It is January 2005. The birthday party’s questionable theme is “natives and colonials”. The man third in line to the throne plumps for a Nazi officer’s uniform with a red swastika wrapped around his left arm. The photos leak and a national scandal ensues.
During the PR crisis that followed, the 20-year-old royal rang his father, Prince Charles. “To my surprise he was serene,” Harry recalled in his 2023 memoir, Spare. “He spoke to me with such tenderness, such genuine compassion, that I was disarmed.”
Seven years later, pictures emerge of Harry naked in a Las Vegas hotel room after playing strip pool. Mid-brouhaha, he meets up with his father in Scotland. “To my surprise, to my relief, he was gentle,” Harry later recalled. “Even bemused.”
These two vignettes show that at some of his trickiest, most humiliating moments, Harry has turned to his father and been met with sympathy. But the fact that, each time, he was surprised by the reassurance he received also speaks to the dysfunction of a relationship that has now all but collapsed.
“It shows a lack of insight on Harry’s part because Charles is an empathetic person,” says Sally Bedell Smith, a royal biographer. “If Harry can’t understand his father to that degree, there’s a problem.”
The King and his youngest son have not seen each other for more than 15 months. Their relationship has been fluctuating between strained and severed ever since the Duke of Sussex, 40, and his wife, 43, quit the royal family in 2020 and headed to America. The relationship between Harry and William is said to be beyond repair.
This month, after losing a legal challenge over his security in Britain, Harry gave yet another interview. “I would love reconciliation with my family,” he told the BBC. “I don’t know how much longer my father has.”
Poignant words, except Harry also proceeded to commit the unforgivable royal sin of airing his dirty laundry in public, reiterating his longstanding grievance over losing his government security detail and claiming that this row is the reason his father won’t speak to him.
How did it come to this? A father and son’s relationship seemingly irretrievably damaged, even as Charles, 76, faces the ordeal of cancer. Were the seeds of this fallout there all along, or is it the tumult of the past five years — the Oprah interview, the Netflix series, Spare — that has brought the pair to this point?
‘My darling boy’
When Henry Charles Albert David was born on September 15, 1984, Charles’s marriage to Diana, Princess of Wales, was already in dire straits. Diana claimed to her biographer Andrew Morton that Charles was disappointed not to have a daughter and that he exclaimed to the room of shocked doctors and nurses: “Oh. God. It’s a boy. And he even has red hair!” Hours later, Charles allegedly dashed off to play polo, though in his book Harry writes that his father went off to see “his girlfriend”.
After an unpromising start, Diana persuaded her husband to change his timetable to spend more time with his sons and less time with his private secretary. “Charles once said to one of his staff, ‘What are you doing this weekend? I’m going to be changing nappies’,” a royal insider recalls, quickly adding that there is no evidence of Charles having actually changed nappies.
This is a world of nannies and private secretaries as surrogate parents, nursery food served under silver cloches and being packed off to boarding school aged eight. (Both brothers attended Ludgrove School near Wokingham, Berkshire.) Despite all this, Charles was a relatively hands-on “Pa”. He chased his young sons all over Sandringham making up games; he taught them about gardening and didn’t miss a first day at school — though this was also good PR.
Later on, he took Harry, whom he always called “my darling boy”, hiking, riding, shooting and fishing with William. “I don’t think he was emotionally distant,” says the royal insider. “That was one of the great myths and one of the great untruths that Diana propagated, that Charles was cold and not fun with the children, and that she was the fun one.” Both parents cheerfully referred to Harry as the “spare”.
Raised by nannies himself, young Charles barely saw his own parents, Elizabeth and Philip, who, in today’s parlance, could be described as “emotionally unavailable”. For example, when Queen Elizabeth returned from one long foreign tour, she greeted him with a handshake.
Decades later, when Diana died in Paris in August 1997, Charles delivered the news to 12-year-old Harry as he lay in bed at Balmoral without a hug. According to Harry, his father put his hand on his knee and said, “It’s going to be OK”. In Spare he wrote: “That was quite a lot for him. Fatherly, hopeful, kind.” An impeccably backhanded compliment.
Of the two grieving boys, Harry felt particularly abandoned. “After Diana died, Charles neglected Harry,” says Tom Bower, who has written biographies about the King and Harry. “He spent his time either consolidating his relationship with Camilla or on his huge number of activities. He was a very busy man.”
Harry has spoken of showering his two children, Archie, six, and Lilibet, three, with the physical affection that he feels he didn’t receive. In a podcast in 2021 he reflected on his father’s emotional coldness, pointing out that Charles had been treated similarly by his own parents. He called it “genetic pain”.
Worlds apart
Difficult events have corroded Charles and Harry’s relationship, where the unique pressures of royal life amplify any fault lines. But they are also fundamentally different characters. Beyond superficial shared interests — playing polo, skiing and, until Meghan arrived, shooting — the two have little in common. Charles is a patrician aesthete, passionate about architecture, Shakespeare and the natural world. Harry is a good-time guy, at ease with people from all walks of life — just like his late mother.
At Eton College, where he boarded from 13 and struggled academically, Harry was largely left to his own devices. “I don’t think Charles had any respect for Harry’s lack of intelligence, lack of application,” says Bower. “When it came to William, he was very grateful that the Queen would see him every weekend at Windsor for tea to steer him towards being the heir, whereas Harry was just neglected.”
Charles focused on his own role — “the man never stops”, Harry once said of his father — and rehabilitating the public image of Camilla Parker Bowles, whom he married in 2005. For Charles,Camilla was a kindred spirit who offered a way out of his loneliness. But for a young Harry, she was the woman who helped to break up his parents’ marriage. In a revealing passage of Spare, Harry details how his old bedroom at Clarence House, where he lived with his father for most of his twenties, was later turned into Camilla’s dressing room. “I tried not to care,” he wrote. A smidge petty for a grown man, perhaps, but those who’ve wrestled with blended family dynamics might also understand such feelings.
After the frivolous teenage years, with minimal parental discipline and maximum partying, Harry found his feet — and some paternal approval. After discussing his options with his Pa — no, he couldn’t work in a fondue restaurant — he plumped to join the army. As a former helicopter pilot, Charles was thrilled by Harry’s focus and natural ability piloting Apaches, as well as his two tours of Afghanistan (in 2007-2008 and 2012).
He was similarly proud of Harry launching the Invictus Games for injured veterans in 2014. At the opening ceremony in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Harry made a speech to the crowd and was congratulated by his father as he sat down. “He was being kind,” Harry wrote in Spare. “He knew I’d rushed the speech. For once I was glad to not hear the raw truth from him.” (Last May, when Harry flew to the UK for the Invictus Games’s ten-year anniversary, Charles was absent and the two didn’t meet up.)
By his late twenties, the prince was reaching the end of his army career and suffering from panic attacks and anxiety. Despite their differences, Harry still confided in his father over dinner at Highgrove. Harry recalled his father’s words to him: “I suppose it’s my fault. I should’ve got you the help you needed years ago.”
Broken trust
In late 2016, when Meghan Markle, an American actress and divorcee, came on the scene, Charles was initially charmed. He was less impressed, however, when Harry sent an unprecedented plea to the press, asking them to leave his new girlfriend alone. At the time, Charles and Camilla had just begun a tour of the Middle East and this missive redirected the media’s attention.
“That was something which broke with the code of the royals,” says Morton, the royal biographer whose book on Churchill, Winston and the Windsors, comes out in October. “When a member of the royal family is abroad the focus is on them, not on the domestic royals. For Harry to give that fairly hysterical statement while his father was in the Middle East was seen as self-indulgent.” Poorly timed interactions with the media have been a Harry trademark ever since.
In May 2018 Charles walked Meghan down the aisle, but since then relations have spectacularly imploded, perhaps to the point of no return. The insiders I spoke to agreed that, in Charles’s mind, Harry has most egregiously crossed the line in attacking the Queen. He described his stepmother as “dangerous” and accused her of sacrificing him to the press “on her personal PR altar” in Spare.
Differing approaches to the media are another frontier in the father-son battle. Harry accuses his father’s office of issuing briefings against him, an accusation that has been denied. In March 2021 Harry and Meghan’s explosive two-hour interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which Meghan claimed that a member of the royal family had openly speculated about how dark their unborn child’s skin would be, marked a new low point in family trust and relations.
Last February Charles called his son to tell him of his cancer diagnosis before the news was made public. Harry immediately flew to the UK to see him. But the meeting at Clarence House lasted less than 45 minutes and, to Harry’s annoyance, Camilla was tellingly present throughout. “It’s unfortunate to say this but Camilla was probably there because Charles wanted a witness,” says Bedell Smith. “By then, there’d been such a breach of trust and I think Charles was worrying that things that he said might get out into the public.” A few days after that meeting, Harry was on American breakfast TV: “Any illness, any sickness, brings families together,” he said.
That wasn’t to be. Neither Charles’s cancer nor the Princess of Wales’s cancer, which is in remission, has helped to piece the fractured family together. Harry hasn’t seen his father since last February despite further trips to the UK. Charles hasn’t seen Archie or Lilibet since his mother’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022.
For Charles, the rift is a tender subject that he doesn’t typically discuss even with friends. “It seems to me one of those things that, if you wanted to have a cheerful evening or cheerful lunch, is probably best not to mention,” says a friend of the King.
Might the strains of Charles’s illness eventually bring them back together? Insiders maintain that the King is bemused by Harry’s repeated airing of laundry and that as long as William, Kate and Camilla have a say in the matter, Harry will be left out in the Californian wilderness.
“You could put a fair bit of dough on the fact that there is not going to be a reconciliation any time soon,” says Morton. “But the first rule of royal reporting is never say never.”