Prince Harry is likely to miss Prince Philip’s memorial at the end of this month and the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June, but may instead make a “personal visit” to his grandmother next month when he is traveling to Europe to attend the Invictus Games, a source has told The Daily Beast.
The concept of Harry dropping in to “pay his respects” privately to Queen Elizabeth will help pave the way for a larger reconciliation between the Sussexes and the Windsors. It may also provide a convenient way for Harry to show that his beef is with the institution of royalty, not his esteemed grandma herself—and there is always the possibility that Harry could overcome his security concerns to bring baby Lilibet to meet her namesake for the first time. A photo of that meeting would be a valuable PR boost to the increasingly fractured Windsor family.
The source told The Daily Beast there was a significant level of confusion over Harry’s movements on both sides this summer, saying: “Things have changed. He was hoping to attend the Philip memorial, but that is now considered more unlikely. The jubilee is a bit harder to call right now. They have no formal role in it and are not expected to be on the (Buckingham Palace) balcony. It’s not ruled out, but the assumption now is that he won’t come because the people who would need to know have not been told he is. However, he is coming to Europe next month for Invictus [the Games take place in the Netherlands in April]. The theory is that he could easily stop in and pay his respects to his grandmother in this jubilee year then.”
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The possibility of a private visit also raises the tantalizing option of Lilibet’s first ever meeting with the woman she is named after.
Harry and Meghan are both thought to be extremely keen to bring their children to see his grandmother, the source said. Indeed, Harry recently said the reason he is fighting for police protection is so that his wife and children can safely “know” the country of his birth, and it seems safe to conclude that includes knowing his sovereign grandmother.
Meghan has been a huge supporter of Harry’s Invictus Games, a Paralympic-style event for wounded servicemen, so it is far from impossible that she would travel with Harry to Holland, with their children, stopping off at Windsor en route.
However, others suspect that Harry, having launched a legal case against the British government saying he and his family are not safe in the U.K. without police protection, cannot afford to be seen to have his actions contradict his argument. The case could drag on for many months, effectively locking Harry out of the U.K. until it is resolved.
Christopher Andersen, the royal biographer whose most recent book Brothers and Wives sensationally claimed that Prince Charles is the so-called royal racist, told The Daily Beast that: “If Harry wants to bring his family to his homeland, he will have to figure out a way to keep his wife and children safe—and after all the huge deals he and Meghan have made in the U.S. he certainly can afford it.”
It is notable that both sides are unwilling to commit definitively, even in background briefings, either way about Harry and family’s attendance at this summer’s events, suggesting there may yet be a possible deal that allows the Sussexes to attend some of the pageantry. Some, such as Andersen, still believe Harry will be there: “There is no way Harry will exclude himself or his family from the jubilee,” he says.
Prince Harry’s office declined to comment, as did Buckingham Palace.
The last time that Harry was back in the U.K. was for the unveiling of the Diana memorial statue on July 1 last year, and prior to that he was in the country for his grandfather’s funeral in April. Meghan was invited but unable to attend. She was pregnant with Lilibet and was advised not to fly by her medical team. She had previously suffered a miscarriage.
COVID regulations have, of course, also provided ample reason to avoid flying with two young children over the course of the past two years, the beginning of the pandemic exactly coinciding with Harry and Meghan’s move to Los Angeles.
While there is likely to be no medical impediment to traveling to the summer’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations, marking Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne, the royal biographer Tom Bower suggested this week in an interview with Closer magazine that Harry would not be there because he “could not face” his family while his tell-all memoir, at which they are aghast, is effectively at the printers.
Bower said he suspected that Harry would use the removal of his police protection—the subject of that ongoing legal wrangle in British courts—as his public reason.
But there is also the issue of what Meghan and Harry are likely to see as the ritual humiliation of their exclusion from the all-important balcony tableau. Sources have consistently told The Daily Beast that only those in the direct line of succession—Charles and William and their spouses—will be invited onto the Buckingham Palace balcony for the climactic moment of the celebrations, a flypast of Buck House by the Royal Air Force aerobatics team, the Red Arrows.
It seems inevitable that even if Harry and Meghan do defy expectations and make it to London for the first weekend in June, they may not find they have a spot on the balcony. This is the remorseless logic of the last big jubilee in 2012, at which Charles not only cut out all the minor royals but also excluded his brothers Andrew and Edward and their families. The balcony hosted just the queen, Charles, Camilla, William, Kate, and Harry.
Harry may still officially be sixth in the line of succession, but by the logic of 2012 there wouldn’t be room for someone on the balcony who has said they will not be playing a major part in the business of royalty.
It’s just possible that this is the deal-breaker which decides whether or not Harry and Meghan will at the last minute change their minds and come to the jubilee.
Not many people want to be invited to a party only to be put on the B-list But, by contrast, if Charles were to extend an olive branch, there could be no more meaningful one than an offer to allow Harry and Meghan onto the balcony.
It is an offer, if made genuinely, that they would find hard to refuse.
