There is out of touch with reality and there is Prince Harry’s concept of reality. One is excusable in privileged people like royalty, the other entails a disassociation from the real world which is just annoying.
I give you this week’s treat, namely, Prince Harry’s interview with Rebecca Barry in the ITV documentary, Tabloids on Trial. In it he intimates that his courageous “mission” against the tabloid press “caused … part of a rift” with the royal family. Asked if his fight had destroyed the relationship with his family, he said, “Yeah, that’s certainly a central piece to it … but you know, that’s a hard question to answer because anything I say about my family results in a torrent of abuse from the press.”
At the risk of adding my droplet to the torrent, this suggestion that his problems with the press are central to his estrangement from his family is nuts. Where do I start?
Well, there was his decision to decamp from the UK and leave the humdrum royal business of attending things to people like his no-nonsense aunt Anne, who is right now over in Paris putting steel in the spine of the UK Olympics team. That move may have been prompted by his lovely wife but he decamped willingly.
There was the suggestion from Meghan, shyly revealed to Oprah Winfrey, that the royal family was racist because someone speculated on the skin colour of the then prenatal Archie. Piers Morgan subsequently named the King and Kate as the possible offenders, but the whole idea of racial bias among the royals was silly and, for idiots, immensely damaging.
There was the slew of allegations in Spare, not least about a fight with his brother in which William wrestled him to the ground, broke his necklace (I know, what was he doing with a necklace?) and cracked a dog bowl on the floor. Harry then revealed that he told his therapist first about it (just for fun, think what the late Duke of Edinburgh would have said to that) and then Meghan, who was “terribly sad”.
In another interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby, a friend, he revealed, “I saw this red mist in him” which must have brought on another red mist episode.
Truth to tell, what with Oprah and Bradby and Spare and Endgame (Omid Scobie’s helpful account) and the rest, it’s quite difficult to keep a running account of Harry’s grievances. But I expect his family has kept count.
Behind all this has been that remarkable spectacle of the Harry and Meghan Give Us Privacy world tour in which the pair use any available outlet to express their utter antipathy to any media intrusion into their very private lives, while at the same time making use of any and every press outlet to flog their product which is Sussex Royal or whatever variant of their title is handiest. To put it another way, their sole marketable commodity is not Meghan’s delicious preserves and cooking tips (the latest offer from Montecito) but the residual glamour attaching to their status and title which is what makes people sign up for Meghan’s tips and their podcasts.
That having-cake and eating-cake philosophy must grate with the royals.
It is, I submit, this willingness simultaneously to milk the royal family and condemn the royal family which has more to do with Harry’s estrangement from his family than the press. That, and perhaps his wife’s alleged arrogance, incivility to staff and sense of entitlement when she was actually living over here.
The unfortunate thing is, Harry does have some grounds for grievance. He is right to say that his mother was ruthlessly exploited by the press (though she could give as good as she got) and was paranoid with good reason. She may well have been hacked as he said.
It is no secret that he does not care for Camilla, the woman who displaced his mother in his father’s affections, and that seems fair enough, but you know, William apparently has reservations about her too, but he expresses them discreetly.
So, Harry, who could have done sterling service as a well loved member of the royal team, especially with veterans (the Invictus Games show what he might have done) and the military, not only threw it all away apparently at the behest of his wife but bought into the narrative of being an innocent victim of a racist establishment and an uncaring father. That’s why there’s a certain froideur between the family and their errant son. The media may have seized on every instance of estrangement but what was reported wasn’t the half of it.
Truth is, Harry’s crusade against the press seems increasingly remote from reality, which is news dominated not by tabloids but by the stream of unreason online. Don’t blame the press, Harry; be grateful still to have us.
Melanie McDonagh is an Evening Standard columnist
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