William and Kate See Christmas With Harry and Meghan as ‘Total Humiliation’

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It was the most brutal, and public, of rejections.

Less than 24 hours after a story had appeared in the British Sunday Times saying that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would very much like to receive an invite to join the royals for Christmas at Sandringham, the official guest list was leaked to ITV.com.

Guess what? Harry and Meghan were not invited.

A friend of King Charles’ told The Daily Beast: “Charles and his team were never going to be bounced into inviting Harry and Meghan. When an invite does come, it will be carefully thought-through and it will be on his terms.”

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Rumors circulating in the press that Harry and Meghan could be invited for New Year at Balmoral are also being scoffed at by some insiders to whom The Daily Beast has spoken. “Media invention,” was the verdict of one former courtier who has seen it all before.

It is hardly surprising that the British royal family didn’t respond “How high?” when asked to jump by Harry and Meghan.

For one thing, royal Christmas plans are made quite early in the year. Invites are coveted and are part of a complex political balancing act within the family (see: seating Prince Andrew). The idea that everything could be changed and a few extra chairs pulled up to the table at the last minute is not how things are done in the king’s household.

More importantly, less than a year ago, Harry published his book Spare in which he called Prince William his “arch-nemesis,” accused him and Kate Middleton of belittling him and Meghan, detailed the contents of multiple highly private conversations, said Queen Camilla “sacrificed” him on her “personal PR altar,” and characterized the king as weak, vacillating and selfish.

As a friend of William’s told The Daily Beast this week: “Would you want to sit down for a slap-up Christmas lunch with someone who had basically called you an asshole in public?” They said that even if Charles wanted Harry and Meghan there (debatable), William and Kate would never “sign up” for such “total humiliation.”

Harry exposed more secrets about the royal family on the day of Spare’s publication than the tabloids had aired in the preceding two decades. The royals, therefore, would be foolish not to price in the possibility that anything shared with Harry or Meghan could subsequently make its way into a book or TV show.

That is what is really behind the ongoing failure of the two sides to reconcile.

And while Charles’ people are quite content for a narrative of wished-for reconciliation and magnanimity to be spun around Charles, he is still a long way from actually having done anything concrete to build bridges with Harry.

In fact, quite the opposite.

Don’t forget, it was Charles who made the decision to order the Sussexes to surrender their Windsor home, Frogmore Cottage, which makes it much more difficult for the couple to simply drop into the U.K. Last time Harry was on British soil, for example, in September, he wasn’t given a place to stay on the royal estate and didn’t meet his father face to face.

Harry and Meghan were notably not invited to his birthday party and the phone call they made to the king on his birthday marked, according to many reports, the first substantive conversation since the coronation in April.

Also, the king’s camp have let it be known that he was not particularly happy that the Sussexes briefed the media about the phone call both before and afterwards. As the Sunday Times reported: “It frustrates him that personal issues intrude on the public duty. He’d much rather the focus was on his work, not the soap opera of the private life. It is always frustrating when family dynamics overshadow the public role.”

Sources say this is an accurate summary of the position. “Who briefs the media about a phone call to their dad?” the former courtier told The Daily Beast. “It’s all PR to Harry and Meghan.”

The trust levels at the palace are unlikely to have been helped by Meghan’s heightened public profile in recent days. She has been unusually visible this week, attending a slew of public events, including a hockey match with Harry, sparking speculation that her long-discussed relaunch is actually about to happen. Indeed, she specifically teased it at a recent Variety event, saying: “I’m just really proud of what we’re creating…My husband is loving it, too. It’s really fun.”

Adding to the sense of nervousness among those who mistrust Harry and Meghan is the publication, next week, of Omid Scobie’s new book, Endgame. While Scobie has always rejected suggestions he is a Sussex mouthpiece, there is no doubt, to judge from the extracts published so far, that he still has excellent contacts in the Sussex camp, able to tell him, for example, exactly how Harry’s day unfolded on the day Queen Elizabeth died. It seems highly probably that next week’s media coverage of the royals will be largely concerned with the critical allegations against the royals made in Scobie’s book. Like it or not, many will see the hand of the Sussexes in Scobie’s text.

All in all, it’s hard to see how a reunion of the Sussexes with Harry’s birth family over Christmas lunch could lead to anything other than a very nasty bout of indigestion.