Harry will bring his four-day solo trip to the UK to a close when he carries out a final engagement
The Duke of Sussex is to visit a charity set up in memory of his mother a day after reuniting with the King for the first time in 19 months. Harry will bring his four-day solo trip to the UK to a close when he carries out a final engagement – with the Diana Award in London on Thursday morning.
The duke is then set to head to the airport to fly back to the US to join his wife, the Duchess of Sussex, and children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, in California. He appeared relaxed, smiling and upbeat at an Invictus reception in the City of London on Wednesday evening, just over an hour after he left Clarence House where he and the King shared a private tea.
The pair’s long-awaited meeting, which lasted just 54 minutes, comes after Harry publicly expressed hopes of a reconciliation with his family in May. Asked how his father was by a reporter shortly after arriving at the Invictus reception, Harry replied: “Yes, he’s great, thank you.”
The duke, who is celebrating his 41st birthday on Monday, will not be expected to appear at the Duchess of Kent’s funeral in London’s Westminster Cathedral on Tuesday after making the journey back to his Montecito home. The funeral is being attended by the King, Queen and other senior members of the royal family.
On Wednesday, Harry drove through the gates of Clarence House following an earlier engagement at the Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College London. He arrived at Clarence House in a black Range Rover at 5.20pm and left at 6.14pm ahead of an engagement with the Invictus Games Foundation on Wednesday evening.
Buckingham Palace confirmed Harry joined Charles for tea. The King skips lunch each day, but takes a break for afternoon tea at about 5pm, with sandwiches and cakes, and his favoured Darjeeling with honey and milk.
Charles, who is still undergoing treatment for cancer, arrived in London from Balmoral on Wednesday, the penultimate day of his youngest son’s stay in the UK – which increased speculation that the pair would meet. The monarch had a run of official duties behind closed doors including a Privy Council meeting at St James’s Palace, adjacent to Clarence House, in the afternoon, following by a one-to-one investiture with Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg at 4.15pm in the Morning Drawing Room at Clarence House.
This offered a window of opportunity for the King and Harry to meet, before the duke had to leave for his pre-planned Invictus Games event and the King had an audience at 6.15pm with the premier of South Australia, Peer Malinauskas, at Clarence House. Harry was due to arrive at his Invictus Games reception in the City of London at 6.45pm but organisers said he was running late, before he finally arrived at 7.24pm.
Traffic has been very heavy in central London this week due to an ongoing Tube strike. At the reception, where he met sponsors and supporters, the duke gave a speech and began by joking about his long journey across the capital.
He made his guests laugh when he said: “I think this whole thing has been delayed slightly, so at this point you’re all hammered – which was part of the plan all along, stuck up here at the top of the Gherkin.” The duke, who stepped down as a senior working royal in 2020, no longer benefits from blue-light police escorts which would have whisked him through any travel chaos.
Harry last saw the King 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 Meghan and their children.
The face-to-face encounter in February 2024 appeared to last for just over 30 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 the details of 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.
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