‘Who does and who does not feature on the Royal Christmas desk has always been like the changing panorama of faces of the balcony’: How The Queen’s Christmas photo gallery was a sign of things to come for Harry and Meghan

Whether it’s a simple walk in the fresh air with the family or the full pomp of a Coronation, when it comes to royal occasions, the symbolism and choreography are all.

And nothing is more closely parsed for meaning at this time of the year than the Christmas broadcast of the monarch.

What, then, did Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex make of The Queen’s message on Christmas Day 2019?

Filmed in the Music Room at Windsor Castle, it was one of the more theatrically staged of her seasonal broadcasts with a tastefully opulent background of gilded mirrors, oil paintings candelabras and a twinkling, perfectly proportioned Christmas tree with light and golden baubles. 

But it was the foreground that mattered. 

The gang’s all there with, from left, Charles and Charles and Camilla, Prince Philip, William’s family picture and King George VI, the Queen’s father. But there is no sign of Harry, Meghan or baby Archie

The Queen’s Christmas broadcast in 2019 was the penultimate one she ever made

William, Kate and family were prominent. Harry and Meghan were not

Baby Archie, their first child, had been born earlier that year, another great grandchild for the Queen

Prince Harry and Meghan with their son Archie during a meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Cape Town, September 2019

By her side and just a little bit in front of the Queen, in prominent view of her watching subjects, was placed a group of family photographs – including a portrait of the father whose early death at the age of 56 had a stroke transformed her from young woman to Queen. 

Her son and heir Prince Charles was included with his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

William, Kate and their children appeared in a happy group photograph while, peeking over them all at the rear, was a portrait of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

Harry and Meghan, new parents to baby Archie, were nowhere to be seen.

The Sussexes had featured in the past but now, amid fraught negotiations about their wish for a new, autonomous  place in royal life – and just a few weeks before Megxit was formally declared – Harry and Meghan had vanished.

As author Robert Lacey noted in his best-selling book Battle of Brothers:

‘Harry and Meghan had featured smiling in a silver frame in 2018. But there would be no sign of them in 2019, nor any mention of the name Sussex – since that name was, apparently, now to be used to sell merchandise for which permission had not been asked from the Queen.

‘Who does and who does not feature on the Royal Christmas desk has always been like the changing panorama of faces of the balcony of Moscow’s Kremlin.

‘It showed who was in favour and who was not.’

As Lacey points out, The Queen acknowledged the arrival of Harry and Meghan’s first child, but avoided the word Sussex, preferring to say that, ‘Prince Philip and I have been delighted to welcome our eighth great grandchild into our family.

The Sussexes, writes Lacy, ‘had been “non-personed” as effectively as the Soviets non-personed Trotsky and Khrushchev.’

There were perfectly good reasons for not including Harry and Meghan. 

An ever-expanding Royal Family meant there was – and is – an inevitable limit to the number of photographs that could be displayed. (The Danish royal family has had similar and well-publicised difficulties in working out who and who should not be accorded full status).

The few that made the cut in the Windsor Castle music room were either in the direct line of succession or, in the case of Philip, Prince Consort, married to the Queen. There was a logic to it.

Could the cull of photographs have been the whim of a TV producer – someone who likes clean lines and tidy desks, perhaps.

Lacey thinks not. According to insiders, he writes, the choice originally been the idea of Prince Charles, keen to promote a ‘slimmed down’ Monarchy.

Prince Harry and Meghan at Canada House, just one day before they dropped the Megxit bomb

Two young mothers,  Kate and Meghan, attend the polo at the Billingbear club in the summer of 2019

 Meghan smiles for the cameras, Prince Harry looks down as they attended their last engagement at the Commonwealth Day Service on March 9 2020

Moreover, the decision, however it had been reached, was clearly been supported by the Queen.

Palace sources, meanwhile, had let it be known ‘that the plan of depicting the direct line of royal succession was enthusiastically supported by Prince William, who was not saying anything for the record – but wanted to send his younger brother a message.’

That message hit home, at least according to Finding Freedom by pro-Sussex authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, who concluded that, to Harry and Meghan, the choice of pictures was ‘yet another sign that they needed to consider their own path.’

Three weeks later, the Sussexes astounded the nation by announcing they would split their time between north America and Britain and renounce front-line royal duties.