Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, flanked by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. Photo / Getty Images
Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, flanked by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. Photo / Getty Images
OPINION:
King George V, quite rightly, tends to get blamed for a lot of controversial decisions which irrevocably shaped royal history: leaving his two first cousins the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia to the murderous Bolsheviks; writing the current Letters Patent which governs titles; and changing the family's name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the far less worrying Teutonic Windsor.
But there is one unequivocally cheery thing he managed to do while on the throne and which is still a part of royal life: introducing the practice of the sovereign sending out cards for 100th birthdays.
Ever since then, anyone in the UK or the Commonwealth who manages to make it to their centenary can look forward to receiving a little something in the mail from the King or Queen of the day, which hardly seems enough of a reward for having survived the vagaries and indignities of a very, very long life.
Next week, our current Queen will get that one step closer to hitting her own milestone birthday when she turns 96, a day she seems likely to mark by enjoying her favourite new pastime: sitting down.
However, unlike other advanced nonagenarians who can content themselves to see out their final years surrounded by the loving embrace of their family, Her Majesty's own extended brood is one defined by anger, recrimination and the occasional prime time blurting of hurt feelings.
Queen Elizabeth II, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex. Photo / Getty Images
One such old wound to have the Band-Aid unceremoniously ripped off was Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who made their grand return a deux to the royal family's neck of the woods.
On Wednesday, UK time, the duo flew into London incognito, spending one night at their official home, Frogmore Cottage. They are reported to have met with the Queen, along with Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall who were there for the Maundy Thursday service. (The Queen had earlier in the week pulled out and deputised her son to do the honours.)
This was Meghan's first time back on British soil since flouncing off into the sunset in 2020 and her first meeting with the Queen since going on global TV screens to raise allegations of institutional racism and indifference to her suffering.
Crucially, not travelling with the duo were their young children. Their son Archie turns 3 next month, yet has not been back to his country of birth since he was about 6 months old.
Last year the Sussexes welcomed their daughter Lilibet, who was given the Queen's lifelong family nickname. Her Majesty is yet to meet her tiny namesake.
It was only the briefest of visits. The couple then jetted off to The Hague in the Netherlands for the Invictus Games, the first time the sporting championship for veterans, which was founded by Harry, has been held since the pandemic.
But before anyone starts energetically throwing around phrases like "olive branches" and "bridge-building", when we get down to it, this trip was the barest of bare minimum for the couple. Them being in the neighbourhood, so to speak, and not popping by to visit his grandmother would have been far too flagrant of a snub even for the tell-all Sussexes.
A spokesperson for the Sussexes confirmed to the UK's ITV that they had visited "the Duke's grandmother".
Maybe their West Coast team is still working their way through their copy of Debrett's and hasn't gotten to the chapter that details the correct honorific to use when referring to the Head of State, Commander of the Armed Forces and Defender of the Faith?
Moreover, the pair's trip to the Netherlands was already a sore point.
Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, flanked by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. Photo / Getty Images
Late last month, the extended house of Windsor, plus Prince Albert of Monaco, King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain, King Philippe and Queen Mathilde of Belgium, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Crown Prince Pavlos and Crown Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece, and Prince Kyril of Preslav, managed to get themselves to Westminster Abbey for a service of thanksgiving for the life of Prince Philip.
(No specific reason was given for his decision to not show up.)
And yet here we are, two weeks later, with not only Harry but Meghan suddenly finding themselves able to make the dash from Los Angeles back to Europe.
Now, Harry is of course currently embroiled in a legal stoush with the British Home Office over the decision for the family's official protection to be removed and has previously said he "does not feel safe" bringing his family to the UK where their paid bodyguards are not allowed to carry guns.
This situation could go some way to understanding his skipping the Philip service … except the Sussexes are still going to the Netherlands despite facing the same firearms restrictions on their private security.
Huh.
The optics of this are pretty pointed. (Anyone know what the Dutch word for "snub" is?)
Another thing to note is it won't just be Harry and Meghan making the trip to The Hague; they will be joined by a Netflix film crew for the Duke's previously announced doco about the games for the streaming giant.
Cue, lights, camera, caring!
Interestingly this is Meghan's first trip outside of the US since leaving the UK in January 2020 and setting off the landslide detonation that was Megxit. A coincidence, I'm sure.
Tina Brown, the former Tatler, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor who penned the seminal biography of the Princess of Wales The Diana Chronicles in 2007, is back this month with the Palace Papers. (Brown was also friends with Diana, too.)
During a recent interview with the Telegraph about her new book, she revealed things between William and Harry were "very bad" and that "I'm told there's absolutely nothing going on between them at the moment".
Queen Elizabeth II arrives to greet the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani to her Windsor residence on October 26, 2010 in Windsor, England. Photo / Getty Images
So too, last weekend marked the first anniversary of Philip's funeral, which Buckingham Palace marked by putting out a spoken version of the poem The Patriarchs: An Elegy, by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage which was released at the time of his funeral last year.
While other royal family members, such as Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and William and Kate, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, also shared the touching tribute, the Sussexes did not post any sort of personal message to mark the occasion.
(Someone really is taking themselves out of the running for grandchild of the year.)
Despite Harry and Meghan having popped into Windsor to kiss the ring, albeit at lightning speed, the 800-pound gorilla in the room is Harry's memoir, set to be released later this year and which has the potential to turn the Queen's Platinum Jubilee year into her annus horribilis 2.0.
The battle lines are already being drawn, according to Brown.
"William was disgusted about Meghan's attack on Kate because she can't answer back. But that's nothing compared to how furious he's going to be when this book comes out," she has said.
"Because Harry's not going to go after the Queen, she's sacrosanct. And he probably won't go after Kate, whom he's very fond of. But he will go after Charles and Camilla and maybe William. And that's so unhelpful to them all at this particular moment; for William that's the big cloud in their relationship right now."
If this situation does come to pass then "unhelpful" would qualify as the understatement of the year. Harry laying bare on the page every snippy comment, grievance and incidence of familial cold-shouldering would likely cause very serious damage to the palace at this delicate stage.
Things have not been going well for Team Monarchy.
Prince Andrew remains a doughy walking PR disaster and the Cambridges' recent Caribbean tour can be qualified as a bona fide fiasco, having reawakened questions about the royal family's ties to colonialism, slavery and exploitation and put the republican movement back on front pages.
Nor have the claims the Sussexes' made to Oprah Winfrey last year of institutional racism and total indifference to their mental health receded from public view for a second.
The house of Windsor has managed to scrape through all of this … by the skin of their bad teeth.
So given this precarious state of affairs, if Harry does come out both barrels blasting with his book and pulls no punches when it comes to revealing all about his father, stepmother and brother, would the royal family be able to pull through? I'm not so sure.
In an ideal world, with once-in-a-century regime change in the offing, the Queen, Charles and William should be focusing on a period of consolidating support for the monarch and yet instead they seem to be permanently on the back foot, dealing with the ongoing shambles that is the royal family.
The motto for the Invictus Games is "I am". Sadly at this stage, it does not look like anyone involved here is ready to say "I am sorry".
• Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years' experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.
