Palace reacts to Harry-Charles ‘routine exchange’

An unprecedented meeting caused a chain reaction about a royal reconciliation between King Charles and his estranged son Prince Harry in their years-long feud.

The monarch and his younger son have reportedly not been on speaking terms since the past 18 months, following the Charles’s cancer diagnosis.

Harry also declared in his BBC interview that his father had not been speaking to him due to his security appeal, which ended in a ‘devastating’ verdict for the Duke of Sussex.

Last week, Harry’s chief of staff and communications director, Meredith Maines, and U.K. spokesperson, Liam Maguire, met with King Charles’s communications secretary, Tobyn Andreae, in an informal meeting at a London members-only club. The informal sit-down was only a stone’s throw away from the monarch’s residence, Clarence House.

Following the leak of the private exchange, sources told People Magazine that it was a “good first step” and it is “always better to be talking.”

The source added that this was a “positive step” and there is “optimism that it can be taken forward.”

While there is fresh hope that the father and son would finally be coming together, palace insiders tried to downplay the importance of the exchange.

The insiders claimed that this was merely a “routine professional exchange between senior communications staff who simply need to know and understand one another”.

However, it still fails to undermine the significance of the meeting as “this kind of dialogue hasn’t taken place in the recent past — and now, lines of communication appear to be reopening”.