Wait, so now Prince Harry wants to come back to Britain?

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Well knock me down with a very small feather, Prince Harry’s apparently bored and wants to come home. Eight years since he met Meghan, six years since he married her, four since they flounced off to America, he’s back in touch with old friends and advisers and seeking to “rehabilitate” his image. That’s quite some brass neck. He’s spent the intervening time saying he was hounded out of the land of his birth and had to take a “freedom flight” to Canada.
He’s complained to whoever points a camera at him about vile courtiers, a wicked stepmother, violent brother and emotionally stunted father. But now it turns out that watching Meghan make jam isn’t enough. According to the Mail on Sunday, he’s been WhatsApping old friends and advisers in the UK and wants to mend relations with his father. Having recently parted company with yet another head of communications, he is “seeking counsel from old friends and associates … rethinking the way he operates.”
The American way appears not be working: when Christine Weil Schirmer quietly quit her job as head of communications she became the tenth staff member to leave in three years. Having been in the post since 2020 she could have qualified for a long-service award.
One friend has suggested that if he came back with “zero fuss, zero publicity and attends very mundane events, he could prove himself and win over the British public again”.
“He would have to accept that he might be reduced to ribbon-cutting for a long time,” the friend continued, one of several “old friends” who are “ready and willing” to help him after the “genuinely big surprise” of hearing from him after four years. One is said to have wanted to tell Edward Lane Fox, a former private secretary to the prince, “please bring our boy home”. His friends are calling it Operation Bring Harry In From the Cold.
They’ve got their work cut out. “Zero fuss, zero publicity” is not exactly the Montecito playbook. It’s a very long time, if ever, since Harry undertook the sort of ribbon-cutting Princess Anne does day in, day out. If he wants to know what “zero fuss, zero publicity” looks like, he could ask her.
“It would give him purpose to work again,” one friend told the Mail on Sunday. Evidently being a humanitarian and environmental campaigner, as he describes himself on sussexroyal.com, is less time-consuming than he thought. One of his colleagues at BetterUp, a coaching platform, described Harry’s day-to-day responsibilities as “zero things”. An executive at Spotify described him and his wife as grifters.
For a proud man obsessed with his dignity and public image, it must hurt that one of the last times he appeared at an official engagement here — the 2022 service at St Paul’s for Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum jubilee — he was booed. Once the most popular member of the royal family, his ratings in the US are on the slide. In a recent YouGov UK poll, only 7 per cent of respondents had a positive view of him. In comparison, the Princess of Wales scored a 74 per cent approval rating and Prince William 75 per cent. On the royal family’s website, Harry and Meghan’s biographies are right at the bottom, beneath even Prince Andrew.
• Prince Harry at 40: ‘All he does is spend time looking back’
How Harry will manage to combine spending more time in the UK with marriage and family life remains to be seen. He has complained that they would not be safe because his automatic Met protection was revoked when he ceased to be a working royal. He nevertheless concluded that they’d be safe enough in Colombia, to parts of which the Foreign Office advises against all travel. No mention has been made of Meghan wanting to return, let alone to open a hospice in Wigan, because why would she? She’s already got everything she ever needed from Britain — Harry. She’s living at home, close to her mother, lunching with A-listers who eight years ago wouldn’t have answered the phone to her. Harry is 6,000 miles from home, cut off from everyone and everything he ever knew. At one point he was reduced to juggling in the background of a video starring his wife and, once he’s stopped flogging indiscreet malice about his royal relatives, what’s left? He turns 40 this month, a milestone in anyone’s life. Until four years ago, his entire existence and upbringing were about royal life and service. His early attempts to recreate that life in America fell flat — remember the photo shoot in the cemetery on Remembrance Sunday?
While the Invictus Games is a remarkable achievement, most of his “humanitarian work” tends to be all about him. His and Meghan’s various awards are suspected of being orchestrated by their PR advisers. Their mini-royal tours to Colombia and Nigeria come over to the rest of the world as a bit pointless. He must know in his heart that his very public rejection of Britain, family and royal life deeply upset Queen Elizabeth, the grandmother he adored. His father has been very seriously unwell, so too the Princess of Wales, the woman he once described as the sister he never had. He only learnt that she was ill at the same time as the general public, and his and Meghan’s private message of support is said to have gone unanswered.
Harry is now thought to accept that his relationship with his brother is beyond repair, perhaps for ever. For his part, Prince William was reported last week simply never to talk about the brother from whom he was once inseparable. He has moved on, while Harry has evidently not.
One friend recently spoke of his frustration that all Harry did was brood on the past, instead of looking to the future and perhaps that struck home. But what of his stepmother, the Queen, the undisputed gatekeeper to his father, the King? When he flew over to see Charles after his diagnosis, he was only given half an hour of his time, and it was not just father and son. Camilla was there too. The Queen hasn’t got where she is today by being an ingénue, so what will her view be on bringing the errant stepson in from the cold? Even if Charles is keen to forgive and forget, will she be too, after he said on international TV that she was prepared to “leave bodies in the street” if it helped her own public image? The irony is lost on Harry that if anyone has left bodies in the street it’s him, with his unending attacks on his family — and he did it for filthy lucre. Now, though, he’s said that he’s not updating Spare for the paperback edition and won’t be doing any interviews to publicise it. It may be true that stems from a desire not to further offend his family. But it may also be true that he’s told Meghan she can have all the content of the past 18 months for her own book, which she is said to be writing.
A good news story about him being welcomed back into the royal fold, and a photo of him introducing Princess Lilibet to King Charles for the first time wouldn’t go amiss either.
Hilary Rose’s book The Secret Diary of Queen Camilla is published on September 26 (£18.99, Constable)
Times+ members can register to enjoy an evening with Hilary Rose on September 24. Visit mytimesplus.co.uk to find out more