer in tow.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle staged their own photo opp at Los Angeles National Cemetery on Remembrance Sunday last year. Picture: Lee Morgan/Handout via Getty Images

Feathers appeared to be ruffled all around.

Which brings us to this year’s Remembrance Day events which will, again, see the breakaway state of Sussex participate in their own high profile appearance.

To be clear: Harry’s support for veterans and the armed services was always going to be a sacrosanct part of his life, whether he had ended up living in rural Paraguay chasing Garboesque solitude or had modelled his new life in the Kardashian/Jenner publicity heat-seeking missile mould.

However, with last year’s defiant war graves move having seemingly failed to impress the powers that be back in London, his decision to take part in another prominent outing around this event does have a certain provocative edge to it.

If there is one word that comes to mind here it’s ‘uncowed.’

Harry’s refusal to relinquish any stake in the annual commemoration can be read in part as something of a laying down of the gauntlet given that events around Remembrance Day are always a red letter engagement for the royal family.

Still, surely this is a state of affairs that neither side would be pleased about.

While taking part in the awards might reinforce Harry’s lifelong commitment to the armed services and veterans, the optics here for the Sussexes are less than ideal. Photos of Harry at the Intrepid Gala, thousands of kilometres away from London where his (possibly) ailing grandmother is refusing to let the side down, will only reinforce the distance, both literal and figurative, between the couple and the rest of the royal family.

For Buckingham Palace, Harry’s New York awards foray will be a painful reminder of how they let things go so spectacularly, historically sour with a prince who served two terms on the front line and whose avowed dedication to men and women in uniform has rightly earned him universal applause.

It is hard to imagine this situation, two opposing sides taking part in nearly competing outings around the same cause, will change any time in the future and the Sussexes as royal-thorn-in-the-PR-side looks set to be a recurring feature of the royal landscape for years to come, cannibalising one another’s carefully calibrated publicity forever more.

“I am” is the motto for the Invictus Games, which are set to be held in The Hague next year.

If only both grandson and grandmother could utter those two words, with a ‘sorry’ tacked on to one another.

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

Originally published as Queen and Prince Harry set for Remembrance Day showdown