The path to peace in the palace

There was a 50-minute meeting and it looked as though King Charles and Prince Harry had found a path towards reconciliation. But they hadn't. The Weekly investigates what it would take to bring this beleaguered father and son back together.

- PAOLA TOTARO

It was their first meeting in 19 months, wedged tightly into a late afternoon gap between public engagements and lasting just 53 minutes from the moment a besuited Prince Harry stepped out of a black Range Rover at 5.21pm to enter Clarence House.

For the British public – fired up by a feverish media – this was the moment the King, now 76 and still undergoing regular cancer treatment, might reconcile with his younger son and father of his two youngest grandchildren, Archie, six, and Lilibet, four. Perhaps, some speculated, it might even open the door for a rapprochement between Harry and his older brother and heir to the throne, Prince William.

Wild rumours had been circulating for days that Harry’s four-day return to the UK, ostensibly to check in on several of his favourite charities, might involve not just a reunion but a gentle redefinition of his public role alongside his family.

“I would love a reconciliation with my family,” Harry told the BBC in May. “There’s no point in continuing to fight anymore. Life is precious.”

Eight weeks later, a photograph in The Mail on Sunday showed Harry and Meghan’s new PR chief, Meredith Maines, meeting with the King’s communications boss, Tobyn Andrae, at the Royal Overseas League club, a hop, skip and a jump from Clarence House. Both sides denied leaking the photo but the image did not find its way onto the front page of a national newspaper alone: There must have been at least an attempt to reopen some form of dialogue.

Harry’s whistlestop tour in September – on the third anniversary of the Queen’s death and the week before his 41st birthday – began with a visit straight from Heathrow airport to St George’s Chapel in Windsor to lay flowers on his grandmother’s grave. It ended with an evening bash for the Invictus Games Foundation after the chat with his dad.