Published: 22:33 BST, 21 August 2026 | Updated: 11:35 BST, 22 August 2026
Everywhere you look the influence of one figure overshadows Prince Harry’s shock homecoming to Britain. It is there in both the element of surprise and in its breathtaking chutzpah.
And it is there in Harry’s certainty that, whatever the consequences, it was the right thing to do.
That figure, of course, is Princess Diana whose memory has become a lodestar for Harry. Indeed, as the decades have passed – next year Harry (and let’s not forget Prince William) will be marking the 30th anniversary of her tragic death.
But for Harry, rather than diminishing with time, his mother’s influence is growing. The audacity of the announcement and the timing was guaranteed to grab the attention of the country and to shake his own family out of their high summer drowsiness at Balmoral.
How reminiscent it was of Diana’s revelation that she had secretly recorded a television interview with BBC’s Panorama programme, a broadcast that even now, 31 years later, continues to reverberate with the Royal Family.
Harry gave his father three days’ notice of his and Meghan’s intentions to relocate from California.
Diana announced news of her interview eight days after it had been shot and a week before its screening. It blindsided everyone.
For both mother and son, each announcement was a fait accompli, not subjects for discussion but matters of fact.
Harry’s announcement to relocate back to Britain, giving King Charles just three days' notice, mirrors Diana’s secret 1995 Panorama interview – which caught the Royal Family off guard
Like Diana, Harry is banking on the British public's capacity for forgiveness. Pictured: Martin Bashir interviews Princess Diana in Kensington Palace for the television program Panorama
Here, too, Harry, like Diana, has made another calculation – but in the Duke of Sussex’s case it is infinitely riskier.
It is the issue of forgiveness and that for all his past mistakes he can rely on the British public’s sense of fair play – or at least mercy.
Diana escaped unscathed from the Panorama fiasco, despite massive establishment anger over her airing of dirty laundry in general and her criticism of her then husband Prince Charles’s ability to become an effective monarch.
It barely dented her image, and her popularity – especially among women – soared with a public who identified with her dramatic account of how her marriage had been destroyed by the presence of Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles, now the Queen.