There was no royal reunion between two members of the British royal family upon Prince Harry’s recent return to the UK. As the Duke of Sussex, 39, returned home to spend time with his father, King Charles III, amid the monarch’s recent cancer diagnosis, he reportedly avoided his stepmother, Queen Camilla.
According to Camilla’s longtime friend Petronella Wyatt, Harry “preferred not to be in the same room with his stepmother when he spoke to the King about his cancer diagnosis,” she wrote for The Telegraph. Wyatt called the diss a “massive opportunity missed” for Harry to extend an “olive branch” to his stepmother, whom his father married in 2005.
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Harry’s reported decision not to meet with Camilla during his short 24-hour trip, only an hour of which was reportedly spent with his father, doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The duke hasn’t shied away from revealing his true feelings for his stepmother, who he referred to as “dangerous” and “the villain” in his memoir Spare. In the book, the royal wrote that he had “complex feelings about gaining a step-parent who I thought had recently sacrificed me on her personal P.R. altar,” adding that Camilla, who he referred to as the “other woman,” was like an “injection… Close your eyes and you won’t even feel it.” He also wrote, “I remember wondering…if she would be cruel to me; if she would be like all the evil stepmothers in the stories.”
“She was the villain, she was a third person in the marriage, she needed to rehabilitate her image,” he said during his January 2023 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper. “The need for her to rehabilitate her image, that made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade information and with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that.”
Harry’s comments reportedly left his father “distraught,” “angry,” and “outraged,” a source later told Us Weekly. The source added, however, that Charles “has hope that in time the dust will settle and Harry will soften his heart toward his family.”
Harry’s return trip to the UK came just days after Buckingham Palace announced that the monarch, 75, was diagnosed with “a form of cancer.” Harry, who traveled without his wife, Meghan Markle, reportedly had a 45-minute meeting with his father at Clarence House before returning home to the U.S.
