I don’t want to alarm you, but Prince Harry‘s slow transformation into Lord Voldemort may be complete. No, I don’t mean to suggest that the Duke of Sussex has lost his nose or the remainder of his hair, but that the Royal family is treating him like some dark wizard they don’t want to summon. The mere memory of Harry is supposedly so sour at this point that King Charles doesn’t even want to hear his name.
This week is a big one for King Charles, perhaps even his biggest since his coronation in 2023. As he undertakes a Royal tour across Australia and Samoa, the monarch is making his first trip to the Commonwealth nations as head of state. Even though his health has already caused unwanted hiccups, the king is determined for everything to go as smoothly as possible. And apparently that requires nary a single mention of He Who Must Not Be Named.
King Charles and Queen Camilla have banned all mention of Prince Harry during their Australian tour
Prince Harry and King Charles haven’t spoken more than a handful of minutes all year — the duke came to Buckingham Palace following his father’s cancer diagnosis for the briefest of brief visits back in February — but now it seems the king isn’t even allowing anyone to speak about Harry in his presence.
As per Express, King Charles and Queen Camilla have requested that there be no discussion of Prince Harry and the paperback release of his infamous memoir, Spare, for the duration of their nine-day trip. Despite this Royal tour being on the calendar all year, Harry elected to schedule the second roll-out of his book for this exact week — the Spare paperback hits U.S. shelves on Oct. 22, and then follows in the U.K. on Oct. 24.
“It will be business as usual for the King and Queen during this tour and they don’t want it to be marred by any talk of Harry’s book,” a source told the publication, using rather strong language to describe the king’s attitude toward his son. “It’s so insignificant to them at this point and they’ve got much bigger things to focus on,” they continued. “The King is keen for this tour to be a success and it [Harry’s book] is not something that even registers on his radar.”
It seems the king may still be sore from an eerily similar situation that happened way back in 2016. The then-Prince Charles was on all-important trip to Bahrain to speak with the nation’s president, a trip that had been carefully planned for months in order to optimize media attention, when Harry elected to release an official statement about his relationship with Meghan Markle for the first time. Charles is said to have been furious and “crushed” that his son had swiped all the headlines from him.
Luckily for Charles on this occasion, Harry has neglected to fill the Spare paperback with any fresh material, which many are viewing as a gesture of goodwill to the Royals who were so offended by the book’s original release. If this was an olive branch, however, it seems the king just took it and used it as a magic wand to expel(liarmus) all things Sussex-related from his life.