The Royal Family will use events around the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee to bring Harry and Meghan closer to the rest of the family, according to one expert.
After years of bad blood, Kate Mansey, assistant editor at the Mail on Sunday says she believes that the Queen wants a rapprochement with the Sussexes who quit royal working life in 2020.
‘There is generally a sense that they want to bring the Sussexes in, I think. They will be invited to lots of family occasions, just not the big, official numbers,’ she tells our royal talk show Palace Confidential.
That doesn’t mean the initial encounters won’t be awkward says the Daily Mail’s Royal Editor Rebecca English, with much speculation about how the Sussexes will interact with the rest of the royals at a Jubilee thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral on June 3.
‘The amount of time that they’re seen interacting with other family members on camera will be fairly limited,’ she tells the programme. ‘But as one source said to me the other week, the body language is going to be fascinating. I just hope for the Queen’s sake it doesn’t overshadow everything else that’s going on over the weekend.’
The Mail on Sunday’s Editor At Large Charlotte Griffiths says the royal balcony will miss Harry’s humour.
‘Harry cold have been the Duke of Edinburgh Mark Two, and we kind of need that,’ she says. ‘The Royal Family do take themselves very seriously but there is a fun side to them and Harry just would have been brilliant at that and he could have brought a jocular side to balcony moments and things like that and we’ve lost that now.’
Meanwhile royal biographer Hugo Vickers talks to the programme about A Royal Life, the memoirs he co-wrote with the Duke of Kent. The Daily Mail’s Diary Editor Richard Eden believes that the duke’s life shows what an opportunity has Harry missed.
‘It emphasises what we’ve lost and what I think Prince Harry could have been if he’d put loyalty and service at the forefront,’ he tells the show. ‘I think they married very different women, I think Meghan didn’t seem to have a plan to serve and to want to stay in this country. And I think she’s helped encourage Harry to quit the Royal Family. Whereas in the Duke of Kent’s case, he had a wife who was very supportive and did all she could to help him.’