Prince Harry speaks to US journalist Anderson Cooper.
Prince Harry speaks to US journalist Anderson Cooper.
Opinion by Daniela Elser
Opinion
Suck it Homer, bugger off Virgil: In the pantheon of figures who have gifted the world powerful lines that have echoed down through the ages with their profundity I present you with this absolute and utter corker from new entrant Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Man with A Book To Sell.
On Monday, with a straight face no less, Harry told the world, “I will sit here and speak truth to you with the words that come out of my mouth.” (Aristotle, is that you?)
And “come out” of his mouth so many words – by turns illogical, bizarre, and accidentally funny words – have, with the royal currently in the midst of doing the media rounds with unprecedented vigour, with not one but two high-profile TV interviews landing in the lead up to the release of his memoir, Spare.
First came 90 minutes of him getting all deep and meaningful with the UK’s Tom Bradby, then later sitting down with Anderson Cooper of American 60 Minutes.
And oh boy … all that has just “come out” of Harry’s mouth raises one immediate and obvious question: Quite when and where did he lose the plot?
In case you are counting, and I certainly am, Monday’s outings now bring the tally of TV created by Harry and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex to nearly eight excruciating hours, in barely a month.
It’s been historic stuff for all the wrong reasons - first as the Sussexes become the first members of the royal family to punch out a Kardashian-worthy series and then with Harry becoming the first blood member of the House of Windsor to write a tell-all since his great-great-uncle David, aka the Duke of Windsor, did in 1947. (Even then the former King Edward VIII had the good grace to wait more than a decade after absconding from the Palace.)
Thanks to Harry and Meghan and their particularly loose lips, never, ever, in modern royal history, have we heard so much and in such intimate detail from two people at the very centre of the sovereign’s family and never, ever have we been presented with so much evidence of an HRH who has come untethered from anything resembling good sense.
Harry and Meghan also recently released their bombshell six-part docuseries. Photo / Netflix
With Spare, Harry has well and truly thrown his family under an iconic red London double-decker bus - and yet he seems to be trying to sell the situation as some sort of mission of truth-telling and healing on his part. Namaste and all that.
Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, with these new interviews we have Harry again taking aim at the same tired targets: the British media, you see, are a noxious lot out to make his and Meghan’s life a misery and Buckingham Palace, in the form of his father and brother’s press outfits, have ‘leaked and planted’ stories.
There are plenty of malignant forces here - but not Harry and Meghan, who only want peace and big group hugs, something they seem to think they might achieve by loudly proclaiming their ‘truth’ about his family -while being paid to do so.
(It’s a rationale that makes about as much sense as thinking that shagging the entire Wallabies front row is a sure-fire way to save a shaky marriage.)
The Harry that viewers got on Monday wasn’t just one willing to thump us about the head with his predictably stroppy view of things, but one ready to offer up some pretty wild lines too.
Should Aitch and Meg ever manage to patch things up with the royal family, the duke thinks it could have “a ripple effect across the entire world”.
In his British interview, the 38-year-old came perilously close to tin-foil hat territory, saying “There’s a lot of things that are unexplained” about his mother Diana, Princess of Wales’ death and that “there were so many gaps and so many holes”.
(What might those “gaps” be? We don’t know. Maybe Harry goes into them in detail in his book. If there is one thing that Oprah, Netflix and now the Spare publicity whirlwind have taught us, it is that the Sussexes are sensationally good at dramatic pronouncements lacking any actual details or proof.)
Prince Harry has been quick to point to his stepmother as the villain of his story. Photo / File
Then there were Harry’s eye-popping comments to 60 Minutes’ Cooper about his stepmother Queen Camilla, referring to her as “the villain” and saying she was “dangerous” because of the connections that she was forging within the British press.
“With her, on the way to being Queen consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street because of that.”
Steady on, old boy. This is a woman who loves the pony club here, not Pol Pot.
Half the time Harry’s lines didn’t even begin to add up, or suggest much rationality.
He said that he and William had asked Charles not to wed Camilla, which is something one can imagine a child doing, not two men in their 20s, and yet he agreed with Bradby that he was “genuinely at peace” with their marriage.
When asked whether, in writing Spare, he was invading his family’s privacy, his answer was a jumble of words that added up to not much more than noise-shaped air. (“That’ll be the accusation from the people that don’t understand, or haven’t – or don’t want to believe that my family have been briefing the press solidly for well over a decade. So, I’m sorry that me owning my story and being able to tell my own story is upsetting to some people.”)
The duke is also a man totally and utterly bereft of any sense of irony.
The Duke of Sussex revealed his brother physically assaulted him during an altercation in 2019 over Meghan, with William calling her ‘difficult’, ‘rude’ and ‘abrasive’. Photo / Getty Images
When Bradby asked him, “What would you say to William if he’s watching this?” he responded with “I’m not gonna share what I say …” later adding “what they have to say to me and what I have to say to them will be in private, and I hope it can stay that way.”
(But what if Netflix comes along with an even bigger cheque, hmm?)
Watching Harry being interviewed is like watching a goat try to play the flute – by turns bizarre, confusing and discordant; the more you watch, the more you can’t stop thinking, “why?”
What is obvious having sat through the Harry interviews thus far is that as time goes on, his sense of victimhood is ever more irretrievably baked in; the couple’s belief that they occupy the moral high ground, ever more unshakeable.
By far and away the strangest line is the point Harry made to both Cooper and Bradby – that he is befuddled why his family might be a tad peeved with him.
“I’m sure I got things wrong, but I’ve continued over the last three, four years, to ask [them] to tell me, what we got wrong, so that we can address it and apologise for those things” he told ITV’s cameras.
While to 60 Minutes he said, “Meghan and I have continued to say that we will openly apologise for anything that we did wrong, but every time we ask that question, no one’s telling us the specifics or anything.”
Dear god – it truly beggars belief that any human could be so lacking in self-awareness.
Going on TV to say you don’t know why your family is upset with you after having sold them down the river both in print and on TV has to constitute some new level of idiocy they need to include in the updated DSM.
So, for this week at least, the world remains stuck in the Sussexes’ world of schlock and awe. I just wish I could watch that goat instead sometimes. I think it would make more sense.
Daniela Elser is a writer and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
