You know what the problem with Prince Harry is? It isn’t that he’s a traitor to his relatives, that his mind has been poisoned by the post-Marxist philosophers of wokeism or even that he’s under the manicured thumb of a royal-family destroying American Maleficent (see also “Duke of Windsor”). The problem with Harry, as I will try to explain, is that he’s basically right. And that is unforgivable.
This isn’t a popular view. By the time Spare hits the shelves and the review pages next week, I don’t anticipate being joined by legions of other 50-plus Harry-defenders.
I haven’t read the book, but by now I think I’m familiar with both its motivation and its argument. Just before Christmas I made myself watch the six-part Netflix series Harry and Meghan. And like just about everyone who has had anything to say about the series, I felt the absurdity of young good-looking folk complaining about suffering while sitting in a Californian mansion where they dwell in perpetual sunshine financed by perpetual royalties.
And yet I found myself quite liking them. Or, at least, in the case of Harry, sympathising. My family was fairly poor when I was young. Our home life was not easy. But of all the alternative families I could have had I would never have chosen to dwell imprisoned among the flunkeys, footmen, courtiers and corgis in the rococo zoo of the British royal family. The British royal family cannot belong to themselves, and this — except for those marrying in — is not by choice but by birth.
The Netflix series was hugely effective (at least for those open to the possibility) in portraying what this life actually meant for someone who didn’t want to live it. The archive scenes of intrusion into the lives of Diana and her children actually made me feel oddly ashamed. I daresay the book — ghost-written by a very talented memoirist — will hit the same chords.
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Anyway, it’s clear that Harry’s game has become not to play the game. Or at least, not in the way it has come to be played. He believes it destroyed his mother and that it, in effect, imprisons and corrupts his family. Almost pathetically he wants them to break loose, as he believes he has tried to do.
Way back in November 2016, when Brexit promised a new dawn and Donald Trump received Hillary Clinton’s concession, Harry’s communications secretary issued a statement on his behalf. Harry, it said, had always been “aware that there is significant curiosity about his private life. He has never been comfortable with this, but he has tried to develop a thick skin.” But now a torrent of “defamatory stories”, a “wave of abuse and harassment” and “bribes” offered to former associates of Meghan’s to dish whatever dirt could be dug up had led the prince to try and “protect” her, by appealing directly to public opinion.
That was more than six years ago. In the period since, his narrative has hardened, as narratives tend to. And camps have formed. I tend to believe that Charles is a decent man, genuine in his appreciation of what we call “diversity”, and happy to have it in his own family. But when a Jamaican poet complains about the racist treatment of Meghan by the royals and is widely and approvingly quoted in the Jamaican press, the sound you hear is not necessarily of truth, rather of long-delayed imperial chickens coming noisily home to roost.
But we’re not obliged to join a camp. On these pages we have the luxury of being able to look at an argument on its own merits. And this is what Harry argues, as contained in a couple of interviews to be screened on TV here and in the US this weekend in advance of the publication of Spare: that his direct experience has been of the palace briefing against the Sussexes, “spoon-feeding” correspondents with stories or damaging interpretations which are attributed to unnamed sources. He argues that this complicity between press and palace has long been a feature of the way in which the royal establishment has sought to deal with awkward truths and awkward truth-tellers.
And it’s true. He’s right. In broad terms. Try the Google game yourself and enter “Meghan” and “royal sources”. As in (from mid-December) “Royal aides accuse Sussexes of MORE falsehoods in their Netflix docuseries: Meghan’s claims that she was not prepared for life in the monarchy is branded ‘a total lie’ by sources.” There are dozens more.
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It’s been this way for ages. In his latest book The Queen, Andrew Morton wrote of how, just after Diana’s death, “the prince’s spin doctors at St James’s Palace tried to portray Charles as decisive and democratic while painting all the Queen’s men as dithering, delaying and hiding behind precedent and tradition”. The long-term royal correspondent Richard Kay told recently of how, in the years following, “the Prince of Wales was trying to get the public to accept Camilla. And when people pushed back on that, Charles’s side would let slip bombshells about other members of the royal family.”
Even so, Harry’s model isn’t quite right. It’s too conspiratorial and too neat. What often happens, as Jennie Bond revealed in her 2001 book, is that correspondents seek comment from an institution which is hugely secretive, and far from being “spoon-fed” they get none. Like any decent reporter they try to get some kind of clarification from contacts in the various palaces. These tend to be the mysterious “sources”.
But the result from the subject’s point of view can seem the same, amounting to complicity between a persecutory press and a paranoid palace, in which they are the collateral damage. The nuances are not the point.
There is, however, one group of people left out of Harry’s demonology. The ones without whom none of this would be happening. Editors aren’t stupid and they see what their readers, viewers and listeners are interested in. You don’t get eight pages devoted to a royal TV series because journalists think that’s more important than climate change or a possible war over Taiwan.
People will buy and read Harry’s book as they watched his series out of the same prurient interest that feeds the beast he fears. What sells Spare is the very public lust to invade the privacy of others that arguably did for his martyred mother. The truth is that we are a fallen species and as Harry may discover when his book gets panned, we don’t care to be reminded of the fact.
