MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Why it’s suddenly time for ‘lonely’ Prince Harry to leave Meghan Markle in Montecito

If ever there was a time for Prince Harry to head home, it’s now.

In yet another bombshell, insiders say that Harry only learned that his father was hospitalized, due to side effects from his cancer treatment, on the news last week.

That’s how completely and utterly dire this fracture is.

Sources have also revealed that Harry is ‘lonelier than ever’ in Montecito.

Of course he is. Harry seems to have few friends, and no core support system of his own.

His wife is off promoting her Netflix series and making yet another podcast while hawking royal-adjacent merch on her website — replete with affiliate links that give her a cut of every sale.

If ever there was a time for Prince Harry to head home, it’s now.

Sources have also revealed that Harry is ‘lonelier than ever’ in Montecito. Of course he is. Harry seems to have few friends , and no core support system of his own.

Surely this is not the life he imagined post-Megxit.

The fall from grandeur is extreme — she’s busy decanting pretzels and flogging her wedding make-up while he once hosted heads of state and was Britain’s greatest soft-power export since Princess Diana.

Grim, indeed.

This all comes to a head as Harry was reportedly left ‘reeling’ after being forced to step down from his Sentebale charity amid mysterious controversy.

Compounding this loss, the chair of Sentebale, Dr. Sophie Chandauka, told the Financial Times that Harry’s brand is ‘toxic’ and actively harmed the charity’s reputation.

Her public message to Harry: ‘The team is resolved that Sentebale will live on, with or without you.’

It’s been a merciless week for the prodigal Duke, with one source telling The Sun that while initially Harry ‘was a spare to William, now he’s increasingly looking like a spare to Meghan — and it’s not a good look.’

Meghan Markle, as we all regrettably know, is in it to win it.

But she’s trying to build a media empire, while Harry is… doing what, exactly?

Sure, he has Invictus, but that’s not enough to keep a 40-year-old unemployed man occupied.

All that free time isn’t healthy.

Unstructured days surely only allow him to perseverate on what’s gone wrong and the mess he’s made of what was once an easy, gilded, pampered life — a life that required not much effort in return for global admiration.

Now he’s left to twist in the soft winds of Montecito as his wife grinds out her products and podcasts.

‘He misses his family terribly,’ another source said, ‘but no one is speaking to him anymore.’

Imagine: Harry hears, on the news, that his cancer-stricken elderly father has been hospitalized, and he can’t call or text his brother, sister-in-law or stepmother to find out what’s going on.

This should be setting off alarm bells for Harry. His father won’t be around forever. Now is the time to fly back home, tail firmly between his legs, and beg for forgiveness.

Really, he should just prostrate himself before his father — say he’ll do whatever it takes.

Leave Meghan in Monetico for weeks or months at a time. She has plenty to keep her busy.

He should also insist on taking their children to visit the grandfather they barely know.

If Harry doesn’t grow a spine now, he never will — and without William softening, he’ll surely be totally cut off when his brother becomes king.

Doing the hard work of rebuilding a bond with his father — and making it clear he expects nothing in return, not money or another patronage or more titles for his children — is perhaps the only way William might entertain a rapprochement, however surface-level.

There’s nothing much left for Harry in California. This was all clearly Meghan’s dream, not his.

Stripped of his purpose in life, and with many of his friends and family lost to him — for now, anyway — he has been left reliant on Meghan for what seems like everything.

‘He just wants to go for a beer with the guys,’ that source told The Sun. ‘But his only friends are just the husbands of Meghan’s friends.’

And how could they possibly relate? These men aren’t part of Harry’s cohort, the aristocrats who went to Eton and breathe the same rarified air.

One wonders if he’s even thought this through. Harry seems so immature, so reactive, that perhaps he genuinely believed he could say — and memorialize in print — all his worst feelings about his father, brother and sister-in-law, and all would be well in the end.

That they would apologize to him.

It seems not to have registered what a brutal year William has had, his father and wife both diagnosed with cancer, his only sibling completely estranged, the fate of becoming king now looming large.

‘The lowest I’ve ever seen him,’ was how William’s former top aide Jason Knauf recently described him after the dual cancer diagnoses. ‘It was awful, absolutely awful.’

Harry should now put himself in William’s shoes and understand that he’s not the only member of the royal family who suffers.

King Charles, by all accounts, would welcome his son back into the fold, despite William’s resistance.

But will Harry meet the moment?