Prince Harry’s Invictus Games could provide his children with a valuable insight into royal life, despite the prince’s aversion to exposing them to press photographers, according to a new episode of Newsweek‘s The Royal Report podcast.
Harry and wife, Meghan Markle, have two children: Prince Archie, born in 2019, and Princess Lilibet, born in 2021. So far neither have made an appearance at the Invictus Games which is Harry’s co-founded sports tournament which showcases the mental and physical achievements of wounded, sick or injured veterans.
At the 2023 games in Düsseldorf, Germany, Meghan told crowds that she “can’t wait to one day be able to bring our kids also, so they can experience just how amazing this is.”
This would not only provide fans with a rare opportunity to see the prince and princess, who until now have rarely been seen in public, but chief royal correspondent Jack Royston told Royal Report listeners it would also provide Archie and Lilibet with a link to the royal lives they might have led, had their parents not split from the monarchy.
“I personally would love to see Harry and Meghan bring Archie and Lily to something like Invictus. I think it would be fantastic,” Royston said. “It would be a really great opportunity to see their kids getting involved as well, helping out, doing good.”
“It’s really interesting because it would kind of give Archie and Lily a little flash of what their lives might have been like if Harry and Meghan had remained working royals, like if they all stayed in Britain they would be out there in the limelight, they would have been part of the coronation, they would have been part of the Jubilee. They would have been part of all of these things.”
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Since Harry and Meghan’s move to the U.S. in 2020, they have only made one public return to Britain with their children to mark the Platinum Jubilee in 2022, however, they were not present for any of the public facing events, unlike their cousins, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis.
Royston noted that by experiencing a small part of the pageantry and duties connected with a royal event, which are in many ways replicated during the Invictus Games, the Sussex children would “get to understand what Harry and Meghan’s lives were like before they quit the palace, and that would probably be quite nice for them to kind of have an insight and an understanding.”
It could also provide them with an opportunity to ask themselves if they perhaps would have enjoyed being part of the working royal machine, he noted.
There are, however, drawbacks to attending an event like the Invictus Games, particularly when it comes to whether Harry and Meghan are willing to expose their children to them, namely press interest and photographers.
So far, the couple have strictly controlled the dissemination and taking of photos of their children, with Harry’s hatred for paparazzi photographers and camera flashes being expressed on a number of occasions, linking back to the experiences of Princess Diana in the 1990s.
“If Archie and Lilibet do come to Invictus, then they will be photographed in public on an international stage,” Royston said. “They’ll probably be filmed in a context where Harry and Meghan don’t have control.”
“That is definitely something they would have to get their heads around in terms of that issue of privacy and whether they would actually want to expose their children to being photographed in a context where they didn’t get to review the images themselves and say yes or no,” he concluded.
