Princess Kate, who stepped out on Monday for a visit to the Royal Naval Air Station in Yeovilton, hasn’t been seen publicly with Prince Harry in many months.
The brother and sister-in-law were last photographed at the same event in May when they attended the King’s Coronation, but they weren’t seen talking.
Relations between them have, inevitably, cooled in recent years since Harry and Meghan Markle unleashed a wave of accusations against the Royal Family.
Long gone are the days of the so-called “fab four”, or sightings of Harry and Kate giggling together at public events, looking every part the friendly siblings.
But in his book, Prince Harry lifted the lid on that early relationship, revealing a side of the future Queen not many will be privy to.
In Spare, published in January 2023, the Duke of Sussex opened a chapter which would go on to discuss the reasons for choosing the now-infamous Nazi costume.
He wrote about how, aged 20, he was struggling to decide what to wear to an Out of Africa-themed party, and how Prince William insisted: “We’ll find you something to wear, Harold”.
Harry wrote that “Willy’s” new girlfriend, Kate Middleton, “promised to help”.
“I liked his new girlfriend,” Harry wrote. “She was carefree, sweet, kind. She’d done a gap year in Florence, knew about photography, art. And clothes. She loved clothes. Her name was Kate.”
He goes on to describe how William planned to wear a “feline outfit…skintight leotard with a springy, bouncy tail.
“He tried it on for us and he looked like a cross between Tigger and Baryshnikov. Kate and I had a great time pointing our fingers at him and rolling around on the floor.”
In a sweet moment, Harry continued: “I liked seeing Kate laugh. Better yet, I liked making her laugh. And I was quite good at it.
“My transparently silly side connected with her heavily disguised silly side.
“Whenever I worried that Kate was going to be the one to take Willy from me, I consoled myself with thoughts of all our future laughing fits together, and I told myself how great everything would be when I had a serious girlfriend who could laugh along with us.”
Harry did, however, go on to say he hoped to “make Kate laugh” with his costume, and detail how both Kate and William encouraged him to wear the Nazi uniform, and both “howled” with laughter when he tried it on for them.
The costume was photographed and, according to Harry, sold to the media. It led to a period of deep “shame” for the young prince, albeit one he admits he felt he “deserved” for the insensitivity the outfit presented.
Speaking on the scandal during the 2022 Netflix documentary, Harry & Meghan, the Prince called it “one of the biggest mistakes of my life” and said he felt he needed to “make it right”.
He said: “We sat down and spoke to the chief Rabbi in London which had a profound impact on me.
“I went to Berlin and spoke to a Holocaust survivor. I could’ve just ignored it and probably made the same mistakes over and over again in my life. But I learned from that.”
