Hilary Rose, as ever, boils them down to glue, but this time with precision more than sarcasm:
Physical violence is obviously never a cause for self-congratulation, unless you’re flying a helicopter and aiming at foreigners. But after enduring 90 minutes of Prince Harry droning on, I thought: William, I’d have thumped him too. Goodness but he’s irritating. Petty, pious, paranoid, delusional, with an ego both monstrous and fragile, the nation’s formerly favourite cheeky chappie has turned into a rather pathetic middle-aged man wanging on about his beard. He claims to be a humanitarian and philanthropist but he can’t get beyond his own face. It’s almost as if staring at your navel, and holding grudges for years, and talking about yourself in therapy, and complaining on TV about how awful your gilded life has been, isn’t very good for your character and doesn’t make you happy. Perhaps he should try stacking shelves on the night shift instead. Maybe that would.
Tom Bradby asked some decent questions but largely let Harry swerve answering them. The result is vague statements about who cares what, nonsense allegations, endless grievances and then back to some perceived slight in 1994 and the beard. Moving to the other side of the world, dumping his friends and trashing his family was clearly worth it for the chance to speak his truth about facial hair. It’s “almost like a shield to my anxiety” he says at one point. Good grief.
The fact is that, like many other people, his parents got divorced and he lost his mum when he was young. His family was dysfunctional and his dad wasn’t much of a hugger. You might think that an expensive education, first-class travel, the chance to spend months on end in Africa, as he said in the Netflix doc, free accommodation in gorgeous buildings and never needing to earn a living might make life bearable. Apparently not. No stone is left unturned, no confidence is left unbroken in his quest for what, exactly? He didn’t even believe William when he looked him in the eye, invoked their mother’s life and told him he just wanted him to be happy. Kudos to William; I’d have told him to sod off long ago.
Meghan and Kate evidently didn’t get on from the start, but there we are. They’re very different people. I don’t believe, as Harry claims, that it was anything to do with Meghan being a divorced American, or that William and Kate were prejudiced by what they read in the press. They’d met her, they could form their own conclusions and they were evidently not exactly in tandem with Harry’s.
My personal favourite moment was when he said that he and his wife were dedicated to a life of service, and it was never about making money. Of course it wasn’t. Thank heavens money and mansions and private jets were just a happy by-product of your selfless endeavours helping others. Perhaps all those people at your wedding you’d barely met, like Oprah and the Clooneys, were only there because they were more photogenic than your friends, and not because they might help you to make money and build a brand.
We talk about the importance of working on yourself, because Harry obviously thinks he’s a tremendous advert for the benefits of therapy. He says something about how much money he has spent on lawyers trying to reconcile with his family, because lawyers are definitely the best way to do that. In an interview overflowing with bonkers self-delusion, he claims that a reconciliation between him and his family would have a ripple effect across the entire world, and in Ukraine people said, “Yes, Harry, we definitely give a shit.” He’s still pissed off that William didn’t want to hang out with him when he arrived at Eton. Imagine.
If Harry’s aim with all this was to burn Buckingham Palace to the ground, I fear it’s backfired. He thinks he’s some kind of avenging angel, but he’s really just a naughty boy. He tells Bradby at the end that he’s happy. He’s got a funny way of showing it.
