There is so much that is so sad about the Duke of Sussex’s latest failed legal battle, and today’s sob-story BBC interview. He continues to be estranged from his family, including the King, Queen, and Prince and Princess of Wales. He carries on feeling excluded from his own country. His sense of profound grievance is as raw as ever.
In which case we must beg him, with the best will in the world, and using admittedly unroyal language, to just shut up. I can’t put it any simpler than that. Every time he carries out an interview with the Beeb or Oprah, and every snide remark in every book he publishes, just makes it yet more likely that the matters he claims to want to resolve with his once nearest and dearest will merely push them all further and further apart.
How can he possibly plead for “reconciliation” with his family when he’s done so much to undermine them? Is anyone who has just been punched in the face ready to reconcile themselves with the puncher? Particularly when they’re accused of racism or living with cancer?
Security is Harry’s obsession. It has, he told the BBC, always been his number one issue. He claims it was withdrawn as a weapon to keep him and his wife working as Royals here in the UK. “An establishment stitch-up”, he calls it. And, of course, we understand that anyone in the public eye, particularly a father of young children, will feel concerned. We all remember Diana and Paris, September 1997. Nobody wants a repeat.
But why continually wash your family’s dirty linen in full public view? Whatever happened to that famous Royal motto, “Never complain, never explain”, at least not in public? Surely an obsession with global media interviews just makes the security risk even greater.
More importantly, Harry still cannot understand, and maybe never will, just how spoiled his continual bleating sounds to ordinary people up and down the UK. We are suffering an appalling cost-of-living crisis. Far too many people this last winter were forced to worry about that awful choice: heating or eating. For many, there is just about enough money to cover the basics of life, but none for those little extras that make life worth living. It’s hard. Very hard. For millions.
And then we see this guy who’s inherited so much money, who earns millions through slagging off his own family, who lives in a gorgeous Californian pad overlooking the sea, who rubs shoulders with A-listers and who travels around in luxury, moaning about how life has treated him so harshly and telling us how much he misses “parts of the UK”. (Which parts, dare we ask?)
How do you think that sounds to us, Harry? Perhaps a wee bit entitled?
We all have problems. But few of us have Harry’s spectacular advantages, all of which were given to him by accident of birth. He has no great talent that, unless he’d been born a Royal, would have made him either noticeable or particularly successful. He struck lucky.
I invite him therefore, just for once, to flip to the positive and consider just how phenomenally privileged he is. To count his blessings.
Oh, and one more thing: if he genuinely wants reconciliation, please Harry, no more interviews. Saying little or nothing is now your best hope. Then let time work its magic.
