Harry flies 8,000km to see his stricken father and gets only 30 minutes. What kind of family behaves like that?

LIKE the rich yolk oozing from a cracked egg, sometimes the utter weirdness of the British royal family spills unchecked into the public domain.

That happened last week with the sad news of King Charles’s cancer diagnosis.

It didn’t just set in motion the usual Windsor welter of entrenched non- speaks and warring factions; of cashmere-wrapped wives bubbling with fury, while rushed meetings were set up for their menfolk in overstuffed drawing rooms as equerries hovered, looking at their watches.

It also seemed to suggest that the fault lines, so casually blown open by the vengeful Harry and Meghan, will never fuse or heal, no matter what fresh tragedy befalls the family. In the doomed sea of royal conciliation, we’re far from the shallows now.

I can just imagine how it all went down. Upon hearing the bad news over the phone from King Charles, Prince Harry impulsively took it upon himself to fly to London to see his father. There’s no need, Charles perhaps insisted. I’m fine, dear boy. No fuss, please.

Yet Harry would not be dissuaded. He’s already offsetting his carbon footprint on green

baloney.com and lacing up his suede desert boots.

From California to Clarence House, from the land of the bland to the heart of the institution of persecution, the very place he professes to loathe most in the world, here he comes.

Nothing can stop him, even if one has to wonder what exactly motivates him and if his flight over the Atlantic was fuelled by filial love or by a thousand gallons of guilt. Hary certainly seemed to be on a self-imposed mission of mercy, but whose soul was he trying to save? Then it gets even weirder. Harry flies more than 8,000 kilometres to see his stricken ‘Pa’ and is given only a half-hour slot in the regal schedule. Barely time for his cup of tea to get cold.

What kind of family behaves like that? Perhaps one that is very nervous. One that has been badly scalded by what went before.

For Harry’ s intentions, no matter how well-meaning, must have been regarded as questionable by some palace officials. How could they not be?

I don’t doubt for one moment t hat Harry is a concerned and loving son.

But is he also a harvester of biographical detail, sifting for nuggets to be included in his next best-seller?

Is he taking care, is he taking stock, or is he taking notes?

While concern for his father’s wellbeing must be genuine, it cannot be denied that Harry’s flamboyant show of air-miles compassion burnished his royal credentials on the global stage; cemented his status as a member of the Firm.

For Harry, being a prince is his only USP in the USA, where no amount of shiny medals hung round his neck by John Travolta can make up for the real thing.

So, was it all of this or none of this? Did love manage to manifest itself in this grisly, desperate, micro-managed scenario?

I hope it did, even if no one could expect the UK monarchs to overlook the terrible things Harry has said and written about many of them over the past few years.

And while every fractured family harbour grudges, Harry’s shrill demands for public accountability from his nearest and not so dearest have been met with a deafening silence. And let us not forget that it is barely any time at all since King Charles and Kate were unveiled as the royal ‘racists’, who so very badly upset Meghan and Oprah.

Two scant months later, Harry’s father Charles and sister-in-law Kate have been in hospital with serious medical issues.

Does that give Harry pause for thought? Or is he mired so deep in his victim narrative that he cannot see that others might be victims, too?

Speaking of which, all sympathy to King Charles in his moment of personal crisis. It takes time mentally to process a cancer diagnosis — and come to terms with a f uture very different from the one you might have imagined for yourself.

In these early days of his new reality, it is not hard to imagine Charles would rather chat with his favourite agapanthus than have to deal with the emotional leakage from his disloyal but suddenly contrite younger son.

Even still, it was a revealing and saddening snapshot of royal life. Harry, full of love, rushing home to his father only to perhaps finally realise, like Lady Macbeth, that what’s done cannot be undone.

The unspoken words, t he brotherly cold shoulder, the clatter of a Sandringham-bound helicopter, the loneliness of hotel room- service in the city of your birth – all of it suggests a bleak road ahead for the warring family.

Tolstoy famously wrote that happy families are all alike, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Yet the British royal family take misery into a whole new gilded age of gloom, entirely of their own making.