Does Britain want Prince Harry back?

“Success,” Winston Churchill was once reputed to have said, “is the ability to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” By this metric, Prince Harry must be about the most successful figure in public life today. Despite a series of myriad embarrassments and humiliations, which have included his Sentebale charity descending into chaos, his well-publicized legal shenanigans (which, apparently, cost him over a million pounds, for little reward) and a consistent ranking as Britain’s third most unpopular royal (ahead only of his disgraced uncle and perennially disliked wife), he is returning to Britain this week, for his first significant visit to 2022.

Harry is “determined to press the reset button,” according to press reports. Although Harry’s popularity has been in the gutter in his home country over the past few years, he has decided that he is going to go on what amounts to a public relations offensive to change this. Ominously, according to a well-sourced report in the Sunday Times, the Duke of Sussex has decided that “he is going to have some fun” on his return to Britain. Given that the younger Harry’s definition of “fun” included everything from dressing up in a Nazi uniform to being surreptitiously photographed playing poker naked in Las Vegas, one might fear the worst. In fact, the itinerary that has been briefed to the media is impeccably wholesome. There are the WellChild awards on Monday, plenty of receptions with charities that he supports, including the Invictus Foundation, and he will be attending a meeting in Nottingham for young people affected by violence. This is, those around Harry hope, the best of him: his mother’s compassion and sincere interest in others channelled through to a new generation.

At least, this is the hope. Yet during his four-day visit, which is, perhaps wisely, “jam-packed with hardly any downtime,” there are two rather significant elephants in the room.

The first, of course, is Harry’s family. He is not believed to have any direct contact with his father in recent months, since they last met in February 2024, and his ill-judged remarks about the King’s health in his equally ill-judged BBC interview in May – after failing to succeed in taking legal action against his government – are understood to have caused deep offense that will make any reconciliation hard.

As for relations between Harry and William, there is more chance of Meghan Markle making her West End debut in a one-woman production of Mother Courage than there is of the two estranged brothers speaking any time soon. The tawdry revelations in Spare set the kibosh on another very frosty relationship. Notably, he will be staying in expensive hotels, rather than at Buckingham Palace.

The other problem is that Harry is incapable of keeping his mouth shut. He is an impetuous, emotional man who is all too keen to use the media to get his message across, but as his lack of popularity shows, he could often do with removing his foot from his mouth. It has been briefed that Harry would someday like to bring his young children back to the country of his birth – where they have not visited since June 2022 – and that: “He wants to be able to show his children where he grew up. He wants them to know their family here. He really would like to come back to the UK much more.” Yet the myriad difficulties with the practicalities of this may well make such a thing impossible. For the Duke to be accepted once more into the bosom of his family, one can imagine that various conditions might be made – which may or may not include leaving his fragrant wife in Montecito, where she would certainly rather remain – and a proud and headstrong figure like Harry might be unwilling to debase himself in so public and humiliating a fashion.

The Duke’s visit this week will inevitably attract headlines and much attention, and he is hoping, as one well-sourced friend has briefed the papers, that it will go well. “He is excited to be on the ground, helping his organizations where he can. He’s pumped for the visit, he’s happy.”

Should it proceed according to plan – in other words, uneventfully – then it might be the beginning of a rapprochement with his home country. But should anything go amiss, or the coverage of his visit be less rhapsodic than he might wish, then it will be hard to imagine that this return will be as regular an occurrence as Harry might be hoping for. How heartbroken his former subjects would be by this remains to be seen.