Perhaps because it involves kings and princes, we can be forgiven for hoping that they were going to live happily ever after in the end, like in a fairytale. Unfortunately, this is real life.
Bearing in mind that the royal family are strangers, that despite all the whispers and briefings and rumours, we really don’t have any idea of what is going on behind closed palace doors, it’s almost comical how invested we are. And yet, this week, when news emerged that Charles had offered Harry the opportunity to stay at Buckingham Palace during his first trip to London with his wife and children in four years, it felt like a wonderful breakthrough. Finally, a glimmer of possibility that this sorry state of affairs between them could maybe be … if not entirely mended, at least taped over for a while, so they could spend some time together.
Even if it was a wobbly start, it would have been a start, and that seemed extremely unlikely in recent years. It might mean they could begin the healing process proper. Baby steps. Instead, a mere 15 minutes after Harry accepted the olive branch, the invitation was withdrawn. The king is reported to have spoken privately to his son about the reasons behind it. If it was the hope that killed us, one can only imagine how they must have felt.
Parental alienation has been dragged into the mainstream by celebrity association recently, but it’s still the opposite of aspirational. The Beckhams, Brad Pitt and Gordon Ramsay’s new son-in-law have reminded us that it happens, but it’s most mums’ and dads’ second worst nightmare. Your child is thankfully still alive, but you are dead to them. The majority of parents would move heaven and earth to avoid it. Do, say, try anything.
So it’s hard not to presume that, whatever has gone on between them, the various complicated rights and wrongs, Charles and Harry are eager to put an end to their estrangement. To have little or no contact with those who, on the tin, are your nearest and dearest must be torture. To have children your father barely knows, grandchildren you’ve hardly met, is also a unique kind of pain. This whole situation, these lost years, are a tragedy for everybody.
And of course, even if you disapprove of some of what you think you know about the way Harry has behaved, the decisions he has made, Britain as a nation has a very particular, unmistakable tie to him. A trauma bond, almost.
It’s a cliche to mention that long walk the 12-year-old boy took behind his mother’s coffin back in 1997, and simultaneously impossible not to. It is undeniably burned on to the nation’s psyche, a factor – consciously or not – in every opinion about him. Losing another parent is the very last thing anyone would have wished for him. Even those who consider themselves in Charles’s corner in this feud cannot fail to want the best for Harry, somewhere underneath that. And this is what makes this latest turn of events so disappointing.
Now, instead of one step forward, this seems like 200 back. Charles and Harry will yet again have to endure having their actions speculated over, decoded by judgmental outsiders in the most negative light available. Charles billed as cold and unfeeling, unsympathetic. Harry as selfish, flighty, using his small children as bargaining chips. That each twist and turn in this saga is breathlessly, endlessly reported and dissected only adds to the soap opera quality of it all. You can get lost in the alleged details, in making your decision about whose side you’re on and becoming furious at the opposition, and forget that these are real human beings, with feelings and emotions.
Royalist or not, envious of their lifestyles or not, empathetic to the burden of their duty and obligation or not, Team Charles or Team Harry, there’s one thing we can surely agree on. This is desperately sad. Mostly because it’s hard to see what will happen in the next episode, or if there will be one at all.
Polly Hudson is a freelance writer
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