If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, an all-new members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday.
For a family as keenly attuned to the power of symbolism as the Windsors, leaving it over a week to wheel Kate, William, and Charles through the doors of Frogmore Cottage is a surprising mistake, and doing little to tamp down rumors of bad blood between the brothers.
Archie Harrison met his great-grandparents two days after he was born, in an iconic photo shared with the world, however it has now transpired that a week after the birth, the baby has yet to be introduced to his grandfather Prince Charles or his wife Camilla, nor his uncle and aunt Prince William and Kate Middleton.
ADVERTISEMENT
Sources told The Daily Beast on Monday that William and Kate may finally make a trip to Windsor to visit the baby in the next few days, with Charles expected to visit later this week.
However the apparent lack of a speedy invite to four of the most senior members of the royal family (or their failure to speedily accept one) risks being interpreted as a deliberate snub, especially as Kate and William’s kids were all visited by Harry and Charles within a couple of days of the birth.
And whilst many would of course be willing to believe that the new parents might just want some time to themselves, this is undermined when you have done a presentation of the child to global news crews and had the kid’s grandmother staying at your house for the past three weeks.
Harry has also been away from home twice since the birth last week; once on a flying visit to the Netherlands to launch the Invictus Games, the Paralympic-style event for wounded servicemen that he sponsors, and again on Sunday to attend the Royal Horse Show with his grandmother.
These little outings, and Meghan’s own appearance for the cameras, would suggest that she is finding life with a newborn eminently manageable.
Much as they may have been the last people she felt like seeing, Meghan would have been well advised to roll out the red carpet for William and Kate this weekend.
William and Kate’s absence at the crib for at least a week is another spectacular own-goal by Harry and Meghan, who are beginning to show a worrying talent for making negative headlines out of what should be joyful set pieces.
The narrative of their wedding, for example, was completely derailed by their shocking failure to look after Meghan’s family, especially her father, in a sensitive way. Now, in their efforts to shroud the birth of their child in secrecy, they have been accused of lying to and misleading the press by announcing Meghan had gone into labor eight hours after she had already given birth.
Harry and Meghan were also accused of deliberately allowing media to believe the baby had been born at home when in fact Archie was born at London’s exclusive Portland clinic.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be totally surprised at another self-inflicted PR headache; with no explanation forthcoming of why Harry and Meghan have been so slow to receive William and Kate, the assumption that this is the latest iteration of the damaging feud is being widely made.
Whether or not this is really the case, and The Daily Beast understands that William and Kate will indeed be making an appearance at Windsor some point over the next few days, serious questions are rightly being asked about the ability of Harry and Meghan’s new press team to help them avoid such obvious PR mistakes.
Reporters at British newspapers are complaining of being starved of information about the new royal arrival, although the Sun did mange one scoop: Harry is proving his credentials as a modern dad by changing the little one’s nappies.
