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‘Last years’: Sad truth about Harry, Charles meeting
There is a sad truth that cannot be ignored after King Charles met with his son, Prince Harry, for the first time in 19 months.
Daniela Elser
September 12, 2025 – 11:54AM
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There is one sad revelation after Charles and Harry’s meeting. Picture: Supplied
Veni, vidi, vici, Julius Caesar supposedly intoned.
He came, he saw, he conquered and he was home in time for his self-congratulatory honey wine sundowner.
Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex and the biggest palace irritant since the recessive haemophiliac gene, has left the UK after by far and away his most successful stint in the UK since the great kablooey of Megxit.
Across four days of ‘royal’ events, the duke came, won over children, academics and community organisers’ hearts, saw his father King Charles for the first time in 19 months and he conquered his years’ long habit of being chauffeured around London staring stonily, moodily ahead and looking like he would prefer to be having his prostate examined than back in the UK.
The most significant, double underlined, development of this trip came on Wednesday when Harry swept through the gates of London’s Clarence House to see Charles after 582 days in the wilderness. No press, no commentators, no one used to tying the letters ‘HRH’ had been expecting this stunning aboutface.
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MORE: ‘Lonely’: Insiders lift lid on Harry’s sad life
At 5.20pm a black Range Rover ferrying the 40-year-old whizzed past the waiting press to deliver him to his first face-to-face meeting with his father since February 2024.
Tea was taken. Words exchanged. Less than an hour later, at 6.14pm, the Duke of Sussex was orrff, to go back to, for another brief, wonderful moment, roleplaying still being an actual working HRH at a drinks reception.
This tea was the most deliberate and major step towards a father-son reconciliation in years and years.
More broadly, this trip has seen Harry do something very strange – spending days and days pretending Megxit didn’t happen.
Having flown into Heathrow on Monday, he spent four days keenly, happily taking himself off on his own DIY series of ‘royal’ engagements. He visited a community radio station in Birmingham, heartmeltingly charmed sick kids, and shone a light on groundbreaking British medical research and didn’t once gripe about his father, his brother, or that time he was served one sausage at dinner, not two like Prince William.
Prince Harry leaves Clarence House after meeting with his father in London. Picture: Toby Shepheard/AFP
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He enthused, smiled, high-fived, laughed, and, wait for it, waved at the press on occasion. New duke, who dis?
His backwards Californian cap-wearing and surfer dude makeover was gone and we were back to the Way Things Were, it was all a sort of weirdly moving, but bizarro, bit of time travelling and ‘acting as if’ on his part.
Basically, Harry has just spent four days mashing the reset button not only his work and UK image but most meaningfully, his relationship with his Pa.
Harry pictured earlier in the day before his meeting with Charles. Picture: Suzanne Plunkett – Pool/Getty Images
You’d have to assume Harry knew just quite how much was on the line when he arrived at Clarence House. How many second chances can any man get?
While we breathlessly await the usual raft of body language ‘experts’ giving their verdict on the meeting based on the hunch of Harry’s shoulders or twitch of an eyebrow, the duke’s face told a real story and a half.
Before the tea, earlier in the day, Harry had been at University College London’s Centre for Blast Injury Studies where he looked like a man reinvigorated and brimming with purpose and mugs of builders tea; that night, post-meeting, at Invictus Games drinks, it was the same again.
A member of the Coldstream Guards stands on duty outside Buckingham Palace, the official residence of the British Monarch. Picture: Rhianna Chadwick/AFP
However in the interim, arriving and leaving Clarence House, the Duke of Sussex’s mien was a far more sombre and serious stripe. He looked pensive, and brooding, and jokey, blokey, charmer Harry was temporarily replaced by a man looking like he was feeling the hell out of some feelings.
When he arrived at Clarence House it was as a son whose father, 19 months on since his diagnosis, is still battling cancer and undergoing weekly treatment.
The Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes (also the author of The Royalist Substack) has argued, “You have to see this in the context of…these probably are the last years of Charles’ life”.
While the tea was a major and unquestionably positive step towards two adult men attempting the first hug ever ventured inside a Grade I listed historic building, there’s one detail that is hard to go past – 54 minutes. That’s how long Harry spent inside Clarence House in total and you have to wonder just how much ground could actually be covered in the same time you could watch Meghan demonstrate basket weaving to nonplussed Netflix names on her flat pancake of a lifestyle show.
Prince Harry arrives at Clarence House. Picture: Ben Montgomery/Getty Images
Still, a start’s a start and the Duke of Sussex might have said the single word that actually needed saying during the tea – one which starts with an ‘s’ and ends with him begging forgiveness on bended knee on an Axminster rug.
Sykes has reported that a friend of the King’s had told him that “Harry must either have apologised or expressed an intention to apologise for the scathing remarks he made about Camilla in Spare and in subsequent interviews” for him to even get these 54 minute.
If that’s the case then it’s quite the spectacular bit of back pedalling from the man who told the Telegraph’s Bryony Grodon in 2023 that he wanted his family to demonstrate “some accountability. And an apology to my wife.”
Broadly speaking, Harry’s whole trip felt like something of an admission that the last years of Harry telling journalists and cameras he wanted the royal family to come on bended knee to he and Meghan to apologise for not appreciating their innate wondrousness might have been a mistake.
Harry’s trip felt like something of an admission. Picture: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP
In those 50-ish minutes, Charles and Harry, might have only had the time to choke down a half of an organic oat cake, barely getting past some niceties and kids photos being proudly proffered forth (‘And here’s Archie at his first kombucha-making workshop’) but the real test of whether this is truly a turning point comes now.
It’s a question of trust.
For years Harry and Meghan’s stock-in-trade has been them mining their UK years like the Rio Tinto of royalty, giving print, podcasts and TV interviews so numerous I’ve long since given up keeping count. (They have done at least 15 TV, print and podcast appearances excluding Oprah.)
Since 2021, the duke and duchess have dumped in the public arena everything from petty anecdotes about lipgloss and receding hairlines, to bombshell revelations about Prince William being a thumper, Charles a dud dad and Queen Camilla being “dangerous” and leaving “bodies in the street”; they have revealed details from what would have to be hundreds of private conversations and moments with every member of the royal family.
Harry as a child with his dad and brother in Switzerland. Picture: AP-PHOTO/ARNO BALZARINI
For things to move forward for Charles and Harry from here, junior has to prove he’s changed his ways.
One of the major stumbling blocks to a meeting between Harry and his father has been the palace fear that His Majesty’s dry comments about the weather would end up becoming a front page People exclusive or top-of-the-hour segment on breakfast TV.
For example, after visiting the late Queen in April 2022, he, days later, told Today he had seen his grandmother to “make sure she’s protected and got the right people around her”. After Harry met with Charles last February, less than two weeks later, there he was on Good Morning America saying he hoped his father’s cancer diagnosis might help heal the family rift.
For things to move forward for Charles and Harry from here, junior has to prove he’s changed his ways. Picture: Samir Hussein/Samir Hussein/WireImage
The only way Charles and Harry’s relationship can truly start to be repaired is if Harry can show he’s turned a page and won’t be rushing towards the nearest blinking red light on a TV camera to spill the organic beans.
To put it another way, can Harry keep his lips zipped?
The sad thing about this week is that the Duke of Sussex, who turns 41 next week, has not looked this happy in public in positively yonks. Years. He was back doing what he was not only born to do but is clearly extraordinarily naturally gifted at. It felt like the Duke of Sussex was back in his natural habitat
It was all a poignant Sliding Doors view of what could have been, Harry out on manoeuvres and repping Crown Inc; the palace basking in the warm glow of having their most charismatic front row player on their books acing the battle for hearts and minds; everyone winning.
The royal brothers in their younger years. Picture: AP
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One person probably not feeling the warm’n’fuzzies this week – William. All reports point to the prince viewing his brother as a Prince Andrew sorta problem – a family member for whom there should not be any way back and should be kept orbiting Crown Inc from about the distance of Pluto.
The palace, having survived Harry’s Operation Win-em-all-back-over now faces a second US invasion in as many weeks. Next week Donald Trump and wife Melania arrive for their another State visit. The Windsor Castle kitchens are already defrosting the chicken nuggets and working members of the royal family practising their game faces. Now if someone could just explain to the King what ‘ketchup’ is…
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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