Settle in for this one, because it has already been a substantial week. There is real movement on whether Harry will finally bring Archie and Lilibet home, Kate has achieved something extraordinary that she only revealed after the fact, Anne has once again out fashioned an industry built entirely on novelty, Wimbledon has begun its annual royal parade, and the King has made a decision about his own future address that nobody quite expected. Let’s get into it.
This is the story everyone in royal circles has been talking about, and it has shifted several times even within the last fortnight.
Harry and Meghan announced last week that they intend to spend five days in the UK from July 7-11, bringing Archie, seven, and Lilibet, five, with them. If it happens, it will be the children’s first publicly confirmed visit to Britain since the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June 2022, and notably, the last time King Charles is known to have seen his grandchildren in person.
But the trip is not confirmed, in fact it’s a moving beast that changes every day, and the sticking point is, as it has been for years now, security. A spokesperson for Harry issued a statement making clear the issue has never been accommodation. King Charles is understood to have already offered the family lodging at a royal residence, which Harry has not yet accepted, If he accepts it would come with police protection attached, and the Sussexes have reportedly also been weighing a stay at Althorp House, Princess Diana’s family estate in Northamptonshire, timed deliberately close to what would have been Diana’s July birthday.
The real obstacle is the Risk Management Board review through RAVEC, the government body that determines who receives publicly funded protective security.
That review was meant to happen back in November and still has not taken place. Harry’s team have been clear that risk follows the person rather than the location, meaning a safe house means very little if the family cannot move safely around the country during the visit itself.
Whether Charles, William, or any other senior royals would see the Sussexes during the trip remains unknown, and most royal watchers expect any reconciliation with William specifically to be off the table regardless of how the visit unfolds. Archie and Lilibet are not expected to appear at any public engagements even if the trip proceeds. We will know more in the coming days.
Over the weekend, Kate completed the National Three Peaks Challenge, climbing Ben Nevis in Scotland, Scafell Pike in England and Yr Wyddfa, also known as Snowdon, in Wales, within twenty-four hours. The challenge covers 23 miles of walking and more than 10,000 feet of total elevation gain. She did each climb alone, supported throughout by Mountain Rescue teams, and told no one publicly until it was finished.
At the end of her 23 mile walk, she was met by William, George, Charlotte and Louis, along with her parents Carole and Michael Middleton and her brother James. The photograph of her at the top of Ben Nevis, beaming in a raincoat and cap, has been shared widely since she posted it.
She undertook the challenge to raise funds for the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, specifically to support the development of holistic cancer care across the UK, the kind of support that addresses wellbeing and recovery alongside clinical treatment rather than instead of it. In her own words, shared alongside the announcement, she explained that cancer changes how a person thinks and feels and affects every part of life, not just the body, and that she understood this personally. She described the challenge not simply as a physical test but as a way of exploring what life looks like beyond a diagnosis, and a chance to give something back to the people and the hospital that supported her own journey.
It is an extraordinary physical achievement on its own terms. Combined with the reason behind it, and the fact she chose to do it privately rather than as a media event, it lands as one of the most quietly powerful things she has done since her diagnosis.
This week Princess Anne has once again demonstrated exactly why she remains the most consistently entertaining dresser in the family.
At the Centenary Banquet of the Honourable Company of Master Mariners, held at London’s Guildhall during a stretch of genuinely brutal heat, Anne arrived in a pale yellow, rose printed gown with a cape detail that she first wore on an official trip to Gambia in 1984, when she was 34 years old. She paired it, exactly as she did more than four decades ago, with white satin gloves. She is now 75. The dress fits as though it was made yesterday.
This was not her only recent re-wear. At her son Peter’s wedding earlier in the month, she brought back a floral print dress from the eighties along with the same yellow hat she wore to Zara’s christening in 1981. Anne has previously explained her approach plainly: well-made clothes can be worn indefinitely, and there is real value in supporting the people who still manufacture textiles domestically rather than buying something new every time an occasion arises.
It would be easy to read this as eccentricity, but it for Princess Anne it is more about principal, and in an era when the family’s spending is under more scrutiny than ever, a princess in a forty-two-year-old gown is doing more for the institution’s reputation than any number of carefully worded statements.
The most reliably charming fixture of the British summer calendar is back. Wimbledon opened this week, and as always, the Royal Box at Centre Court has become its own small theatre of who’s who.
The Duke of Kent, now 90 and the tournament’s former patron, opened proceedings in the front row, dressed in the tournament’s traditional green and purple, accompanied by Lady Susan Hussey, the late Queen’s former lady in waiting. He has scaled back his public life considerably in recent years, but tennis still draws him out, and he has now appeared at three major events this month alone, following Trooping the Colour and his granddaughter Marina’s wedding in Yorkshire. Joining the box on opening day were a typically eclectic mix of guests, including Sir David Beckham, his mum and Mary Berry.
Kate now holds the patronage that the Duke of Kent once held, and as anyone who follows this column regularly will know, she traditionally saves her appearances for the second week, arriving once the tournament narrows toward its finals, and the crowds thicken with the year’s biggest names. Expect her in white, expect a hat that becomes its own headline, and expect the column to have plenty more to say about it next week.
This week the palace confirmed, as part of the annual report into how taxpayer funding supports royal duties, that King Charles will not move into Buckingham Palace once its decade long, roughly half a billion-dollar renovation concludes next year. He and Camilla will remain at Clarence House, his long-term London residence, instead. Buckingham Palace will continue to serve as the ceremonial and administrative heart of the monarchy, hosting state visits, official functions and the balcony appearances the public knows so well, but it will not be home in the way it was for every monarch since Victoria.
Neither Charles nor his late mother have stayed overnight at the palace since 2019, so in practical terms this changes very little day to day. Symbolically it is a major break with tradition, and officials have framed it as an opportunity to open the building to far greater public access and revenue once renovations are complete, with the palace already drawing around 700,000 visitors annually.
The same announcement included a true first: the King published his personal tax bill for the first time in his reign, revealing payments of close to seventeen million dollars in the most recent financial year, placing him among the country’s highest taxpayers. The Sovereign Grant itself, the public funding that supports official royal duties, will also be reduced from 2027 once the renovation funding obligation ends.
Reaction has been mixed. Some have welcomed the transparency and the practical good sense of letting more of the public into a building that will otherwise sit largely unused as a residence. Others have questioned whether spending such an enormous sum on renovating a home the King has no intention of living in represents value for taxpayers. It is, in many ways, the same tension running through nearly every royal finance story this year: an institution trying to modernise and be transparent while still carrying the costs and contradictions of several centuries of tradition.
Until next week, keep the tea piping hot, the tiaras polished and maybe dust of a few 1980’s wardrobe favourites for your next function.
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