King Charles stares down Harry, Meghan hit

As America prepares to celebrate 250 years since they turfed out the Brits and told them where they could stick their buttered crumpets, two of the country’s most famous residents are putting down their matcha lattes and first amendment rights and trotting back to Blighty.

In early July, Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their children Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet will touch down in the UK, the first time that the whole family has been back since June 2022, a time when Queen Elizabeth was still on the throne, AI was just a hoodie-wearing boy billionaire’s Gibsonian wet dream and Taylor Swift was single.

Prepare yourself. The Sussex squall that is about to hit the UK is shaping up to be a true storm, featuring the family potentially taking up temporary residence in Buckingham Palace, the kids maybe making some sort of public debut, and a moist-eyed reunion for King Charles and his American grandchildren.

This trip is all upside for Harry and Meghan – emotional, personal, professional and financial – but for the King? Going out on a weak, sapling limb to try and rehabilitate his “darling boy” and his family comes with the same risk level as letting Prince Philip take the wheel of his Land Rover.

Only days after news.com.au’s Bronte Coy exclusively broke the news of the trip, Brits woke up to read that support for the monarchy is the lowest it has been since Ipsos began polling on the subject in 1993. Currently, only 55 per cent of people are in favour of the institution, down from a high of 80 per cent in 2012.

There is a PhD thesis in the ‘why’ of this slippage or I can sum it up for you with just the letters A, N, D, R, E and W.

(Something else that has probably not helped support has been the Sussexes’ years of making Crown Inc out to be a ruthless, stony-hearted bunch whose attitudes towards race belong in the time when the pith helmet reigned supreme.)

The calculation that Charles is doing in throwing open the doors of the royal family for the Sussexes makes for some tricky maths – An institution leaking support like a bung hose is backing a couple whose UK popularity has been in freefall for years. This does immediately strike one as a bang up, sure-fire recipe for PR success.

For the King, the Grand Sussex Return is a gamble of the sort that would make a Monte Carlo croupier wince. His Majesty might reportedly want to be seen as a magnanimous, conciliatory man, deeply driven by his Christian beliefs and all that forgiveness business that the disciples and other sandal-wearers liked to bang on about, but do Brits feel the same way?

The most recent polling, done in April, shows that fewer than one in three Brits (30 per cent) have a favourable view of Harry and just one in five (20 per cent) for Meghan.

It is against this backdrop that Charles could be set to hand the Sussexes keys to a Buckingham Palace apartment. Someone energetically ring the symbolism bell please.

While it has been confirmed that the King has offered the Sussexes a royal property for their visit, thus also offering them the protection of the security envelopes that surround His Majesty’s homes, it is not known which one it might be. The options being broadly mooted were Sandringham, Highgrove and St James’s Palace.

Then along came The Royalist’s Tom Sykes to report the possibility that the King could have offered up Monarchy HQ itself saying he was hearing that “Buckingham Palace is back in the frame”.

Here’s the real meat of the thing – this stay might not be a one-off overnighter but could set the “precedent”, Sykes has said, for more such royal stays for the Sussexes.

Of the King’s offer of royal accommodation to Harry, Sykes has said, “to all extents and purposes” what His Majesty is handing Harry is “a residence back within a royal palace” where he will “be able to leave his toothbrush”.

Take into consideration too here the moment the Sussex family are returning to the UK, with the country about to get its sixth prime minister in ten years, a middling flu season away from the national health service falling apart, and financially beleaguered families struggling to pay for bulk teabags.

So at this moment, the King letting bygones bygone and seemingly rewarding two people who have spent the past few years bagging the UK with a Palace bolthole is quite the punt.

But. Maybe. What about … if the Sussexes’ palace return is actually Charles playing the long game, a sport he has mastered over the years?

In the 90s, the King was deeply, deeply disliked and the then Camilla Parker-Bowles was the UK’s most hated woman by a fag-puffing, fox-hunting country mile. They were the Sussexes of their day, so to speak.

And yet Charles managed to engineer the reputational equivalent of raising the Titanic and setting sail to New York. If you had told anyone circa 1993 that one day Queen Camilla would be crowned inside Westminster Abbey, it would have seemed about as plausible as Margaret Thatcher covering Maxim.

Still, the King pulled it off and maybe he can and will do the same thing for Harry and Meghan.

The duke’s favourability numbers might be in a sorry state but don’t write off the reservoirs of public affection that still exist for the boy who walked behind his mother’s coffin. If the UK is reacquainted with original flavour Harry, high-fiving, selfie-ing and hugging his way through charity events, that could go a long way to wiping the slate clean-ish at least.

Then let’s deal out the wildcard – whether Archie and Lili could be about to make their ‘royal’ debut. According to the Daily Mail, there are “indications” that Harry might bring the small prince and princess to “public-facing events” during the trip such as the Invictus Birmingham one year to go celebration.

A source told the Mail: “Nobody understands how this can happen given Harry’s feelings about having been used as a child in the service of the monarchy. But it looks like July could be the big reveal of [Archie and Lili’s] faces.”

The sight of the duke in doting dad mode could go a long way to reframing his image after all those years of sour finger-pointing. The duchess, maybe, too.

And if there was some sort of photo of Charles with Harry and Meghan and the kids? Warm, touching, and genuine? That could either soften calcified British hearts and remind them of the couple whose romance and wedding they gloried in … or dent the King and take support down a peg.

For now that is, anyway. Charles runs an institution that predates the printing press by at least 400 years, which works on the sort of timescale where things are jotted down on vellum. The next poll or ten polls don’t matter; the only thing that does is whether the Crown is still chugging along in 2126.

Daniela Elser is an editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with Australia’s leading media titles.