Buckingham Palace declined to comment – the royal rift is the elephant in the room for courtiers – but It is understood that the King and his younger son have not spoken since the late Queen’s funeral in September last year.
Royal insiders say that neither the monarch nor most of his family have forgiven Harry for criticising them on television and in his memoir, Spare, in January.
“There’s no sign of a rapprochement yet. It’s too soon. But time is a great healer,” one source said.
Harry at least has been invited to join the rest of the family at a birthday celebration at Clarence House to celebrate the King’s three-quarter century on November 14, it was reported, but is understood to have turned the invitation down.
It was the same in September when he was back in Britain on the first anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s death. There was a lukewarm invitation to join the family at Balmoral for a private gathering but instead he chose to mark the anniversary on September 8 by going to St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle.
Harry, 39, has told friends he has no plans to return to Britain again soon and is focused on his new life in the United States. A trip to Sandringham for Christmas looks out of the question at the moment.
Harry’s brother Prince William is even less inclined to mend fences at the moment, such is his fury with his brother over what he regards as unjustified attacks on him and Kate in Spare.
And although Prince Andrew’s daughters Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie have kept in touch with their cousin, much of the rest of the family are equally unenthusiastic about reconciliation for now.
They all sympathised when Harry and Meghan went through a tough time because virtually every member of the family has been through a period when they too faced criticism from the press and public. But when Harry and Meghan released their fly-on-the-wall Netflix series last year and then the Prince published his memoir in January trashing his family, that sympathy disappeared.
One source cited by The Sunday Times said: “There is the sense of a cooling-off period from the family that is under way after the aftershocks of the book and the interviews.
“But that doesn’t change the King’s love for his son. He’ll never not invite his son to a family gathering, because that’s not who he is.”
The King, meanwhile, is said to be delighted that Rishi Sunak has cleared the way for him to speak at the Cop28 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, in sharp contrast to his predecessor Liz Truss’s decision to stop him attending Cop27 in Egypt a year ago.
A source close to the King told The Sunday Times: “He’s putting into practice the theory he always hoped would be possible: that as monarch you can play a role on the global stage and still champion the causes you care about, without upsetting the constitutional red lines. He’s enjoying it.”
