Prince Harry to stay at Buckingham Palace during UK visit

Prince Harry has accepted an invitation to stay at Buckingham Palace during part of his UK visit, a rare use of a royal residence that puts his ties to the monarchy under a sharper spotlight than any stop on the trip itself.

Harry was due to arrive in London later on Monday for a five-day visit tied to the one-year countdown to the 2027 Invictus Games in Birmingham. The trip also included charity and Invictus-related engagements, but the lodging decision drew the most attention because it placed him inside the institution he left behind.

Meghan Markle, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet were not expected to join him in London. The absence of Harry’s family, amid continuing concerns over security arrangements in the UK, underscored how unresolved the dispute over protection remains. Archie is seven and Lilibet is five, and the children last saw King Charles III in person during Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022. Harry and Charles last met in person in September 2024.

Buckingham Palace, a vacant 773-room property undergoing a £369 million refurbishment, is more than a convenient address. Harry’s stay there has been read as a modest but meaningful signal that relations with Charles may be improving after years of confrontation, including Harry’s departure as a working royal in 2020, the loss of Frogmore Cottage in 2023, the publication of Spare and his repeated public criticism of the Royal Family.

The security issue remains the central constraint on any broader family reunion. Harry has spent years battling the Home Office over protection arrangements after his security was downgraded in 2020, and he lost a Court of Appeal challenge over those measures last year. After that ruling, Harry told the BBC that he could not see a world in which he would bring his wife and children back to the UK at that point.

Any meeting with Charles, if it happens at all, was being handled privately. That caution fit the larger pattern around the visit: a carefully managed return to London, a stay in a royal residence, and no public indication yet that the family’s most difficult disputes have been resolved.