Prince Harry will need to return to royal family to take ‘pressure’ off Kate and William, expert says

Author Tina Brown says the pressure on working royals is ‘excessive’

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leave the Queen’s Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral on Friday 3 June 2022 (Getty Images)

Prince Harry may need to “return to the royal family” to “take pressure” off the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, a royal expert has claimed.

Tina Brown, author of The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor-the Truth and the Turmoil, said the current form of the monarchy is “looking a bit skeletal” as it wasn’t meant to “lose Andrew and Harry”.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex stepped down as senior members of the royal family in 2020 and moved to California in the US to pursue other projects.

They briefly returned to the UK last weekend with their children, Archie, three, and Lilibet, one, for the Queen’s platinum jubilee celebrations.

Prince Andrew was relieved of his duties as a working royal after a sexual assault case was brought against him in the US by Virginia Giuffre who claimed the royal assaulted her when she was a teenager. The case was settled out of court and Andrew has consistently denied these claims.

The ‘slimmed down’ royal family (Getty Images)

Speaking on Guardian‘s podcast Today in Focus, Brown said: “It’s looking a bit skeletal, because they weren’t supposed to be losing Andrew or Harry, so a bit of a problem slimmed-down monarchy at the moment.

“I think there is a great effort to try to make everybody focus on the heir, Charles, and William and Kate. But there is a lot of pressure on that.

“I think there is excessive pressure on the Cambridges at the moment to be essentially taking up the slack for both Harry and Andrew.

“And I do think at a certain point they are going to need Harry back, particularly probably after the Queen dies, because he was an asset.”

For the Queen’s last appearance of the platinum jubilee weekend, she stepped out on the Buckingham Palace balcony following the platinum jubilee pageant flanked by her three heirs, Prince Charles, Prince William, and Prince George.

They were joined on the balcony by the Duchess of Cornwall, the Duchess of Cambridge, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, leading some royal fans to speculate that this could be what the “slimmed-down” monarchy will look like.