Lowri Griffiths on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s planned UK return for the 2026 Invictus Games, the King’s accommodation offer, and the state of things
By Lowri Griffiths, Big Smoke Broke
Harry and Meghan Are Coming Back; London Is Preparing Its Complicated Feelings
Prince Harry is bringing his family — Meghan, Archie, and Lilibet — to the United Kingdom next month for the 2026 Invictus Games, and King Charles has reportedly offered to provide accommodation for the visit, which is the most diplomatically managed sentence in recent royal history: the King offering his son a place to stay at what is, technically, the King’s property anyway, in a gesture that communicates familial warmth while maintaining the specific formal architecture of a relationship that has been conducted in public for long enough that all parties have developed extremely careful vocabularies for describing it.
The Invictus Games — the international adaptive sporting competition for wounded, injured, or sick service personnel that Harry founded in 2014 and that has been one of the genuinely unambiguous achievements of his post-active-service years — are being held in the UK for the first time since the Games began. The Games themselves are excellent: they celebrate physical and psychological recovery, they highlight service and sacrifice, and they produce the kind of athletic performance that inspires people who are watching sporting competition rather than royal family drama. This is worth saying because the reporting on this UK visit will be primarily about royal family drama and the Games will get the coverage they deserve if the drama generates enough attention to remind people they exist.
London’s Evolving Position on the Sussexes
London’s relationship with Harry and Meghan has moved through several phases since the 2020 “step back” announcement: shock, extensive coverage of shock, the Netflix documentary, the memoir, the various press releases clarifying the record on various matters, and the current phase in which most people I talk to in North London have settled into a posture that combines residual warmth for Harry, complicated feelings about the relationship with Meghan, and the general British preference for not having to have complicated feelings about the royal family if it can possibly be avoided, which it cannot.
The visit will produce excellent photography of Archie and Lilibet, who have been seen less frequently in public than their cousins and who are, by all accounts, entirely normal children who had no say in the circumstances of their family’s departure from the UK and would probably enjoy a visit to their father’s home country at whatever level of interest and comprehension their ages permit. Archie is seven. Lilibet is five. They will be photographed. Their grandfather will be glad to see them. The rest will be what it is.
The Games: What Actually Matters
The 2026 Invictus Games will feature hundreds of competitors from across the globe competing in adaptive sports including wheelchair basketball, sitting volleyball, swimming, athletics, and cycling. The competitors are service members and veterans whose injuries and illnesses are the specific, unglamorous product of military service in conflicts that the countries sending them have had varying levels of enthusiasm for discussing in the years since those conflicts ended. The Games give them a stage that is not about the politics of the conflicts but about the people who served in them, which is a contribution to public understanding that transcends whatever drama the Sussex family situation generates in the coverage surrounding it. Harry created something genuinely valuable. The thing that’s valuable is the Games. The thing that generates the coverage is everything else. Both are real. One matters more than the other.
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What North London Requires of Its Representatives
The question that North London voters — in Kentish Town, in Camden, in Islington, in Hornsey — are asking of whoever leads Labour next is not abstract. It is specific to the conditions of life in the part of the city they inhabit: the housing costs that consume above-average proportions of above-average salaries, the public transport that works well enough when it works and is miserable when it doesn’t, the NHS waiting times that feel longer despite the government’s investment narrative, and the specific cost-of-living squeeze that makes a city full of interesting people in stimulating jobs feel, at the monthly bank statement moment, like a question about whether the interesting stimulating life is sustainable at its current price. Burnham’s northern credibility is real. His relevance to North London’s specific concerns remains to be demonstrated. The coffee shop in Kentish Town will be watching. The Northern line will be running, or not, regardless of who leads Labour. Both things will be true simultaneously, as they always are.
London’s Living Character
London in 2026 is a city in the middle of several stories simultaneously: the political story of a Labour government that just lost its leader and is searching for a direction that can beat Reform UK without losing the urban progressive base that considers Reform’s platform a threat to the kind of city London is; the economic story of a housing market that has made the city excellent for those who already own a piece of it and increasingly difficult for those who are trying to; the cultural story of a city whose creative output — in fashion, in food, in art, in music, in the performing arts — remains extraordinary by any global comparison, produced by the specific density of talented people who come here from everywhere and stay because what they find is worth the cost of finding it; and the civic story of a city that is doing many things right — the parks, the museums, the public transport when it functions, the diversity of experience available per square mile — while struggling with the structural challenges that every major global city struggles with and that London’s specific combination of history, geography, and governance makes particularly acute. The neighbourhood-level version of all these stories is what the people writing here have been trying to capture. The city-level version is what you encounter when you arrive, if you are visiting, or what you live inside every day, if you are not. Both encounters are worth having. London rewards them both.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
