After years of bombshells in the form of interviews, a memoir, Netflix documentary, podcasts, on-stage Q&As and more interviews, it was just possible that things would fall quiet enough for them to talk father-to-son again.
The only thing required was rebuilding a fragile trust.
That court case has indeed finished and that rosy picture has not – and now likely will not – come to pass.
Prince Harry’s appeal was rejected. His interview, hours later with the BBC, felt like the last throw of the dice.
He will now go to Sir Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, to ask for the board which decides his security status to be reviewed, he said, and still loves his country “despite what some people in that country have done”. He wishes “someone had told me” there was no way to win this case through the courts “beforehand”.
Each answer was a revelation. Many served as evidence as to why the King and Prince Harry stopped talking in the first place.
Insiders have described a lack of trust: the belief that any detail Prince Harry gleans about his family’s words, thoughts or indeed health may eventually make its way into the public domain.
There was one line in the interview, therefore, that may have done more than any other in the last five years to ensure that they cannot go back to how things once were.
“I don’t know how much longer my father has,” said Prince Harry, reflecting on his father’s cancer. “He won’t speak to me because of this security stuff, but it would be nice to reconcile.”
It is impossible to overstate how little the King, or the palace, would have appreciated the airing of such sentiments.
All are acutely aware of the King’s health, of his ongoing cancer treatment and his efforts to keep the royal show on the road throughout.
The palace operation will give no clues about his prognosis or what he suffers in private, maintaining that his progress is good and a recent hospitalisation for the side effects of treatment was merely a “blip”.
Prince Harry’s choice to raise the question of how long the King has left to live was described by one source, moderately, as being in “particularly poor taste”.
There is, they said, “nothing that can be trusted to remain private”, adding that “as for there being no contact, well, he has just proven why, yet again”.
The emotive language describing Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet as “my father’s grandchildren” will have been noted, alongside the accusation that “duty of care has been thrown out the window”.
The King was inserted front and centre of the blame for Harry’s security being downgraded, with the self-described “spare” arguing that his father should “step out of the way” from the process, as if he and his staff were personally blocking it.
The palace, which maintains the King cannot be seen to interfere in Government business, will be similarly unimpressed with the fifth-in-line to the throne’s description of the court’s decision as a “good old-fashioned establishment stitch-up”.
The Prince of Wales was not named by his younger brother, though was surely included among those “some members of my family will never forgive me for writing a book. Of course, they will never forgive me for lots of things”.
Quite what Prince William made of the references to their late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales (“some people want history to repeat itself”), can only be imagined.
There have been so many differences, disagreements between me and some of my family,” said Prince Harry. “This [security] is the sticking point. It is the only thing that’s left.”
He has “no regrets” about any of his previous airing of royal family dirty linen, maintaining that “the other side of the story needed to come out”.
“I’m devastated,” he said of the family status quo, and he looked so.
There are people in Britain – indeed, even in palaces – who remain sympathetic to Prince Harry on a human level. It is clear to all how much the last few years have cost him and how deeply he feels the loss of his security status.
But in one interview, he once again reminded the world that “at the heart” of the entire row “is a family dispute”.
By talking so personally about the King’s health, he has all but ensured he learns little more about it until it is really necessary.
If he truly hoped to bring about reconciliation, this has taken him back to square one.
There is one line, ending in three important words, that will echo in palace ears the longest.
Asked for the specific names of those the Duke of Sussex believes want to see him in harm’s way, he said: “I’m not going to share, at this point.”
