Prince Harry’s Triumphant UK Return Comes With a Sting

Prince Harry is set to take his greatest achievement back to the United Kingdom in 2027, but the triumphant return to his home country may come with a sting in its tail, a new episode of Newsweek‘s The Royal Report podcast has heard.

It has been formally announced that the Invictus Games, Harry’s veterans sports tournament for which he has won international praise, will return to Britain in 2027 as Birmingham will play host to its eighth event.

The first games were held in London in 2014, and though support for the venture has only grown over the years, Harry may find his personal support network has shrunk since then.

At the 2014 games, he was supported not only by his brother, Prince William but also by his father and stepmother, King Charles and Queen Camilla (when still Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall).

As the prince’s relationships with his family have publicly broken down in recent years, Newsweek‘s chief royal correspondent, Jack Royston, told Royal Report listeners that the Invictus Games may not present an opportunity for reconciliation.

“Prince Harry has chosen Britain over America to host the 2027 Invictus Games, so this feels quite momentous to me because much of the noise from him has been about how wholeheartedly committed he is to his new life in the States,” Royston said.

“Harry and the Invictus team had a really clear choice. They were deciding between two possible options: one was Birmingham for 2027, and the other one was Washington, D.C., the home of American politics, where they would have had the chance to try to draw in big names from the corridors of power and pitch themselves to the public in Harris’s adoptive home, or they had the option to go back to Britain, to Birmingham, a city Meghan Markle first visited March 2018, just days before their wedding.”

Royston suggested that the decision to host in Britain presented a number of personal disadvantages to Harry and Meghan, who have attended every Invictus Games in part together since 2017.

“Choosing Britain means choosing to give a home-field advantage to the British press, who are so regularly hostile to them,” Royston said, going on to highlight the main sting, which would be speculation over whether any of the prince’s family members would show up (or even be invited) to support him.

“It means choosing awkward debates about whether the royals should attend the tournament and whether it’s a snub when certain relatives inevitably don’t go,” he said. “I mean, obviously, I cannot imagine in a million years that William and Kate will go, but I’m actually not sure that Charles and Camilla will either. You know, you might see Princess Eugenie possibly, but even then, I wouldn’t count on it.”

On why this might be the case, Royston said he suspects the palace will “just get a little bit institutional about it.”

“They’ll take the view that the royals can’t be seen to officially endorse anything that Harry does outside of his time as a working royal,” he explained. “Otherwise, that could be commercialized, it could be profited from, and that is not supposed to be the royal family’s vibe.”

“But it does feel a little bit heartless,” he added. “And I would personally love to see Charles sat in the audience as a proud father watching his son perform and doing what he does best. Which, of course, is show up for veterans who need support and who need someone to fight their corner.”

James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek‘s royal reporter, based in London. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter) at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.

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