Prince Harry made it clear to the BBC in May that he “would love a reconciliation” with his father King Charles, who is suffering from cancer.
“There’s no point continuing to fight any more. Life is precious,” he said.
Harry added he didn’t know “how much longer my father has”, a hurtful and undermining comment.
Earlier this month, Harry came over to Britain from his home in California to visit some of his favourite charities.
It had been 19 months since he and his father had met and at the last moment the King agreed to see him at his home, Clarence House.
Harry was asked not to discuss their conversation and just said his father was “great”.
It was an opportunity for Harry to make amends and apologise for all the dreadful things he had said about his father and family.
Unfortunately, either accidently or deliberately, a day later the caring son became a spiteful one.
Talking to a journalist from The Guardian he didn’t seem to understand that his words in his book Spare and in Harry and Meghan, a six-part series for Netflix, could tear a reconciliation to pieces.
In his book he has described his father and his older brother Prince William as “trapped” and said that William was his “beloved brother and arch nemesis”, an awful thing to say about his brother.
He has been spiteful about Queen Camilla too.
In Spare he called her “evil” and “the villain” that “sacrificed me on her personal PR altar”.
He told The Guardian his “conscience is clear”, adding: “I don’t believe that I aired my dirty laundry in public.”
He went on, “I am very happy with who I am and I like the life I live.” It doesn’t always look like it.
He said that his memoir was not about revenge, but about “accountability”. In other words, everyone else is wrong but he never is.
Harry arrived in the UK on September 8 and laid a wreath at the tomb of his grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth, on the third anniversary of her death.
Some people feel he should have been kinder to her during the last months of her life when she was in a great deal of pain due to bone marrow cancer.
While in London, he also attended a ceremony at the WellChild Awards, of which he is a patron.
Next stop was Nottingham, where he offered a donation of £1.1 million of his own money to BBC Children in Need to help young people affected by violence.
He also pledged $500,000 through his Archewell foundation to support children wounded in the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
It is not usual for royals to talk in detail about the amount they are giving to charity and it’s been a surprise that Harry had more money than expected.
He was the larking old Harry.
Some newspapers commented he was more fun than William.
Harry may have been showing off to try to prove he could be better than William, as there are rumours that he wants to come back to Britain and resume some of his royal duties.
After meeting with his father, he went off to Kyiv at the invitation of an organisation that supports Ukrainians with life-changing injuries caused by the war.
He said he wanted to do “everything possible” to help their recovery.
He disappeared for an hour at one point and was rumoured to have met president Volodymyr Zelensky.
The British government preferred he did not as he has no official role.
But then Harry isn’t always ready to do what he is asked to.
Harry was 41 on September 15 and his wife Meghan posted a photograph of him on Instagram with a messy beard and hair and the words, “Oh hi, birthday boy”, alongside a flame emoji.
Now he’s back in California, we don’t know whether his visit was the first step towards his reintegration into the royal family.
My own belief is that it won’t happen: he behaves as if he has nothing to apologise for, and the chasm between him and Prince William in particular is too deep to bridge.
Angela Levin is an award-winning British journalist and royal biographer. Her biography Harry: Conversations with the Prince was published in 2018. Her work has been commended twice at the British Press Awards.