Memo to Prince Harry: Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Such is the obvious message from Buckingham Palace — and what’s to come under William’s reign.
Only 24 hours after making a transatlantic dash to see King Charles, just diagnosed with cancer, Harry is flying back to California.
That’s 10,000 miles and 21 hours in the air for minutes with his father.
Imagine Harry’s overwhelming emotions. The exhaustion from jet lag – flying commercial.
Tyler Perry’s private jet, it seems, was not available for loan this time.
Nor was there room at the Palace, or Clarence House, or any castle or royal cottage.
Harry was reportedly forced to put himself up at a hotel. Room service for one!
Imagine Harry’s overwhelming emotions. The exhaustion from jet lag - flying commercial. Tyler Perry’s private jet, it seems, was not available for loan this time. Nor was there room at the Palace. Harry was reportedly forced to put himself up at a hotel. (Pictured: Harry at Heathrow, heading
Imagine how lonely he must have felt: His father dashing off after their fleeting reunion — the first time Harry has spoken in person with Charles since the funeral of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in September 2022 — contentedly cocooned with Camilla.
His estranged brother, his only sibling, tending to his recovering wife and their three children, no invitation extended — presumably not a phone call or even a text message.
All of Harry’s old friends, either cut off or fallen away. No one to see, to commiserate with, to meet at the pub for a pint and a cry.
Of course, Harry had no other option but to turn around and go home.
It seems our desolate duke is learning the hardest of lessons, one most of us learn as toddlers: Actions have consequences.
Having sold out his family’s secrets, having slandered them for years through Oprah Winfrey and Netflix and a self-pitying memoir, having made Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth’s final years a misery — well, it seems the royals have reached the sad conclusion, the only conclusion, that Harry cannot be trusted.
Adding to his humiliation, a source close to Prince William made it clear that under no circumstances would he be seeing or speaking to his brother.
‘No plans’ to see Harry, the source said.
And why would William risk a conversation?
The one piece of information that William and Kate want to keep private — the exact status of her health and recovery — is the very thing the Sussexes, if history is any guide, might leak.
Recall Meghan cruelly reminding the world, during the Oprah sit-down, of the ‘Waity Katie’ nickname.
Or Harry writing of Kate’s refusal to share her lip gloss with Meghan and reprinting a tense text exchange between the women over bridesmaids’ dresses. That Kate made Meghan cry!
And, most gravely, the gruesome twosome seemingly doing nothing to stop their groupie Omid Scobie’s revelation that the so-called ‘royal racists’ were Charles and Kate — as printed in a foreign edition of Scobie’s book ‘Endgame’, released late last November.
Truly: Who in the royal fold would trust these two?
Adding to his humiliation, a source close to Prince William made it clear that under no circumstances would he be seeing or speaking to his brother. And why would William risk a conversation? The one piece of information that William and Kate want to keep private
Adding to his humiliation, a source close to Prince William made it clear that under no circumstances would he be seeing or speaking to his brother. And why would William risk a conversation? The one piece of information that William and Kate want to keep private - the exact status of her health - is the very thing the Sussexes, if history is any guide, might leak.
Especially with their Netflix deal on the bubble! And Harry owes his publisher at least one more book. Meghan is rumored to be planning her own memoir.
If there was ever a time for Harry to show discretion, this was it.
Immediately upon landing at Heathrow on Tuesday, he rushed to Clarence House, arriving at 2.45 pm.
He met with his father for only 45 minutes.
Harry’s motorcade then departed at 3:32 pm, with Charles and Camilla departing for Sandringham at 3:38 pm — just six minutes later.
Brutal. Not even a delay for the sake of optics.
Perhaps Charles was tired from his treatments. But the bags were clearly packed. The schedule was to remain intact.
This visit, it seems, was going to be tolerated rather than welcomed.
Indeed, sources told Charles's biographer Robert Jobson that while the King was perhaps moved by his 'darling boy' flying over, Harry actually caused 'some disquiet by "taking it upon himself" to fly over unbidden'.
Charles may in fact wish for a reconciliation. Getting diagnosed with cancer, no matter how early it’s caught or how treatable it is, tends to realign one’s priorities and perspectives.
To that point, it seems we can be reassured that Charles’s prognosis is, as reported, excellent.
Otherwise, we’d likely see more urgency here, not just between Charles and Harry, but between Harry and William, too.
And for a brief moment on Monday, it did seem as if the door had been opened ever so slightly — that a repentant Harry, shaken by this sad news, would have a newfound clarity.
That perhaps William, despite the myriad insults to Kate — despite implying in ‘Spare’ that the future king had married not for love but for duty — would want some kind of relationship with his brother.
It seems, on that fraternal front at least, that all is lost.
William has made it clear that there is no hope of reconciliation. Their father’s diagnosis will not move the needle.
Once William takes the throne, this will be Harry’s future: Total and complete severance from the royal family.
William must be hurting too, not just for his sick father but from the loss of his only sibling, the only other person who knows their specific, unique upbringing.
Does Harry get it now? The sheer emotional carnage he’s left behind?
Charles was magnanimous to hold a meeting with his son and allow the media to report on it.
Harry, after all, wrote of his death fantasy against Charles in ‘Spare’, of remotely piloting a fighter jet and targeting his father after a visit some years back — a visit that left Harry, as he wrote, overjoyed.
‘I loved seeing Pa, loved feeling his pride, and felt buoyed by his praise.’
Yet six lines later: ‘The Typhoon tracked Pa, did a low pass straight over him, almost shattering the windows of his Audi’, Harry wrote.
‘But ultimately spared him. On my orders’.
How could Harry possibly come back from that? From all of it?
‘It never needed to be this way’, Harry told Tom Bradby in a televised interview last year. ‘I would like to get my father back. I would like to have my brother back’.
It certainly didn’t have to be this way. But Harry has made it so.
There should be a better term for it.
www.thesun.co.uk
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