Don’t Tell William, but Harry Wants to Spend ‘More and More’ Time in the UK

It sounds like Prince Harry has had enough of sitting around in Montecito watching his wife make jam. His people are briefing that Harry is planning to make “more and more” visits to the U.K. after a successful trip last month when he finally managed to get together with his father.

Roya Nikkah, royal editor of The Sunday Times, reports that Harry will be back in Britain next month for a week-long trip with engagements for the charity WellChild, and the Invictus Games, the multi-sport event for disabled veterans that Harry founded 12 years ago. The next Invictus Games are to be held in the English city of Birmingham next July, and Harry wants to step up the frequency of his visits before then, as well as more actively support the various U.K.-based charities with which he’s still involved.

“He wants more and more of a foothold here, more trips back, less courtroom drama. And he always love seeing his family.”

If we set aside the “less courtroom drama” remark for a moment, The Royalist has no doubt that Harry would indeed like to spend more time in the U.K., even without the automatic taxpayer-funded police protection that he’s been pushing for. But this still sounds like wishful thinking on his part.

Nikkah says Harry felt “buoyed, very happy and really energized” after last month’s trip, when he and Meghan and their children Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5, were received by the King and Queen at Charles’ private estate in Gloucestershire, Highgrove. It was a momentous occasion: the first time Charles had seen his California-based grandchildren in four years.

But no advance notice was given of the meeting, and no photos or footage were released afterward. We still don’t know what they spoke about.

So what’s going to happen on his next trip home, or the one after that? Will Charles and Camilla receive him again? Will Meghan and the kids come along for the ride? Would it be another clandestine meeting, iPhones confiscated on arrival and with the Sussexes sworn to eternal secrecy? That’s never going to satisfy Harry, let alone his wife. He wants to rebuild his royal career, or at least fashion something resembling it, not to be treated as a family pariah, only one step up from his Uncle Andrew.

Plus, the family goes beyond Charles and Camilla. There’s also William and Catherine, Prince and Princess of Wales, and there’s no sign of any olive branches being offered from that quarter, however much Charles would like to see his sons reconciled. William felt profoundly, absolutely, unforgivably betrayed by his brother’s decision to spill all on their private lives in his best-selling ghostwritten memoir Spare, and in the interviews he did to promote it. The two brothers, once so close after living through the trauma of their mother’s death in 1997, no longer speak.

The 77-year-old monarch is responding fantastically well to his cancer treatment that once looked likely to curtail his reign, so the power dynamic in the Windsor family has shifted. But Charles will know that there can be no real return to royal life for Harry without William’s consent.

And the “courtroom drama” that Harry says he wants to see less of, that still has to play out after his humiliating defeat to the publisher of The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. Harry and his six co-claimants, including Sir Elton John and Elizabeth Hurley, accused Mail reporters of having used illegal means to gather their information. But the most expensive and complex privacy case in British legal history crumbled in the courtroom and Mr Justice Nicklin found in the newspapers’ favor on all 97 claims of unlawful information gathering.

Associated Newspapers says its costs exceeded £34 million ($46 million) and wants Harry and his co-defendants to pay £10 million upfront before a final costs hearing in the next couple of weeks. It’s going to prove a very expensive mistake for Harry.