As we’ve seen now for a full week, King Charles and his courtiers simply cannot get over the fact that Prince Harry issued a simple, gracious statement about how he would not see his father due to the king’s full schedule. Harry was in London for about three days, May 7-9, before he reunited with Meghan and they flew to Nigeria together. Harry was there on well-publicized business – the Invictus Games’ tenth anniversary service, and Harry added on a few other events while he was in town. The palace knew he was coming. Harry also has to give 28 days notice before traveling to the UK. That hasn’t stopped Charles and his courtiers from furiously briefing increasingly contradictory bullsh-t about how Harry never asked for a meeting, and Harry did ask but Charles snubbed him on purpose, and Harry didn’t ask for royal lodging and Charles didn’t even know Harry was coming, and Charles would never allow Harry to come back to the UK because something something Camilla! Well, Roya Nikkhah got a fresh (contradictory) briefing from both Buckingham Palace and Team Sussex.

The King agreed to a request from the Duke of Sussex to stay in a royal residence for last week’s trip to London, mindful that his younger son no longer has an official UK residence, friends of the monarch say. In the event, however, Harry is thought to have chosen to stay in a hotel during his three-day visit. The friends point out that staying in a royal residence would have made visiting his father logistically easier, given the competing pressures on Charles’s diary.

It is the latest twist in another awkward week for father and son, who have different versions of who asked — or did not ask — to see whom. Those close to Harry, 39, who was visiting London from his home in California to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Invictus Games, insist he put in a request to see his father well in advance of the visit, which was “long on the radar”. They point out that when Harry wants to come to the UK, he must give 28 days’ warning to the King and the Home Office to request security.

Friends of the King, 75, who has cancer, continue to stress that, to the best of their understanding, Harry neither requested to see his father nor invited him to attend the service at St Paul’s last Tuesday to celebrate the Invictus anniversary. But sources close to Harry expressed their bemusement that Charles did not see his son on a rare trip to the UK. They noted that, despite his cancer treatment, the King made time to attend a Buckingham Palace garden party on Wednesday afternoon, hold his weekly audience with Rishi Sunak that evening and undertake a military engagement in Wiltshire on Thursday.

“It’s all very sad,” said a friend of Charles. “While it is true that the King is understandably wary about meeting with Harry, given the publicity circus that seems to surround all such visits, he did of course agree to see his son at the most vulnerable moment of his illness [in February], and at very short notice. While he was hardly going to roll out the red carpet the moment this Invictus trip was announced, with doctors advising him to focus on his treatment and recovery, the idea that he refused to find space in his diary … well, let’s say recollections may vary once again.”

A friend of Harry’s said: “I can’t imagine that request [from Harry to Charles] fell through the gaps. Even if they didn’t get a request, which I don’t believe, could His Majesty not have made a request to see his son? It was widely known he was coming.”

The missed opportunity is understood to have deeply stung Harry, according to friends who spent time with him in London last week. “It surprises me a lot. I was fully expecting them to meet. I know that’s what he wanted to happen and I don’t know when he’s next back,” one said.

[From The Times]

It feels like something else is happening here, like an undercurrent of “Charles is doing poorly and he’s being heavily managed by the courtiers.” I got a similar vibe from that story one month ago, about how a courtier cut corners and “duped” Charles into signing off on some fancy assignment. Adjacent to that, Charles is overstaffed and the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing – it seems likely that palace disorganization was one of the big reasons for the way they f–ked up “the Harry issue” once again. Harry likely went through a combination of official channels (28 days notice to get security, invitation to the Invictus service) and private channels (a personal request to see Charles), and he was told different things by different people with different agendas. Instead of playing Charles’s games and the courtiers’ games, Harry pulled the ripcord, issued the statement about not meeting Charles and effectively called everyone’s bluff. The palace spent the next week scrambling and making ridiculous claims, tying themselves in knots to blame Harry for their f–kups.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.