Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex has had a few exciting years – if we’re talking frequent flyer points, that is.
This week he will add to his grand total when he does the Los Angeles-London hop in the confines of first class.
While his wife Meghan the Duchess of Sussex might have dodged having to do battle with jet lag and a nation that, statistically, has the serious beef with both of them, for Harry, this return to the shores of his homeland will be his 11th trip in just over three years.
Bet he’s really getting to know the LAX duty-free offering pretty well.
This week the Duke of Sussex will make the ten-plus hour flight back to the UK to attend a May 8 St. Paul’s church service to mark the 10th anniversary of his highly successful and universally applauded Invictus Games.
This should be a victory lap for the 39-year-old, a nice bit of icing on a nice bit of cake after a decade of changing an untold number of lives.
Instead, Harry faces a return trip unlike any other.
Since the duke was last in the UK in February, after King Charles announced that he had cancer, the royal world has tilted on its axis with the horribly, eerily similar announcement that Kate the Princess of Wales does as well.
The truly shocking news that both His Majesty and the princess are battling cancer means that Harry’s usual in-and-out-in-under-48-hours sprint might not be possible this time.
Generally, these UK dashes follow something of a predictable pattern.
The duke flies in with the tabloids monitoring his flight like the NSA tracking Edward Snowden, whence he arrives and is whisked out of Heathrow via private car.
Harry is then whisked into London in the back of a Range Rover while looking generally thunderous and like he’s dearly regretting choosing the fish over the chicken.
Then, the duke spends somewhere between 24 and 48 hours in Britain to do one or two very specific events before he about turns and positively sprints back to the United States of Hey-Didn’t-You-Used-To-Be-Royal …
Just what is a returning self-exiled pot-stirring duke to do?
On one hand, Harry not seeing his ailing relatives will hardly help his sharing, caring image; of he and Meghan as the far more emotionally attuned sensitive sorts than those stony Windsors.
On the other hand, it sounds like Kate has all but deleted his number while the King is not exactly champing at the bit for the duke to pop over and enthuse about the healing powers of colonics.
Kate’s attitude towards any sort of Harry meeting sounds like it can best be summarised by what Princess Anne told a wannabe kidnapper who tried to snatch her in 1974: “Not bloody likely.”
A friend of hers and husband Prince William told Sykes: “Both sides understand each other’s position clearly now. William and Catherine felt completely betrayed by Harry’s memoir “Spare.”
They don’t speak to Harry and Meghan, and they are certainly not about to start when Catherine is at her most vulnerable.
Hours after the princess revealed in late March that she is undergoing preventive chemotherapy, the Sussexes put out a statement that skipped over her title, failed to name William or the kids and which wished her “health and healing.”
A former Harry and current William friend told Sykes that we shouldn’t expect the princess’s health battle to see any sort of Wales-Sussex Yalta conference of hearts-on-sleeves or a teary reunion.
“[Harry is] just another person who sold his story to the papers. A ‘get well soon’ message is neither here nor there,” the friend told the Beast. “But the whole situation doesn’t use up a huge amount of their mental energy anymore. William and Kate have accepted it and moved on.”
The Duke of Sussex faces a marginally warmer reception from his father than an outright, possibly mutual, Wales snubbing.
The Telegraph’s Victoria Ward has reported that the King “will make time to see his son if he is able,” which really goes a way to showing how eager the 75-year-old sovereign is to spend time with his TV-dabbler son.
More than a week before Harry has to start packing his carry-on suitcase, Buckingham Palace was already making noise about how full Charles’ schedule is looking when Harry is in town.
(Harry better hope there are no Estonian trade delegations that the beleaguered post-Brexit Foreign Office suddenly needs the King to attend on or around May 8.)
Ward writes that, even if father and son do manage to end up in the same room, it won’t be a lengthy deep and meaningful because Charles’s schedule is “quite busy.”
As far as exercises in expectation management go, this is up there.
What’s so extraordinary, what still makes my head spin, is that six years ago right about now, not only Britain but the world was riding the incredible high ahead of Harry and Meghan’s wedding.
When they tied the knot on May 19, It was a day so joyous and sunny that it demanded the word “fairytale” be used to absolute, exhausting, death.
Harry and Meghan, absolutely pretty much everyone in possession of a keyboard and a column agreed, were The Great Hopes of the monarchy.
And yet when the Duke of Sussex arrives in London this week, it won’t just be to find that his father and sister-in-law have little to no time to see him but he will also be forced to stay in a hotel, having lost access to a royal roof over his head and having been stripped of his police protection.
No man is an island, John Donne wrote, but a duke who has managed to burn every bridge in sight? That is another matter entirely.
