LONDON, Sept 11 (Bernama-PA Media/dpa) — Prince Harry has reunited with King Charles II for the first time in 19 months, after he joined his father for a private tea at Clarence House, PA Media/dpa reported.
The pair’s long-awaited face to face meeting at the king’s residence in London, which lasted just 54 minutes, comes after Harry publicly expressed hopes of a reconciliation with his family in May.
Following the meeting, Buckingham Palace confirmed that the monarch and Harry spent time together at Charles’s London home.
Harry was driven through the gates of the royal residence on Wednesday afternoon following an earlier engagement at the Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College London.
The Duke of Sussex arrived at Clarence House in a black Range Rover at 5.20 pm and left at 6.14 pm ahead of an engagement with the Invictus Games Foundation on Wednesday evening.
He ducked down inside the car as he was driven out of the premises, with the vehicle illuminated by camera flashes as it drove past a crowd of journalists while leaving the royal residence.
The king, who is still undergoing treatment for cancer, arrived in London from Balmoral on Wednesday, the penultimate day of his youngest son’s four-day trip to the UK – which increased speculation that the pair would meet.
Charles had a run of official duties behind closed doors including a Privy Council meeting at St James’s Palace, adjacent to Clarence House, in the afternoon, following by a one-to-one investiture with Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg at 4:15 pm in the Morning Drawing Room at Clarence House.
This offered a window of opportunity for the king and Harry to meet, before the duke had to leave for his pre-planned Invictus Games event and the king had an audience at 6.15 pm with the Premier of South Australia, Peer Malinauskas at Clarence House.
Harry was due to arrive at his Invictus Games reception in the City of London at 6:45 pm but organisers said he was running late, before he finally arrived at 7.24 pm.
It is believed the duke travelled to the event straight after seeing his father but traffic has been very heavy in central London this week due to an ongoing Tube strike.
The duke, who stepped down as a senior working royal in 2020, no longer benefits from blue-light police escorts which would have whisked him through any travel chaos.
Harry last saw the King in February last year when he made a trans-Atlantic dash from his Californian home to the UK to see Charles following his cancer diagnosis.
The pair’s previous meeting was less than 24 hours after the announcement of the King’s health and was without Harry’s wife, the Duchess of Sussex, and their children.
The face-to-face encounter in February 2024 appeared to last for just over 30 minutes – with the latest meeting also lasting less than an hour ahead of the duke’s evening engagement.
The duke has levelled a barrage of accusations at the king, stepmother the queen, brother Prince of Wales, and sister-in-law the Princess of Wales in his Oprah interview, Netflix documentary, interviews, and his autobiography Spare since moving to the US.
Harry previously claimed Charles was jealous of Meghan and Kate, did not hug him when he told him his mother Diana, Princess of Wales had died, and said he believed the King was “never made” for single parenthood, but “to be fair, he tried.”
Charles, according to the duke, pleaded with his sons during a tense meeting after the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral: “Please, boys. Don’t make my final years a misery.”
Harry remains estranged from his brother William, who has been busying himself with a flurry of engagements this week and was away in Cardiff on Wednesday visiting a new mental health hub on World Suicide Prevention Day.
Royal watchers will be waiting to see if Harry keeps quiet and refrains from publicly discussing his reunion with the king, and, on the other side, whether any briefings emerge from Palace.
Senior aides to the king and the duke were pictured together in London this July in what was reported to be an initial step towards opening channels of communication between the two households.
— BERNAMA-PA MEDIA/dpa
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