Prince Harry’s Birthday Met With Totally Normal Effusive Good Wishes by Royals He Has Spent All Year Slamming

Hard feelings? One?

Perish the thought!

Buoyed, perhaps, by her success at cheerfully wishing North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un and his people a happy national day and best wishes for the future, the queen has turned the focus of her blithe good tidings on a less easily placated opponent of Britain’s most ancient institutions: Prince Harry.

After a year in which Harry has notably accused the royal family (which the queen runs) of racism, ignoring his wife’s mental health troubles, and trying to smear Meghan as a bully, it was perhaps with an eye to the optics of reclaiming the moral high ground that the monarch took to social media to publicly wish her errant and self-exiled grandson a happy 37th birthday.

After H.M. fired the starting gun, the royal felicitations started coming in thick and fast.

First out of the blocks were William and Kate, although unlike their grandmother they perhaps less magnificently opted only to include Harry in the image they shared with the world, not his wife Meghan. Whether or not this is because Meghan accused Kate of making her cry in the run up to her wedding, and then allowing palace spinners to manipulate the story so that a narrative developed that it was Meghan who had made Kate cry, was not elucidated on in the brief birthday wishes.

Tough to do in 280 characters, to be fair.

A few minutes later, Prince Charles fired off his birthday greetings. One might—depending on one’s prejudices—consider this was either a) an impromptu and uncomplicated birthday tweet, b) a noble gesture of healing and reconciliation, or c) a cynical attempt to position the royal personage as one embracing the notion of healing and reconciliation.

Just as Kate and William kept the more fractious details of the past year's gigantic family argument out of the social media domain, Charles was also the soul of discretion.

There was, for example, no mention of the fact that his son recently told a global audience of hundreds of millions of people that Charles cut him off financially, was “trapped” in the system and institution of monarchy, and had done nothing to sympathize with Harry when he told him his difficulties, instead telling him he must simply “suffer” the same way he had.

Charles also apparently couldn’t quite bring himself to share images of Harry and Meghan, instead focusing on some sweet throwback childhood images.

Meghan, of course, is a big fan of birthdays—and was expected to post something on the couple’s Archewell website later in the day.