Can there be anything more painful than a parent’s estrangement from an adult child? Or more unnatural than the severing of ties just as life’s greatest transitions are taking place?
There will be families across the land reading this who are all too familiar with the sense of deep loss, the endless ruminations, the bitter recriminations when one of their own walks away. Forever.
The hurt and heartbreak of family breakdown are no respecters of rank or royalty, as King Charles and Prince Harry have discovered in the course of these last few years.
Father and son have been at odds with one another to the point it’s hard to remember their once respectful if not affectionate relationship; a product of his upbringing, Charles did his best.
Yes, we all remember the little boy who, once upon a time, clung to his father’s hand behind Diana’s coffin. But even if we have forgotten that it was Charles who insisted that his 12-year-old walk behind his mother body, Harry had not.
A lot of water has flowed under Tower Bridge since then. But Harry remembers this and every other wrong perpetrated against him.
Now a father of two, here is a man who nurses his grievances to keep them warm.
His fury at perceived slights made against him and wife Meghan – bearing in mind Her Late Great Majesty’s sage observation that recollections may vary – has meant that private turmoil has played out in public, which has done nothing to bring about any lasting rapprochement with his family, and especially his father.
In a hyper-connected world of social media and digital platform, where baby pictures can be exchanged at a keystroke and warm words in a millisecond, there is something uniquely tragic about the deliberate silence between a father and son.
And so in one corner we have Charles, a greying but dignified 76-year-old battling with cancer yet still wedded to duty as he enters his twilight years.
In the other, we have 40-year-old Harry, a balding, truculent midlife husband, idling his days in Montecito without any clear role as his wife records her shiny if pointless cookery show.
Next week he flies over to Britain. I hope with every fibre of my being that these two meet, away from the cameras, behind closed doors at Clarence House and make finally make peace.
Strip away the uniforms, the palaces, the privilege, and theirs is a story as old as time – and like the tide, it waits for neither man nor monarch.
Hard as it may be to make the first move, it is nevertheless up to Charles to offer an olive branch. Not as King, Defender of the Faith or indeed The Firm, but as a father to a son.
Nothing can make good Harry’s shocking Oprah interview, the appalling allegations contained in Spare, or any of the wild accusations about the removal of his security detail.
