Picture the scene. Christmas Day at Sandringham. For the first time since 2018 the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are at the King’s table.
At its head, the King. Two down from the Princess Royal, a lifetime of public service under her belt, sits Duchess Meghan, whose own public life ran to around 20 months.
Beatrice and Eugenie further along, both princesses, titles and no royal jobs, as it has been since the day they were born. Their parents, Andrew and Sarah, weren’t on the guest list — for reasons well known by now, and a reminder that not every family tension around the royal table this year involves the Sussexes.
The Waleses decided to give this royal gathering a miss, making their own plans instead and heading to Bucklebury for Christmas with William’s in-laws, the Middletons.
This is the tricky scenario our King is being asked to navigate: Harry and Meghan are back in the UK.
A royal Christmas is of course, a private occasion at a private royal residence during the season of goodwill. Sandringham is the King’s house, and guests lay by his rules. His late mother, Queen Elizabeth, ran it that way for thirty years. Nobody gets a seat by right.
It will be the first big test of the new royal family dynamic.
© WireImageIt had been easier before, when the Sussexes were thousands of miles away in Montecito. But now they are back, it has got more complex.
The palace whispers - nothing said about it officially, no statements on headed paper - that there will be no half in, half out.
We are told by “palace sources” that the Sandringham summit deal of January 2020 still stands.
But given the Harry and Meghan media profile, and their history of sharing news through their own channels, that arrangement is already being tested to the limit.
Now for day-to-day practicalities.
© UK Press via Getty ImagesThe Crown - an integral part of our system of parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy - runs on a grid. Private secretaries of the sovereign, senior royals and senior politicians compare diaries months ahead so one engagement does not clash with another.
It only works because everyone inside accepts its authority, and there is, of course, a hierarchy, one built around precedence rather than public profile.
As it stands, the Sussexes sit outside that system, because they are private individuals. Their diary answers to commercial commitments in a way a working royal’s cannot.
A streaming release they are involved in is unlikely to shift its date around a hospice visit by the Princess of Wales. If a brand launch of Meghan’s landed on the same day as an important speech by William, it would likely go ahead regardless. The same could be true if she chose to share a few photographs of the children on social media.
There is precedent for it. In December 2019, the couple travelled to Canada and announced it through their own office, catching palace officials off guard.
No king can order his heir to forgive. Especially, when Harry has betrayed family trusts at the drop of a hat. But every reconciliation scenario being speculated rests, in the end, on William - and he has agreed to none of it yet.
As for the King, he was reportedly only told of his son’s homecoming plans on 16 August. Now 77, and living with cancer, he understandably wants a relationship with all his Sussex grandchildren. He has seen them only a couple of times in five years. Archie is seven, Lilibet is five, and neither can remember a royal Norfolk Christmas.
When Harry and Meghan sat down with him and the Queen at Highgrove in July, that was the opening moment in this new royal dynamic.
What he is unlikely to do is press his eldest son to simply fall in line and reconcile with a brother he currently has little relationship with.
No king can order his heir to forgive. Especially, when Harry has betrayed family trusts at the drop of a hat.
But every reconciliation scenario being speculated rests, in the end, on William - and he has agreed to none of it yet.
There are other big family gatherings too. Catherine’s annual carol service at Westminster Abbey, that comes first in December. Trooping in June. Royal Ascot. Public moments where any strain within the family, forced into a corner by Harry’s homecoming, becomes harder to hide. Forced smiles are easy to detect after all.
Long term, whatever arrangement is reached with the Sussexes under King Charles will very likely only last until the next accession.
Robert Jobson, author of The Windsor Legacy (Blink)
