A.N. Wilson: Harry must reflect on behaviour to his family

Illnesses in families can be the cause of reconciliations, so it is encouraging to learn that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have sent a tender private message to their brother and sister-in-law after the Princess of Wales’s moving announcement.

This communication, which followed a public statement from Montecito wishing Kate “health and healing”, is said to have been the first in months between the warring Wales brothers.

Let’s all hope that the truce, if there is one, lasts and that Meghan and Harry are eventually welcomed back into the royal family, and – one day, perhaps – into the hearts of the British nation.

Lord knows the royals could do with it.

With the King and Kate both temporarily out of action through illness, there’s a real need for others to pitch in, especially in the low-profile, less glamorous work of charities and patronages.

Let’s also not forget Donald Trump’s veiled threat, if he is reelected to the White House this November, that he might expel Harry from the United States for allegedly giving misleading accounts of his previous drug use in his visa application.

“If he lied, they’ll have to take appropriate action,” the ex- President said.

Were this frankly hilarious development to take place, Meghan would presumably be asked to give up her Californian lifestyle – to say nothing of her hotly anticipated new luxury jam enterprise – and bring Archie and Lilibet to live in Windsor Great Park, and perhaps go to school with George, Charlotte and Louis.

If you were writing the script of the royal soap opera, you could not hope for a more delicious twist in the plot.

So, yes, let’s hope that Sussex and Cambridge alike forgive and befriend one another again, in spite of all the dreadful things that have been said.

Yet still I ask myself: How must Harry have felt last Friday when he heard Kate’s sad news, so bravely expressed?

It is he, after all, who averred in his tawdry Netflix show: “I think, for so many people in the family – especially obviously the men – there can be a temptation or an urge to marry someone who would fit the mould as opposed to somebody who you perhaps are destined to be with.”

His meaning was clear. He, Harry, had married for love: whereas William, and perhaps their father, had coldly married someone who merely looked the part, out of a misguided sense of duty.

The ill feeling that ensued from this deplorable claim only deepened when Harry and Meghan’s ghastly mouthpiece, Omid Scobie, wrote in his error-strewn anti-monarchist book Endgame that Kate was a “Stepford-like royal wife” who was content to be a “voiceless symbol”. (Sources later admitted to Scobie that “there is no way (Kate) could ever trust (the Sussexes) after all their interviews.”)

Before Harry met Meghan, he and Kate had been true friends: by his own admission, she was “the sister I’ve never had and always wanted”.

So if her brave video last week achieved anything, I hope it made Harry reflect on how he has had treated her. After all, it seems to me that a great many of the problems facing the royal family at the moment can be laid at his and Meghan’s door.

It is they who lifted the lid on the rift between the two brothers.

It is they who raised the inflammatory claim that some royals are secret racists.

It is they who insulted Kate, knowing she could not respond.

Their foolish decision to go public with their seething resentments against the House of Windsor has done far more damage to the royal image than any supposed intrusions into their privacy by the press, let alone the delusional fantasies of social media trolls.

The truth is, Harry and Meghan were too self-absorbed and ultimately too lazy to carry out the day-to-day slog of royal duty which Kate, Princess Anne and the King and Queen have so faithfully done for years.

Their little strops, and their decision to flounce out in early 2020, were a sort of mini-abdication.

And the energy with which they have derided and vilified the royal family is another way in which they seem to want to echo the bad behaviour of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, aka the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (The eerie thing is that as time goes by, Meghan has increasingly come to look like Wallis, her fellow American divorcee.)

Harry, in short, has a lot of patching up to do – and it would be a wonderful thing if Kate’s sad news were the spur to him feeling, and even expressing, a shred of humility for a change.

Yes, we should take some comfort from the private message that he and Meghan have sent the Prince and Princess of Wales. But be under no illusion: much work remains to be done to heal this rift, if healed it ever can be.