Illnesses in families can be the cause of reconciliation. It was heartening to read that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had sent a tender private message to their brother and sister-in-law following the Princess of Wales’s moving announcement.
The communication, which followed a public statement from Montecito wishing Kate “health and healing,” is believed to have been the first in months between the feuding Welsh brothers.
Let’s all hope that the truce, if there is one, holds and that Meghan and Harry are eventually welcomed back into the royal family, and – one day perhaps – into the hearts of the British nation.
God knows the royal family can do something with it. With the King and Kate both temporarily out of action due to illness, there is a real need for others to contribute, especially in the low-profile, less glamorous work of charities and patronages.
Harry and Meghan appear to want to mirror the bad behavior of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, aka the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, says AN Wilson
How must Harry have felt last Friday when he heard Kate’s sad news, so bravely expressed?
Let us also not forget Donald Trump’s veiled threat, if re-elected to the White House in November, that he could deport Harry from the United States for making misleading statements about his past drug use in his visa application. “If he lied, they will have to take appropriate action,” the ex-president said.
If this downright hilarious development were to occur, Meghan would presumably be asked to give up her Californian lifestyle – not to mention her long-awaited new venture into luxury jams – and leave Archie and Lilibet living in Windsor Great Park, and perhaps attending school to go. with George, Charlotte and Louis. If you were writing the script for the royal soap opera, you couldn’t hope for a more delightful twist in the plot.
So yes, let’s hope that both Sussex and Cambridge forgive each other and become friends again, despite all the terrible things that have been said.
Yet I still ask myself: How must Harry have felt last Friday when he heard Kate’s sad news, so courageously expressed?
After all, it is he who claimed in his tasteless Netflix show: ‘I think for so many people in the family – especially obviously the men – there can be a temptation or an urge to marry someone who would fit the mold . to someone you might be meant to be with.”
His meaning was clear. He, Harry, had married for love, while William, and perhaps their father too, had cold-bloodedly married someone who only looked good, out of a misplaced sense of duty.
The ill feeling that arose from this deplorable claim only deepened when Harry and Meghan’s ghastly mouthpiece, Omid Scobie, wrote in his error-strewn anti-monarchist book Endgame that Kate was a “Stepford-esque royal woman” who was content to a ‘voiceless symbol’. (Sources later admitted to Scobie that “There was no way Kate could ever trust (the Sussexes) after all their interviews.”)
Before Harry met Meghan, he and Kate had been real friends: she was, in his own words, “the sister I never had and always wanted.”
So if her brave video last week did anything, I hope it made Harry think about how he treated her.
After all, it seems to me that a lot of the problems currently facing the Royal Family can be blamed on him and Meghan.
It is they who opened the rift between the two brothers. It is they who put forward the inflammatory claim that some royals are secret racists. They are the ones who offended Kate, knowing she couldn’t respond.
Their foolish decision to make public their seething resentment of the House of Windsor has done far more damage to the royal image than any perceived invasion of their privacy by the press, let alone the delusions of social media trolls.
Kate and William and the Sussexes attend the Queen’s funeral in September 2022, by which time the rift had already hardened
The truth is that he and Meghan were too self-centered and ultimately too lazy to carry out the day-to-day royal duties that Kate, Princess Anne and the King and Queen have done so faithfully for years.
Their small steps and decision to come out in early 2020 were a mini-abdication of sorts. And the malice with which they have mocked and vilified the Royal Family is another way in which they seem to want to mirror the bad behavior of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, aka the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (The creepy thing is that as time goes by, Meghan becomes more and more like Wallis, her fellow American divorcee.)
We should take some solace in the private message the Sussexes sent the Prince and Princess of Wales. But we should be under no illusions: much work remains to be done to close this gap, if that is ever possible.