They are understood to have agreed to talk again next week after Harry broke the ice to call his father on his milestone birthday, ending months of father and son not being on speaking terms, according to the sources.
Buckingham Palace has declined to discuss the rapprochement but the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s camp has briefed journalists that both Harry and Meghan spoke to King Charles on Tuesday in a call from California.
They also said that the couple’s children, Prince Archie, four, and Princess Lilibet, two, had recorded a video of themselves singing happy birthday to their grandfather.
The rift between the monarch and his younger son remains painful and there is much bridge-building to be done but the agreement to speak again has been hailed by friends as a change in tone and a sign that the relationship can be fixed.
A spokeswoman for the Sussexes had earlier briefed the BBC and US journalists that Harry was planning to call his father on his birthday.
King Charles evicted Harry, 39, and Meghan, 42, from their home at Frogmore Cottage on the royal estate at Windsor after the fifth in line to the throne criticised his family, and especially his stepmother Queen Camilla, in his memoir, Spare, in January.
They have not been on speaking terms since but friends of the monarch have made it clear that he still loves his son and family.
Bridging the gap between Harry and his brother Prince William may take longer. Friends of the heir to the throne and his wife Kate have repeatedly insisted there is no sign of them overcoming their divisions with Harry and Meghan for now.
“There’s no sign of a rapprochement yet. It’s too soon. But time is a great healer,” one source said earlier this month.
Palace officials remain hopeful that the two brothers can overcome their differences eventually, given time.
But Harry and Meghan’s biographer Omid Scobie insisted yesterday that their relationship was irreparable.
In an interview with People in the United States to promote its serialisation of his new book, Endgame, on the British monarchy, Scobie suggested that the hurt and anger between the two brothers had hardened into a colder and more immovable indifference.
“There’s no going back,” he said, adding that in writing Endgame, “I was talking to a source quite early on in the process, and they called Harry a ‘defector’ and said that was William’s view.
“These were two men who once upon a time were firmly aligned in their outlook. One of them had to move on to also protect the Crown.”
In his book he quoted a source saying of Harry: “Though he hasn’t found closure with his family, he’s accepted that things are unlikely to change, particularly with his brother — who refuses to even properly talk with him.”
He writes that Harry later explained to a friend: “I’m ready to move on past it. Whether we get an apology or accountability, who knows? Who really cares at this point?”
But People’s serialisation of the book appeared to contain no sensational new material in the first extract, which repeated a well-covered story about Harry being left to make his own way to Balmoral on the day his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, died. After announcing that he and Meghan were on their way there, he was told not to bring Meghan because Kate would not be there with William – she has stayed in Windsor to see her children when they came home from their first day at school.
Scobie writes that Harry and Meghan had been left in the dark about the true state of the Queen’s health in her final hours even as the Royal Household was preparing for a change in reign.
William would not return his text messages, the author writes, and with no further information from other family members or palace aides, the Sussexes and their team had to operate in the dark.
Harry was informed that William had already secured a flight with his uncles Andrew and Edward (and Edward’s wife, Sophie), but he could not get in touch with anyone about joining that flight. “It was upsetting to witness,” Scobie cites a source close to the Sussexes. “[Harry] was completely by himself on this.”
It got even worse for Harry as the palace announced the Queen’s death while he was still in the air in a private jet he had chartered from Luton to Aberdeen. He found out from a BBC News alert on his phone after his plane landed.
