Daniela Elser: Sad reason ‘blindsided’ William won’t talk to Harry

The royal family reportedly has a plan for dealing with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle if they come to the coronation. Photo / AP

OPINION

You’d think that being a Peer of the Realm, you’d have it made.

There’s the title, sure, but if you have earned a seat in the House of Lords or if you are the latest offshoot of some dynasty of double-chinned, ruddy landowners who can trace their heritage back to the Doomsday Book then chances are your biggest concerns are finding the readies to fix your vast, leaking estate.

So just imagine the hurt feelings and dented egos, given only a minority will get coveted invitations to King Charles’s coronation, with peers being forced to lobby the cabinet office to make the guest list.

It’ll please them to know, then, that there might be a couple of spare seats going begging, depending on whether Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, decide to turn up.

This week, the actual invitations to Charles’s May 6 ceremony went out, first class stamps all around I assume, meaning that the Sussexes are at some point soon going to work out if they are willing to turn up and face his frosty family. Will they decide to put paternal affection and fealty to the King first and go to London?

Or would they be willing to risk hurting feelings of His Majesty and possibly raising the ire of Netflix by staying home?

(It’s not like anyone is clamouring for a second season of Harry & Meghan, in which the cameras record their scintillating day-to-day affectionate bickering, I’m guessing, about who finished the almond milk.)

Harry is seen showing Meghan the text from William. Photo / Netflix

If there is one person we’d would assume the duke would be most nervous about seeing in London, then the smart money would be on his brother, Prince William, who came in for a right royal pasting thanks to Harry.

For decades, the most notable thing about William was that those lustrous blonde locks of his teen years and early 20s had deserted him to such devastating effect and that he managed to get the absolutely perfect wife and future Queen across the line.

The prince basically was a Marks & Spencer jumper in human form; inoffensive, unobjectionable and largely lacking in anything much like personality.

But oh boy, has that changed.

In the Sussexes’ Harry & Meghan (tag line: ‘Please Netflix, help us keep the lights on’) audiences learnt that William had “screamed and shouted” at Harry during the Sandringham Summit and that the Waleses’ press office had planted negative stories about the Sussexes.

Then came Harry’s autobiography, Spare, and with it fresh, biting revelations including that ‘Willy’ had physically assaulted him during a spot of Kensington Palace argy-bargy about Meghan’s treatment of staff and ‘Harold’ dubbing his brother his “arch nemesis”.

(Oh and that Nazi uniform that Harry picked out for a 2005 costume party? He wore it after being encouraged by William and his now wife Kate.)

Just call him the Notorious W-I-L-L.

Harry made headlines for his Royal Nazi costume. Photo / Getty Images

The Prince of Wales, for his part, has stayed relentlessly schtum, getting on with his day job of trying to fix homelessness while not wearing a tie. (He’s not a regular prince, he’s a cool prince.)

If anyone is hoping that now is the point in this sorry tale of fraternal fisticuffs and feuding that we might get to the part where they patch things up, I have some bad news.

Fixing any of this mess would require talking and that, according to a new report, is off the table right now with the Windsors leery about saying anything to the Sussexes lest it end up in the public domain.

According to the Telegraph’s royal editor Victoria Ward, Harry is “keen to salvage the broken relationship with his family,” a sentiment that seems about as likely as Vladimir Putin suggesting Volodymyr Zelensky partner with him for a quick game of doubles with senior NATO staff.

No matter what Harry might be busy trying to manifest by his vision board, Ward writes that “the rift between the two sides has never been deeper,” an unsurprising state of affairs given that “both the King and Prince William were blindsided by the allegations and revelations” of Spare.

“Both the King and Prince William were blindsided by the allegations and revelations” of Spare. Photo / Getty Images

However, even if William was in a white flag-waving mood, that Deepak Chopra cassette series about forgiveness that wife Kate had got him from a Windsor car boot sale working a treat, there is one thing that is reportedly preventing any sort of hands-across-the-aisle outreach.

No-one with an HRH wants to end up ‘starring’ in the Sussexes’ next primetime outing or their conversations splashed all over the next Sussex bestseller.

According to that Telegraph report, “many members of the Royal family were said to have lost all trust in the Duke and were ‘wary’ of talking to him in case their words were repeated in television interviews or his next book, sources revealed.

Harry has form on this front.

Take the events of April 2021. Only weeks after the Sussexes had sat down with Oprah Winfrey, unleashing what was widely interpreted as allegations of royal racism, sound bites still reverberating in the world’s ears and the internet rattling with memes of the TV host’s shocked reaction, he returned to the UK for the funeral of his grandfather Prince Philip.

The world watched on as Kate and then William made what looked like some very polite conversation with Harry outside St George’s Chapel in Windsor.

Only weeks after the Sussexes had sat down with Oprah Winfrey the Prince returned to the UK for the funeral of his grandfather Prince Philip. Photo / BBC

We now know that was not the only time the two brothers spoke thanks to no better source than Aitch himself. In Spare, the duke writes about the intensely personal meeting with his father and brother after the service in the grounds of nearby Frogmore House, during which the King begged: “Please, boys – don’t make my final years a misery.”

(Harry writes of the moment: “His voice sounded raspy, fragile. It sounded, if I’m being honest, old”.)

It is hard to think of a more private, intimate moment, of raw feelings and of vulnerability on full display, from all three people involved. Yet only one of them made the choice to tell the world about that moment and to betray the others’ trust.

Perhaps Charles and William should not have been surprised about this disloyalty given that only the month before, in the aftermath of Oprah, the TV titan’s best friend Gayle King told This Morning’s audience: “Harry has talked to his brother and he has talked to his father too. The word I was given was those conversations were not productive”.

The Sussexes aired the royals' dirty laundry, sparking racism speculation in the Monarchy, during their interview with Oprah Winfrey. Photo / Supplied

The ‘word she was given’? That must have made some ears prick up back in London’s SW1 postcode.

It makes perfect sense therefore that the Sussexes, if they turn up to the coronation “should realise that there is only one subject that many members of the Royal Family will be willing to discuss … and that’s the weather,” as a source told the Daily Mail recently.

The problem is, even if members of the royal family did want to make nice and try and find a way to patch things up with Harry and Meghan, how can they do so without the fear that they might suddenly end up hearing their words being sprouted on American breakfast shows?

How can any progress be made if the royal family is worried about their conversations being repeated for the viewing pleasure of Netflix subscribers or to slack jawed Minnesota housewives watching morning TV?

“It’s impossible to exaggerate the extent of [William’s] contempt for Harry and Meghan now. He absolutely hates them, and can’t believe that Harry would do this to him and to Kate. He feels utterly betrayed and deeply saddened by everything that has happened. There will be no way back after this.” Photo / AP

There is an irony in that Harry accused William of his office leaking information to further his own agenda, something that Harry is now doing himself to painful effect. He might have proven his point but it has, based on these reports, come at the expense of his family feeling able to have anything even vaguely resembling a heart-to-heart.

No matter how Charles, William and Kate might feel about Harry and Meghan, so long as there is a chance of them being unwittingly becoming a cog in the Sussex grievance industrial complex then it’s hard to see how any progress can be made.

That’s not to say that a lack of trust is the only thing that might be standing in the way of some great rapprochement, all bear hugs and teary-eyed HRHs.

Earlier this year, a friend of the Prince of Wales told the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes: “It’s impossible to exaggerate the extent of [William’s] contempt for Harry and Meghan now. He absolutely hates them, and can’t believe that Harry would do this to him and to Kate. He feels utterly betrayed and deeply saddened by everything that has happened. There will be no way back after this”.

Something makes me think that the Sussexes should start boning up on recent rainfall in Scotland or regularly checking BBC weather or things could be even more awkward come May.

Daniela Elser is a writer and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australasia’s leading media titles