I love Prince Harry
possibly my most controversial opinion that I am very sure of and which I think could not publish like this in the UK press (plus, under the line: a great documentary, podcast and parrot news)
Here is an audio version of this post, read by me not the AI voice. The AI voice cannot say “for god’s sake” like I need it said:
Let’s start with a thought experiment. Think of a small child you know and love. Like… between two and five years old. At that time of sweetness where they want to explore the world and everything is delightful to them, intense and vivid. A squishy lovely little person.
Now imagine that I come to you and say:
“congratulations! This child is now a member of the British royal family! They will never be able to starve, they will always have somewhere to live, they won’t want for money, they’ll be in actual palaces often with beautiful views and have the opportunity to meet a lot of people, cut ribbons on new buildings and read out speeches! Wonderful!
“Of course we do ask for something in exchange: do they have any interests? Those don’t matter now. Are they drawn to gardening, to literature, to a life of adventure, to musical theatre, to professional sport, might they like to be an engineer? Great, we don’t give a toss. That stuff must be at most an occasional hobby because their job is decided now, they have to spend the majority of their time making small talk with random people - never deep talk, never ever - and doing that ribbon-cutting and speech-reading.
“They will have to entertain world leaders even if they find them rancid. The worst people in the world will want to get close to them and use them for the cachet of their presence. They can never express a strong opinion in public, or mostly in private because the world’s press will constantly be obsessed by them. They will be the subject of true and made-up stories, they will have very little private life as someone will always be willing to sell any story about them to the press. They will be chased by cameras, by photographers hiding half a mile away and using a telephoto lens to try to get an image of them, for example, on holiday. They will live their lives as a hunted animal and have to pretend to enjoy it, either playing the game of the press or if they refuse being pursued with rage-filled ferocity. It doesn’t matter if they don’t want it or try to give it up. It’s not like being the child of a celeb where if you don’t go to the press they don’t come to you. There is no way out.”
Really think about it. Do you go “hurray! This child is a Royal now, how lovely!”? Or do you grab them in your arms and run, run anywhere you can to get away? The ends of the earth. Change your names. Find a way to get a false passport. Get away, get away from this horror.
I mean, I don’t think there are many people who truly want it for a child they love.
Let us now consider Prince Harry. I don’t care what he’s done in his life, actually, although he seems basically dedicated to being a good dad and husband, and he enjoyed his relatively anonymous time as a soldier before the media buggered it up for him. He’s had some therapy which seems like a good choice; I’m sure he blooming needed it.
This is what I care about.
The thing that happened to Harry at twelve years old was this: the system of ‘royalty’, the British idea that someone can ‘be royal’, the things we make that mean, the way we treat them, the intrusive press, each of us who was a bit interested in reading a story about a royal princess… all of that killed Harry’s mother.
I’m not interested in questions about whether she should have got into that car or whatever. I’m not interested in debating who she was as a person or the decisions she made. The long You’re Wrong About series on her is a great deep dive into Diana if you like that sort of thing. She seems like she was quite a messy and dramatic person in some ways - and which of us haven’t been? - but she was a good mother, she adored her children and she was 36 years old when she died.
What put her in the tunnel pursued by a pack of photographers was the British idea of royalty. The system that says you can take a 19-year-old girl, marry her to a ‘future king’ and then for the rest of her short life any photograph of her will be worth thousands and thousands of pounds. What caused all of that to happen - the reckless pursuit, the fleeing from the press, the tunnel, the crash - the ultimate cause of all of that was that the British royal family is still taken seriously in Britain. Seriously enough to expect them to toe the line. But not - any longer - seriously enough that the press wouldn’t report any salacious stories about them1.
In modern Britain, the royal family is essentially the last place where we demand that children have to do their parents’ jobs. This used to be a somewhat common system - we all know the story where the baker’s son or daughter learns to be a baker, the smith’s son learns to man the forge2. But we gave that system up for everyone else a long time ago for the incredibly obvious reason that quite often children are really crap at their parents’ jobs and also really hate it. We have a much better system now which is that - hopefully, in an ideal world - you get a good education that introduces you to a wide range of things you might be interested in and then you get to pursue the career that fits with your interests, your skills and what the rest of us need doing in the world. “You were born to it or you married into it” is a demonstrably terrible way of choosing the right person for any job, let alone one where you have to be OK with all four of:
being as world-famous as the most well-known music and movie stars
being an extrovert who is capable of being pleasantly bland to strangers all the time - essentially the job is ‘cabin crew’
being OK with keeping your mouth shut about any views you might happen to have for the whole of your life
leading an extraordinarily respectable life which gives no one anything to complain about or gossip about
It’s not a difficult job. It’s an incredibly demanding one. Different things.
Just on paper, this is not a job it ought to be possible to ‘marry into’, or be born into. If you pick people for it that way, you’re going to end up with a lot of unhappy people doing a job they’re not great at, visibly straining at the restrictions, limitations and demands on their lives. QED3.
Diana died at thirty six. Her sons were fifteen and twelve.
If your mum dies when you are twelve, that will be a big deal for you for the rest of your life no matter how it happened. It’s just very young to lose your mother. You’ll be left - rather like Paul McCartney and John Lennon - yearning for that very important love that is gone. It doesn’t matter whether it was someone’s fault or not, it’s just massive.
If she died shockingly suddenly in a car accident, that will give you a lifelong understanding of what can be suddenly taken from you without warning. It will be easy for you to be afraid and anxious, easy to imagine the worst things that can happen. If the car crash was caused by the press pursuing her on motorbikes… you might end up with eg a feeling of being very, very protective of those you love. You might end up terrified of the press in general. You would very reasonably and particularly have an atavistic, bone-deep, unshakeable, exhausting, horrifying terror of people you love being treated by the media in anything other than the tenderest ways.
His mother died being pursued by the press. Do you see where I’m going with this?
I cannot believe that in all the crap you read about Prince Harry and his family in the media, no one ever seems to mention that everything came to a head for him, that he and his wife stepped down as “working Royals4” in the year when he was about to turn 36. The age his mother was when she died.
I know some people who lost a parent too young. They all say that reaching the age that parent was when they died is a very difficult and strange time. Almost uncanny. To be older than your parent ever got to be brings everything into question. It must be even worse if they died suddenly. If it was in a shocking accident. If they were being hunted.
Yes, why at that age with a young family himself would he have been frightened by relentless British media criticism of himself and his wife? Why would he have felt that this was bound to get worse and worse? Why would he have become desperately protective? Why would he have had the feeling that this could really, genuinely end up with his children going through what he went through and having to live too young through the death of a parent? Why would that have felt particularly intense for him at the age of nearly 36?
Run. The ends of the earth. Change your name. Get away, get away from this horror.
For God’s sake.
We need to look at the pictures again.
We the British “love” our royal family, allegedly. We “loved” Diana and “love” the King and Queen now. If you love something, doesn’t that mean trying to look after it? Not ‘cupboard love’, loving someone only for what they do for you. Isn’t the nature of love to try to care for something, to acknowledge when you haven’t lived up to that love, to try to make amends if you can?
According to Harry’s autobiography, at some point in this whole ghastly mess some decision was ‘sent up the chain’ to some grey-faced grey-suited person who decided that a twelve-year-old boy had to walk behind his mother’s coffin in front of the world’s press a week after losing her. Losing her, that is, to the pursuit of the world’s press.
The question of whether Harry could somehow get away without doing it “was sent up the chain. Back came the answer. It must be both princes. To garner sympathy, presumably.” He calls it “an ordeal” and I don’t think it takes a huge amount of imagination to understand why.
It sounds as if they all, on some level, did it to appease the press - because they were legitimately terrified of the press.
Someone made that decision and no one protested, or protested strongly enough for it to be stopped. If we were adults in the UK on the day they made that 12-year-old boy walk behind his mother’s coffin on international TV, then we could have written an angry letter or protested about it. I was 22 and I didn’t. I could have, but I didn’t.
So I’m taking my share of responsibility. About let’s say one forty-millionth of it. What happened to Harry was a bit like an online hate mob, which we’re more familiar with now, in the sense that the responsibility is so spread out that any single one of us can ignore it easily. It wasn’t that any single one of us citizens of the UK did that to him. There was a chain of us, a huge number of people who all just… didn’t say anything, and didn’t do anything about it and presumed that someone else had decided it was OK.
Imagine if it worked like this.
There should be no such thing as “royal children”. “Royal children” as a concept is a form of child abuse. Sorry, I know we’ve been doing it for ages and so it doesn’t feel like it but here you go, a little slap-awake for you. It’s just incredibly wrong.
I look at the royal family negotiating with the press and feeling they have to give out images of their kids to feed the public appetite for them, to prevent worse things happening, to stop the long lenses and the pursuit by the paparazzi on motorbikes and I think: this is like an abused person negotiating with their abusive partner. Please, if I do this, please don’t do that. Please, I’ll give you something, just don’t hurt the kids too much. Please. Put your attention on me and not them. Please.
How it should work is: until they’re at least 21, or 25 - and I would prefer 30 - there’s a press blackout5. There can’t be stories about them. Did you as a company publish a story in your paper or on your site? That’s a £10m fine for you. Did you take a photograph of them and publish it? That’s a massive fine if you’re a British citizen and if not that’s your right to come to the UK revoked forever.
When they’re 21, or 25, or 30, when they’ve completed their education and had a few years in the workplace we say to them: OK, do you fancy this? You have the option. Do you fancy being a Royal? And if they do, when they’re adults, then fine. Gloves off, you get the deal. No private life but you can live in a castle. Opportunity to be head of state, or near to the head of state. Enjoy, knock yourselves out. And if not, that’s that. They’re out. No civil list, but no press either. Go and have a life. A pretty nice life is on offer. Their parents/siblings/cousins would still probably have them to stay in the castle if they fancied.
We know it should work this way. It works this way for celebrities. There’s a non-famous child of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne who didn’t fancy being in the show and so fine, that child gets to go and live her life. We don’t obsess over the kids of celebrities who decide to go off and be dentists or landscape gardeners. We basically just let them get on with it. We don’t think they owe us something just because of who their parents are. That is the only way that makes ethical sense.
But let’s be real, this isn’t going to happen today. Or tomorrow. Or maybe ever, although I really think it should. In the absence of changing the way the big institutions work - which I really do think we should push for - there are individual choices which help a bit6.
It’s New Year, a time for ‘resolutions’. Which these days seems to mean “I must do Crossfit and learn Spanish”. This isn’t what people used to mean by ‘improving yourself’, you know. So I’m going to suggest… we could all do a bit of ethical sensitising. Just a little bit. Just improve our moral sensitivity a fraction.
If we claim to ‘love’ the royal family, then treat him with love. If we claim to hate the idea of royals, then just ignore him.
What do you need to do to discharge your one-forty-millionth of responsibility? Not much. Just stop gossiping about Harry. Stop talking in a mean way about him and his wife. Stop taking potshots. Just stop it now. Let him live his life even if you think some of his decisions are a bit silly. He’s trying to make something out of a life twisted out of shape by tragedy and brutalised by the grey-faced men ‘up the chain’.
He doesn’t owe us anything. Just let them be.
As ever, if you’ve found this post thought-provoking do give it a like below, it helps other people find it.
And now, having said all of that. Underneath the line some joy about the returning of the sun and about parrots, a brilliant documentary, some thoughts about animal cognition and an excellent podcast about what the next peptides will be after the GLP-1s.
☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️ rejoicing the sun ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️
