In the days leading up to Trooping the Colour, the only real gossip was “why isn’t there any gossip?” Last year’s Trooping was positively a stand-alone soap opera with all of the storylines involving the Princess of Wales’s reemergence and King Charles’s first Trooping since his cancer diagnosis. This year’s Trooping felt like it could have been an email, and that’s how the media treated it too. The only buzzy thing was that several outlets (American and British) ran stories about “why isn’t Prince Harry coming to the parade” and “Harry SHOULD come to the parade!” Well, that was all a precursor to yet another annual story: Harry won’t go to Trooping because he wasn’t invited.
For the third year in a row, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have not been invited to Trooping the Colour — King Charles’ official birthday celebration and one of the royal family’s most high-profile annual events — set to take place this Saturday, June 14.
The decision continues a pattern set after Charles became monarch in 2022. The last time Harry and Meghan attended Trooping was during Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee in June 2022 — where they were noticeably kept out of the public spotlight, watching the parade from a separate room alongside other non-working royals and not joining the traditional balcony appearance.
Their ongoing absence comes as the family rift deepens. The Duke of Sussex, 40, recently lost a legal bid to reinstate his state-funded security in the U.K. and admitted in a BBC interview last month that he cannot envision bringing his wife and their two children — Prince Archie, 6, and Princess Lilibet, 4 — back to Britain under the current circumstances.
“I can’t see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the U.K. at this point,” he said.
The lack of an invitation to Trooping follows a series of strained moments between father and son — including Harry’s statement that King Charles is not currently speaking to him. Despite the silence, Harry has continued to express hope for a reunion.
Every year they dust off this annual story, I’m reminded of how QEII behaved during her Jubilee year, in what turned out to be her final months. She publicly and privately invited the Sussexes to come to the UK for Jubbly weekend, she invited them to watch the parade on the secondary balcony with all of the cousins, she invited them to her Jubbly service at St. Paul’s Cathedral AND she ensured that they had royal protection for the whole visit. This was never about “QEII wanted the Sussexes to be cast out and permanently marginalized.” QEII wanted the Sussexes to still be included in family and state events. Charles does not want that. Nor does he want Archie and Lili to visit. People Mag also ran a story about “Archie and Lili have never attended Trooping!” They never will attend it either.
What else? The Daily Beast’s Royalist wrote a piece called: “Harry-Shaped Hole Haunts King Charles’ Birthday Parade.” The only way anyone wants to gossip about the fakakta parade is by bringing up Harry. Anyway, Tom Sykes’ piece is just about the history of Trooping and how QEII loved to have her whole extended family up there, but Charles prefers “the increasingly geriatric rump of the royal family not so much slimmed down as anorexic.” Ouch! Sykes also wrote: “Charles’ failure to bring his son back into the fold is always highlighted on occasions such as these, and today’s pomp and ceremony was no different.” What’s worse is that the anorexic balcony was mirrored by an anorexic crowd size – the conversation about Harry is really just a reflection of the larger problem: the Windsors are sinking in their own irrelevance.
Photos courtesy of Instar, Avalon Red.
