Family reconciliation or just another flying visit?
With King Charles facing, in cancer, a far more serious fight than simply who said what to whom, can brothers William and Harry bury the hatchet? Will they even try?
Prince Harry’s book, Spare, is dedicated to his wife and children “ … and, of course, my mother”. In the acknowledgments he thanks Oprah Winfrey and James Corden and his therapist. In the 400-odd pages in between, he gives his father and entire family a prolonged and very public kicking. But the book starts just after Prince Philip’s funeral, at a secret meeting with “Pa and Willy”. Harry writes of his hopes of healing the rift and his certainty that it’s what his mother would want. Can they find a way out of this full-scale public rupture, he wonders? Can they mend it before it becomes irreparable?
At that meeting, the short answer was no. His father and brother, he complained, had come ready for a fight, not a rapprochement. Since then, Harry has spoken to his father only rarely and his brother almost never. But in the wake of the King’s cancer diagnosis, and Harry’s decision to fly immediately to England, could this be a chance to heal the rift? Following the painfully awkward “reconciliation” walkabout after Queen Elizabeth died, and with Charles facing a far more serious fight than simply who said what to whom, can William and Harry bury the hatchet? Will they even try?
On Monday the King began what the Palace describes as “regular” and “specialist” treatment for an unspecified type of cancer. He and the Queen have known of the diagnosis since last week, and the King personally called his siblings and sons to inform them. But with the news kept to the smallest possible group of people amid fears that it might leak, it seems likely that some were told sooner and others later. Shortly after the news broke publicly on Monday evening, Harry took a scheduled flight from California to Heathrow, alone, having left Meghan and the children at home.
Charles’s cancer is said to have been caught early, so who knows what words of reassurance the King felt able to give his younger son when he spoke to him? Harry wrote in Spare about how he once viewed his father’s marriage to Camilla as akin to losing a second parent, and it was “not a prospect I relished”.
Now, living isolated and estranged from almost his entire family halfway around the world, he had 12 hours at 37,000 feet to confront his father’s mortality. Did he wonder as he flew over the Arctic Circle whom he might see while he’s here or who might agree to see him? Will his brother speak to him? Will his stepmother greet him?
Camilla is said to have been hurt by the brickbats he hurled in her direction in Spare, but inclined to forgiveness. Between caring for her husband and helping to keep the royal show on the road, she has more important things to deal with than Harry and his grudges, real or imagined. She will also no doubt be cautious about who gets face time with her husband, partly so as not to tire him and partly to protect him from possible infection.
Harry landed at Heathrow on Tuesday lunchtime and was whisked away in a convoy of Range Rovers and police cars. He had a brief meeting with his father at Clarence House but there are as yet no plans for him to meet his brother. Wherever he was taken to stay afterwards, it’s unlikely there was bunting.
It’s nearly three years since he and Meghan sat down with Oprah, and exactly a year since Spare was published. He wrote unsparingly of his father’s inability to show emotion, how he didn’t even hug him when he woke him at Balmoral to say his mother was dead. He accused his father of joking about his, Harry’s, paternity, and wrote that he was flung to the tabloids for bad behaviour — Nazi fancy dress, smoking weed — to make his brother look good. He accused Charles of being “unmoved’’ when he asked him to protect Meghan, then his girlfriend, from press “harassment” and furious when he unilaterally issued a statement himself.
He wrote that William was free with his fists, and said that Camilla was dangerous, akin to a wicked stepmother, a woman happy to leave “bodies in the street” in her bid to win future recognition as Queen Consort. As for his father, he portrayed him effectively as mean and jealous.
“Pa might have dreaded the rising cost of maintaining us,” he wrote, “but what he really couldn’t stomach was someone new dominating the monarchy, grabbing the limelight, someone shiny and new coming in and overshadowing him. He’d lived through that before, and had no interest in living through it again.”
Ouch. Within hours, Charles issued his younger son with an eviction notice for Frogmore Cottage, while for William the book was supposedly the last straw. Forced publicly to deny allegations that the royal family was racist, he was now accused in print of having punched his brother. He had to bite his lip while Harry took aim in print at his wife too. Too formal with the barefoot American actress who greeted her when they first went round for dinner at Nottingham Cottage, too unfriendly, not huggy enough, a wife chosen, most woundingly, because she fitted the “mould”.
While the King undergoes treatment in London, he and the Queen are at Clarence House, the stucco mansion on The Mall that William and Harry once called home. An invitation to stay now seems unlikely. Frogmore Cottage, the former marital home, is empty, and even a crack team of flunkeys would be hard pushed to make an empty house warm and habitable in a day. An invitation to stay with William and Kate at Adelaide Cottage seems equally unlikely, even if they had a spare room, which they don’t.
The Princess of Wales is recovering from her own recent abdominal surgery, which was serious enough for her to be in hospital for a fortnight and off work for months. Raking over the past with her brother-in-law is unlikely to be high on her list of priorities, even assuming she and William trust him to keep the conversation private.
When Harry went on US TV to publicise his book, he claimed to have been writing with restraint. He wasn’t trying to “collapse” the monarchy, he said, he was trying to save them from themselves, and clearly whether they wanted to be saved was not a matter for them. The book could have been twice as long, he said, and the hardest part was deciding what to leave out. In the end, what he mostly removed were “interactions” with his father and brother. “There are some things that have happened,” he told one interviewer, “especially between me and my brother, and to some extent between me and my father, that I just don’t want the world to know, because I don’t think they would ever forgive me.”
At the secret meeting, that April day after Prince Philip’s funeral, Harry wrote that Charles begged his furiously arguing sons to resolve their differences.
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