Abstract
Newspapers have been quick to denigrate Prince Harry and his book. Is that because they know what they did to him?
What took him so long? A quarter of a century after paparazzi motorbikes played a role in the death of his mother, the Duke of Sussex has at last confirmed that his “life’s work” is to “reform the media landscape” in the UK. The anger he feels towards his family and “the institution” is as nothing compared to that towards the media. “All because a dreadful mob of dweebs and crones and cut-rate criminals and clinically diagnosable sadists along Fleet Street feel the need to get their jollies and plump their profits and work out their personal issues by tormenting one very large, very ancient, very dysfunctional family.”
Until the Bradby interview, some of us with a longstanding interest in redtop rascalry suspected that the royal without a cause had at last found one. Now he has confirmed it, presumably because otherwise the newspapers would be the last to tell the rest of us. The newspapers he so resents have chosen to tell the juiciest stories (the rivalries, the family feuds, the Taliban deaths, the frosty willy, the drug-taking, the petty slights), rather than explain that almost all his grievances have their roots upstream of those stories – in the media and royal attempts to manipulate how they are covered. Most of the coverage and the denigration of his personality, imperfect as it is, have been sideshows to the main event – that Harry has a score to settle.
So here are a few things Harry’s beef is not primarily about: a scrap in the kitchen between proud men; race; a pushy American who doesn’t understand that noblesse oblige, richesse doesn’t (never mind having to curtsey behind closed doors); a grieving son finally finding some space to be himself; a grieving son finding a living version of his mother; therapy versus bottling it up; conservatism versus progressivism;, love versus duty; an uncomplicated young man being led by a hard-headed woman who doesn’t understand the difference between reigning and ruling; a lion-hearted, Boy Scout of a young man denied the soldierly career he always wanted; a greed-driven display of hypocrisy from two privacy-seeking, entitled lovebirds; a challenge to the fusty status quo from an upstart colonial; female empowerment; bickering sisters-in-law (a “catfight”, in tabloidese) arguing about who made whom cry or wore the wrong dress or was presumptuous with the lip gloss; the default taking of offence; a heroic husband protecting his wife’s mental health and preventing history repeating itself, and … and … and.
Now, though, by spelling it out, Harry has done as much as he can to make the real issue unignorable. Not that that will stop his chief antagonists trying. First comes the mockery. After all, we pragmatic Brits don’t have much time for deluded souls with convictions, folk who want to improve the world (or at least those who lack the manners to pretend otherwise), let alone tilt at windmills. Quentin Letts was first out of the traps after ITV’s Tom Bradby interview, reporting that “for almost two verminous hours a designer-bearded princeling bewailed his lot and claimed he was going to have to change the world because no one else would do the job.”
“Everything was Fleet Street’s fault,” said Letts, “except when it was Camilla’s fault or William’s fault or the fault of his poor, loving father whose lone-parenting skills had been measured and found not up to Californian snuff.” Leo McKinstry was even more splenetic. “Soaked in spite, marinated in malice,” he explained, “the book has exposed him to the world as a jealous man-child, whose verbal incontinence is matched by his capacity for paranoia and petulance. The peevish, often incoherent, Prince has already made a fortune from this book. But in the process, he has sold his soul with his spectacular treachery towards his family and his country … His descent into absurdity is fuelled by his lack of self-awareness. His claim that he and his wife are ‘dedicated to a life of service’ is almost laughable, given their fixation with wealth and luxury.” In short, Mr Chippy and his American wife had got above themselves, an open goal for the pundits.
I lack McKinstry’s anger – or the slightest expertise as a psychotherapist – but it doesn’t take a genius to see that Harry is a deeply damaged figure. He will attract any amount of abuse. He may be a hypocrite for using the media to convey his message and accepting all that money. He may be showing selfish disloyalty to his father, brother and their public positions. He may have had too much therapy and lost any sense of proportion. He may even have developed a messiah complex as he carries his mother’s flag through this rotten world. But his grievances are deep-seated, would have troubled anyone, remain unresolved, and call for some understanding. In 2007, when contemplating possible death while serving in the army, he consoled himself thus: “If I die in Afghanistan, I thought, at least I’ll never have to see another fake headline, read another shameful lie about myself.”
He didn’t ask to be born a prince, and in return for playing the role he’s entitled to some sense of equity and fair play. Yet what example was he shown in his most formative years? The fact that he is now damaged goods doesn’t prevent him having a legitimate gripe about press misbehaviour. On the contrary. It’s a qualification.
‘Dark arts’ deployed to dig up dirt on Harry
The roots of his anger, of course, are deep. He was 12 when his mother was killed as her car was chased by paparazzi through the streets of Paris. This wasn’t “a bit of bad luck”, an accident of the “struck-by-a meteorite” type. It was the sort of accident that happens when some cruel sport – say, bear-baiting – is not only unpoliced but industrialised. The world sympathised, but also reserved the right to gawp at his teenage years, wondering how he was coping. The traumatised princes had to endure the Palace’s “keep your head down” attitude at an age when nobody’s hormones show them at their best. “I was lost … for doing basic teenage stuff,” Harry has written.
When he was 16, the News of the World, in defiance of a deal that was supposed to ensure the princes’ privacy, targeted him, deploying unlawful means to try to prove he was drinking excessively and taking drugs. “It was a fishing expedition, based on rumours,” the News of the World’s Greg Miskiw told Byline Investigates. “I commissioned both Glenn Mulcaire and Mazher Mahmood to get the evidence; to stand up the story.” (Neither Mulcaire nor Mahmood has unblemished records and both Miskiw and Mulcaire admit that illegal methods – “the dark arts” - were deployed in the search for evidence.)
In the end, the paper was unable to stand up the story, but that didn’t stop Prince Charles’s PR man Mark Bolland, the man charged with turning “other woman” Camilla into a future queen, being tricked into doing a deal with the News of the World. It was based on a sham. The paper had no evidence.
Rather than being punished for even breaking the original deal, the paper was rewarded for ratting on it. The paper negotiated for a story headlined “Harry’s Drugs Shame: Prince admits ‘I smoked pot at Highgrove’” to be published. It portrayed the then-Prince Charles as a deeply caring father who, supposedly as a result of the paper’s helpful exposé, arranged for Harry to visit a rehabilitation clinic. Simply, this was not true. Harry had visited the clinic months earlier.
Anyone naïve enough to think the Press Complaints Commission should have blown the whistle on the News of the World’s behaviour – and that of other papers – should remember that it was brokered by Bolland, partner of then PCC boss Lord Black, and that their wedding was witnessed by the News of the World’s editor. Conflict of interest, anyone? No prizes for guessing why the brothers used to refer to Bolland as My Lord Blackadder.
For Harry and his entourage, unlawful scrutiny was routine. “Blaggers”, hired on a freelance basis to put distance between them and their paymasters, would, in harness with staff reporters, get up to no good in pursuit of royal tittle-tattle. Phone records were purloined, voicemails hacked, friends tricked and girlfriends papped. Some of it was unlawful, much of it was intrusive. One girlfriend found a tracking device on the underside of her car. It was an echo of a world barely changed from the one his mother faced. The BBC’s Martin Bashir fed his mother’s “paranoia” about media duplicity, turning out to be the arch-exponent of it himself, a truth she didn’t live to learn. No wonder Harry, who once said he was living in a cross between The Truman Show and a human zoo, feels he has unfinished business.
The framing of how things looked, of the narrative, was out of Harry’s hands. Where was his autonomy? When he wanted a serious conversation with his family about his role, it got leaked. When, in a state of puppyish excitement, he discusses Meghan’s suitability to join the royal family, he is told to slow the relationship down.
When Meghan writes to her father, the letter gets into the newspapers, seemingly confident the Palace won’t sue. The Mail caused Meghan’s miscarriage, says Harry. The papers use racist dog-whistle language to undermine Meghan. The press parrots a Palace press office untruth – in which Harry had no say – when denying that William bullied Harry’s family into effective exile. (They were “happy to lie to protect my brother”, says Harry.)
How you win this war is anyone’s guess, but Harry has had it with compromise, and it looks as if he thinks his brother should have had it too. You sense his resentment at the comparatively easier ride his brother had – over his teenage drinking, for example, which was barely mentioned in the papers – is rooted in what must look to him like William going along with one rule for the heir, another for The Spare. Harry was labelled by one pundit the “royal flypaper”. The bad stuff stuck to him.
Compromise, after all, was what allowed the 1998 PR-inspired deal that enabled The Sun to reveal that William and Camilla (not Harry, mind) had met for the first time, just months after Diana’s funeral, an acknowledgement that Camilla was here to stay. William had been bounced into it, but had to bite the bullet.
William was reportedly as angry as Harry about the anonymous briefings that elevated the briefer’s boss above all else, but he took on board that that is how the world works, and how the monarchy, so dependent on public support, survives. Presumably he had been no less traumatised by the death of Diana than had his brother, but in time he concluded that if the press is not going to go away, it has to be managed, as far as possible. Unlike Harry, he has the title-to-be, the sheer power, to make it work to his advantage. He and his office can use the kowtowers and the game-playing, gong-awarding bag of sticks and carrots that goes with knowing he will be king one day.
William ensured that Kate was less harassed than Diana
Quietly, though, William did make some inroads into the tabloid tendency to bully. He ensured that Kate had less paparazzi harassment than his mother had, though he was unable to prevent topless pictures of her appearing in a French magazine. And let us not forget that, when the celebs had all but given up complaining about their privacy being ignored, his discreet pushing (possibly encouraged by Harry?) over a trivial but tale-telling story of the loan of a video camera led to the arrest and imprisonment of Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman, without which we might to this day know nothing of phone-hacking.
But Harry’s passivity is exhausted. He has determination, a sense of grievance, and a can-do wife with little time for crusty hierarchies. She wants him to find fulfilment. So the moment the Mail on Sunday published Meghan’s letter to her father, a touchpaper was lit. The couple decided, in defiance of the Palace, to take unprecedented legal action. “We knew they’d advise us not to sue,” says Harry. They talk almost as if it was an accident, “the catalyst for all the unravelling”, but to their therapists maybe it looked like the fight they always needed to have.
They, in their own minds at least, are the wholesome ones, the unsullied, uncompromising ones with virtue and social progress on their side, but they are still learning the hard way that hierarchies don’t happen by accident. Top dogs tend to stay top dogs, by fair means or foul, so Harry and Meghan, appalled by a handful of examples of “competitive” briefing, have sandbagged themselves into a position where almost any steer by the Palace looks corrupt and dishonest. In the moral stand against tabloid hypocrisy, the Palace is complicit. The problem now, though, is that Harry has told the world he resents his family almost as much as he resents the press. In his mind they look like twin evils, hence the need for him to clarify the suggestion, based on a conversation about the colour of their baby’s skin, that his family is racist.
When the Palace has only one real way of judging success – what the press says about it – they end up feeling imprisoned by their own cheerleaders. “If you are, like a lot of my family, reading the press, the British tabloids, at the same time as living the life, then there is a tendency where you could actually end up living in the tabloid bubble rather than the actual reality,” he said. The question of the baby’s skin tone is, of course, the ultimate in “things not to say”. It made Oprah Winfrey, and presumably millions more, gasp, after Meghan raised it in their interview.
Harry, though, said he would never discuss that conversation, possibly because it suits everyone for it to be assumed the person who raised it belongs to a generation less attuned to current attitudes. There is a belief in some quarters (and no, for better or worse I have not been briefed by the Palace) that the matter was brought up as an artless royal attempt to prepare for public curiosity on the matter – for a feverish media desire for pictures and so on – rather than for more discreditable reasons. If so – and this is speculation – one imagines this would have fed Harry’s sense that his family is incapable of knowing what it thinks is important, as opposed to what the media thinks matters. In short, in Harry’s mind, the tabloid bubble has become the royals’ new reality.
So, citing “the actual reality”, he is saying no more fairy tales, no more Truman Show. Harry, valiant for truth, has found his new cause. He and Meghan want no part of this closed system. If you speak truth to power, says Harry, they respond with institutional gaslighting. With an irony and chutzpah that must leave his father and brother speechless, he says he wants serious conversations that won’t get leaked. Time may do its work, but it is difficult to imagine a “reformed media landscape”, an institutional structure, that would stop “insiders” and “friends” talking and journalists being journalists. Harry must know he can’t write his own school report, but he needs also to see that if Jan Moir and a Daily Mail editorial want to interpret what he intended as a public-spirited utterance about trauma among the military as a “boast” (as they did), they are expressing an opinion. It looks to me like the opposite of a boast, but let it go. Is his aunt Princess Anne diminished by rising above the noise? On the contrary.
He will win no prizes for diplomacy with his description of News Group’s boss Rebekah Brooks (“An infected pustule on the arse of humanity [and] a shit excuse for a journalist”), another example of Harry’s occasional and self-defeating “don’t get even, get mad” approach. But where he could strike a blow – and it is hard to avoid the sense that the Mail is his chief target – is in his court cases. He and some celebrities have lined up a handful of private investigators, armed with payment records, with revealing things to say about the work they did for Associated Newspapers. Famously, the Mail’s then-editor Paul Dacre denied to Lord Leveson any involvement by the paper in phone-hacking, so the mind races as to what is being alleged. Harry has claims against The Sun (under Brooks’s editorship) and the Mirror (under that of Piers Morgan). These are not small fry.
“If we don’t have the resource or the capability or the capacity to stand up to these people, then no one else has,” says Harry. His demeanour suggests he’s up for a big fight, and lawyers don’t come cheap. Maybe that is what he needs all those royalties for.
