The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will not be attending Trooping the Colour in London this year.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who live in Montecito with their two children Prince Archie, five, and Princess Lilibet, three, after stepping back from their royal duties in 2020, have reportedly not been invited to the King’s birthday celebration.
The pair will miss the annual celebrations for a second year in a row, according to PEOPLE magazine, after Harry, 39, and Meghan, 42, didn’t join the Royal Family for the first birthday parade of King Charles’ reign.
It comes after claims Prince Harry, who did not meet with his father during his whirlwind visit to London last month, turned down an invitation by His Majesty to stay at a royal residence during the trip because he had ‘security concerns’.
MailOnline has contacted Buckingham Palace for comment and representatives of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Meghan and Harry first attended Trooping the Colour together in 2018, one month after their royal wedding in Windsor. They once again appeared on the Buckingham Palace balcony in 2019, weeks after welcoming their first child.
In 2020 and 2021, the event was scaled down due to the coronavirus pandemic. It was held at Windsor Castle, without the usual large gathering of royal family members.
But the ceremony was brought back to all its glory in 2022 to mark the late Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee.
The Duke and Duchess travelled to the UK to attend the special event – but did not join the Royal Family on the Buckingham Palace balcony, instead watching the occasion with other non-working royals in a room above the Horse Guards Parade.
The latest reports about Trooping the Colour come after it was claimed Prince Harry turned down an invitation by the King to stay at a royal residence when he visited the UK earlier this month because he had ‘security concerns’.
He is said to have declined his father’s offer because it did not come with any taxpayer-funded personal security provision, which would leave him staying in a ‘visible location with public entrance and exit points and no police protection’.
Instead he chose to stay at a hotel – presumably with members of the public – because it meant he ‘could come and go unseen’, claimed The Telegraph.
The newspaper further maintained that the Duke of Sussex ‘remains devastated’ about the withdrawal of his automatic right to police protection which he is still battling the Home Office over through the British courts.
He now has to give the Metropolitan Police 28 days’ notice before coming to the UK if he wants to apply for security provision, with each request assessed on an individual basis by Ravec, the committee which oversees the protection of royalty and public figures.
While it has not been revealed where the King offered Harry a room, St James’ Palace is a strong possibility.
It would have allowed father and son a place to meet in relative privacy and is guarded round-the-clock by a ‘ring of steel’.
In fact all royal residences – whichever one Harry was offered – feature armed guards at entry and exit points, unlike any London hotel, and boast the most sophisticated security systems in the country to protect working members of the family.
Buckingham Palace has consistently declined to comment on anything to do with Harry and his father.
But a spokesman for the prince chose to issue a statement when he came to London at the beginning of May for a service to mark the 10th anniversary of the Invictus Games.
It strongly suggested that while Harry was keen to meet his father, the King was effectively ‘too busy’ to see him.
However it has since become clear that while His Majesty did indeed have a packed programme of engagements that week, the King had made conciliatory overtures that would have enabled him to see his son.
In all Harry spent three nights in the capital without seeing any family members before meeting his wife, Meghan, at Heathrow airport and flying onto Nigeria for a quasi-royal tour.
In 2020 Harry applied for a judicial review over the decision to strip himself and his family of publicly funded police protection when they chose to quit royal duties and leave the UK.
