By Laura Elston
Copyright standard
The King has had a private tea with his son the Duke of Sussex at Clarence House in their first face-to-face encounter for 19 months.
The pair’s meeting, which lasted 54 minutes, comes after Harry publicly expressed hopes of a reconciliation with his family in May.
Following the meeting, Buckingham Palace confirmed that Charles and Harry spent time together.
Harry was driven through the gates of Charles’s London home on Wednesday afternoon following an earlier engagement at the Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College London.
The duke arrived at Clarence House in a black Range Rover at 5.20pm and left at 6.14pm ahead of an engagement later on Wednesday evening.
The duke ducked down inside the car as he was driven out of the premises, with the vehicle illuminated by camera flashes as it drove past a crowd of journalists while leaving the royal residence.
The King, who is still undergoing treatment for cancer, arrived in London from Balmoral on Wednesday, the penultimate day of his youngest son’s four-day trip to the UK – which increased speculation that the pair would meet.
Harry last saw his father in February last year when he made a transatlantic dash from his Californian home to the UK to see Charles following his cancer diagnosis.
The pair’s previous meeting was less than 24 hours after the announcement about the King’s health and was without Harry’s wife, the Duchess of Sussex, and their children.
The face-to-face encounter last February appeared to last for as little as 45 minutes – with the latest meeting also lasting less than an hour ahead of the duke’s evening engagement.
The duke, who stepped down from the working monarchy in 2020, has levelled a barrage of accusations at the King, stepmother the Queen, brother Prince of Wales and sister-in-law the Princess of Wales in his Oprah interview, Netflix documentary, interviews and his autobiography Spare since moving to the US.
Harry previously claimed Charles was jealous of Meghan and Kate, did not hug him when he told him his mother Diana, Princess of Wales had died, and said he believed the King was “never made” for single parenthood, but “to be fair, he tried”.
Charles, according to the duke, pleaded with his sons during a tense meeting after the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral: “Please, boys. Don’t make my final years a misery.”
Harry remains estranged from his brother William, who has been busying himself with a flurry of engagements this week and was away in Cardiff on Wednesday visiting a new mental health hub on World Suicide Prevention Day.
Royal watchers will be waiting to see if Harry keeps quiet and refrains from publicly discussing his reunion with the King, and, on the other side, whether any briefings emerge from Palace.
Senior aides to the King and the duke were pictured together in London this July in what was reported to be an initial step towards opening channels of communication between the two households.
