How very convenient of Prince Harry to blame the rift with his family on his one-sided, obsessive, eternal battle with the tabloid and popular Press.
He made the claim on last night’s documentary Tabloids On Trial (ITV), telling sympathetic Health Correspondent Rebecca Barry it was his ‘mission’ against newspapers that destroyed the relationship with his family. Was it really?
‘Yeah, that’s certainly a central piece to it,’ he said, nodding from deep within the ruff of hair that now encircles his entire face, like a giant, ginger dandelion. ‘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.’
Torrent of abuse? Tsk. Clearly, three years in California have done little to halt the growth of Harry’s giant beanstalk of a martyr complex. He’s one of those pampered sensitivos whose elite status makes him believe that any mild disagreement with his views is a vicious personal attack.
So, listen Harry. I’m not an abuser, torrential or otherwise. I’m just a lowly Scottish serf offering a cheep of dissent, someone who is dumbfounded by your most sanctimonious claim to date. Which seems to be that you fell out with the Windsors because of your — checks notes — war on newspapers? Have I got that right?
‘It would be nice,’ he added, ‘if we could do it as a family.’
It would be nice! Do it as a family! Why am I shouting? Just at the utter audacity of it all. Prince Harry has been so rude about his family for so long, painting them as ribbon-cutting dolts while he and only he, armed with his A-level in art and his grim wife, is guided by a higher moral purpose.
And this new pet theory of his neatly absolves the Prince of any responsibility for deserting not only his royal duty, but his duty as a brother and a son. It excuses him for the cruel things he wrote in his autobiography Spare about his family, including his stepmother (‘dangerous’), his sister-in-law (imperious demands, wife who fitted the royal mould, utter witch who made darling Megs cry) and damning passages depicting his father as a damaged, dithering adult who loves his teddy bear and fears emotional intimacy. It ignores the fact that it was Prince William whose Chief of Staff first went to the police with his suspicions of illegal phone hacking.
Let’s not forget it also exempts Harry from any accountability over that nasty business of globally smearing the entire Royal Family as racists fretting over the colour of baby Archie’s skin. Then vowing never to reveal the true identities of the two individuals allegedly involved before it somehow became public — whoopsadaisy, thanks Omid — that it was CH*RL*S and K*TE all along.
Harry (with Meghan at his side) has broken the blood bond by repeatedly invading the Royals’ collective and individual privacy on television, in documentary projects, in print, on film, via Oprah, Anderson Cooper, Netflix, Apple, and Tom Bradby — perhaps even on a podcast near you right now.
Indeed, I’ve never understood why the Duke and Duchess of Sussex continue to ostracise poor old Thomas Markle for his silly but minor transgression with newspapers, when what they’ve done together is a thousand times worse — on an industrial scale.
For the truth is that Prince Harry and the Royal Family fell out about a lot of things a long time ago. And to blame the rift on his Press crusade is not just disingenuous, it also provides him with the perfect excuse and a freshly minted get-out-of-jail-free card.
I suspect it’s not what King Charles or Prince William would say, it’s not what the Princess of Wales would say, it’s not what all the scolded courtiers and former palace staff members would say about what really caused the royal rift. However, it is what Prince Harry says and in Harry’s world, what Harry says goes — because who is going to argue with him?
Up there in his gilded Californian mansion, with his polo pals and his grandiose Archewell website — a total iron dome of dumb — he lives in a confected orbit of celebrity by proxy; he is a fish out of water, a prince in a republic, a rebel on pause. Today, the Sussexes exist as an abstract construct built on stunts and showbiz buzz, measuring out their existence by embarking on crusades and accepting embarrassing awards such as the Ripple of Hope or the Living Legend of Aviation.
Against the wishes of the late soldier’s mother, who along with ex-military chiefs, urged him to turn it down, Prince Harry accepted the Pat Tillman Award for Service at a recent star-studded event in Los Angeles. It was the action of a man so desperate to be seen in a heroic light that he’d risk ridicule and controversy just to add another medal to his trophy cupboard.
Prince Harry’s life now is propped up by such awards, along with honorary accolades and his assorted pet projects. Some of them, like the Invictus Games, are indeed noble. Yet blaming his grievances against the Press as the reason for his ongoing isolation from the rest of his family is fooling absolutely no one. Except himself.
