Harry says King is ‘great, thank you’ as they reunite after 19 months apart

The Duke of Sussex has reunited with the King for the first time in 19 months, revealing his father was “great, thank you” shortly after their private tea at Clarence House.

Harry appeared relaxed, smiling and upbeat as he mingled with corporate sponsors and Government ministers at an Invictus reception at The Gherkin in the City of London on Wednesday evening.

His public appearance came just over an hour after he left Charles’s London residence where the father and son spent time together face to face after nearly two years apart.

The pair’s long-awaited meeting, which lasted just 54 minutes, comes after Harry publicly expressed hopes of a reconciliation with his family in May.

Asked how his father was by a reporter shortly after arriving at the Invictus reception, Harry replied: “Yes he’s great, thank you.”

The duke, who entered on the top floor atrium to stunning views across London, had travelled directly to the event after seeing his father at Clarence House, but was delayed by around 40 minutes due to traffic.

He had been driven through the gates of the royal residence on Wednesday afternoon following an earlier engagement at the Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College London.

The duke arrived at Clarence House in a black Range Rover at 5.20pm and left at 6.14pm ahead of an engagement with the Invictus Games Foundation on Wednesday evening.

He ducked down inside the car as he was driven out of the premises, with the vehicle illuminated by camera flashes as it drove past a crowd of journalists while leaving the royal residence.

Buckingham Palace confirmed Harry joined Charles for tea.

The King skips lunch each day, but takes a break for afternoon tea at around 5pm, with sandwiches and cakes, and his favoured Darjeeling with honey and milk.

The King, who is still undergoing treatment for cancer, arrived in London from Balmoral on Wednesday, the penultimate day of his youngest son’s four-day trip to the UK – which increased speculation that the pair would meet.

Charles had a run of official duties behind closed doors including a Privy Council meeting at St James’s Palace, adjacent to Clarence House, in the afternoon, following by a one-to-one investiture with Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg at 4.15pm in the Morning Drawing Room at Clarence House.

This offered a window of opportunity for the King and Harry to meet, before the duke had to leave for his pre-planned Invictus Games event and the King had an audience at 6.15pm with the Premier of South Australia, Peer Malinauskas at Clarence House.

Harry was due to arrive at his Invictus Games reception in the City of London at 6.45pm but organisers said he was running late, before he finally arrived at 7.24pm.

Traffic has been very heavy in central London this week due to an ongoing Tube strike.

At the reception where he met sponsors and supporters, the duke gave a speech and began by joking about his long journey across the capital.

He made his guests laugh when he said: “I think this whole thing has been delayed slightly, so at this point you’re all hammered – which was part of the plan all along, stuck up here at the top of the Gherkin.”

The duke, who stepped down as a senior working royal in 2020, no longer benefits from blue-light police escorts which would have whisked him through any travel chaos.

Harry last saw the King in February last year when he made a transatlantic dash from his Californian home to the UK to see Charles following his cancer diagnosis.

The pair’s previous meeting was less than 24 hours after the announcement about the King’s health and was without Harry’s wife, the Duchess of Sussex, and their children.

The face-to-face encounter in February 2024 appeared to last for just over 30 minutes – with the latest meeting also lasting less than an hour ahead of the duke’s evening engagement.

The duke, who stepped down from the working monarchy in 2020, has levelled a barrage of accusations at the King, stepmother the Queen, brother Prince of Wales and sister-in-law the Princess of Wales in his Oprah interview, Netflix documentary, interviews and his autobiography Spare since moving to the US.

Harry previously claimed Charles was jealous of Meghan and Kate, did not hug him when he told him his mother Diana, Princess of Wales had died, and said he believed the King was “never made” for single parenthood, but “to be fair, he tried”.

Charles, according to the duke, pleaded with his sons during a tense meeting after the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral: “Please, boys. Don’t make my final years a misery.”

Harry remains estranged from his brother William, who has been busying himself with a flurry of engagements this week and was away in Cardiff on Wednesday visiting a new mental health hub on World Suicide Prevention Day.

Royal watchers will be waiting to see if Harry keeps quiet and refrains from publicly discussing his reunion with the King, and, on the other side, whether any briefings emerge from Palace.

Senior aides to the King and the duke were pictured together in London this July in what was reported to be an initial step towards opening channels of communication between the two households.