Prince Harry surprised fans as he lifted the lid on a fall-out with Prince William and Princess Kate at Easter time, prior to his estrangement from the royal family.
Harry is currently back in the UK as part of his ongoing security court battle. However, he failed to see his father the King before he left for Italy, and is unlikely to reunite with the Waleses, either, despite the fact that his nephews and niece – George, Louis, and Charlotte – are on their school break. Following the Sussexes’ shock decision to quit royal life in January 2020, Harry and Meghan have publicly attacked the royals on a number of occasions, from their tell-all Oprah interview, to Harry’s explosive claims in his tell-all memoir, Spare.
And it was in the latter that he spoke about a rift with William and Kate over Easter. He recalled a day back in June 2018 when he and Meghan invited Kate and William round for tea in Nottingham Cottage, in order to establish why Kate and Meghan had “got off on the wrong foot”.
Harry wrote, “For 10 minutes we did the classic small talk. How are the kids? How was your honeymoon?
“Meg then acknowledged the tension among the four of us and ventured that it might go back to those early days when she’d first joined the family – a misunderstanding that had almost passed without notice. Kate thought Meg had wanted her fashion contacts. But Meg had her own,” Harry added.
He continued, “They’d got off on the wrong foot perhaps? And then, Meg added, everything got magnified by the wedding, and those infernal bridesmaids’ dresses.”
However, it transpired that there was another issue bothering Prince William and Kate. According to Harry, a lack of Easter gifts that year had really struck a sour note with the couple.
“But it turned out there were other things… about which we’d been unaware. Willy and Kate were apparently upset that we hadn’t given them Easter presents,” the Duke continues.
“Easter presents? Was that a thing? Willy and I had never exchanged Easter presents. Pa always made a big deal about Easter, sure, but that was Pa. Still, if Willy and Kate were upset, we apologised.
“For our part, we chipped in that we weren’t too pleased when Willy and Kate switched place cards and changed seats at our wedding. We’d followed the American tradition, placing couples next to each other, but Willy and Kate didn’t like that tradition, so their table was the only one where spouses were apart.”
Fast-forward to present day, and the gulf between Harry and his family is wider than ever. It’s thought that he has now not seen his father King Charles in person for 14 months – despite the fact they were mere miles apart just this week.
Harry, 40, arrived at London Heathrow on Sunday, while Charles, 76, was in the capital for rescheduled cancer treatment ahead of his official trip to Italy . They did not see each other, however.
The Duke is in London for a hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice, where he has again challenged the decision to remove his security in the UK.
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It is the last roll of the dice in his effort to win automatic state-backed security for him and his family whenever they return to the UK – something he was no longer afforded when he quit life as a working royal.
Last February, Harry ‘comprehensively lost’ his legal battle with the Home Office when Mr Justice Lane ruled that a decision made by the Royal and VIP Executive Committee (Ravec) had not been irrational or procedurally unfair.
However, his barrister, Shaheed Fatima KC, is now arguing that “he has been singled out for different, unjustified and inferior treatment”. She also claimed that Harry and Meghan had been “forced” to step back from royal duties because “they considered they were not being protected by the institution”.
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