Like his mother, Princess Diana, Harry has been an instrument all his life. The Windsor family is Britain’s national pantomime and he was cast at birth — long before he could give consent — to be the shade to the sunlight of his brother, William. The newspapers chronicled his childhood; his parents’ love affairs, late-night telephone calls and hatred. They photographed his mother as she lay dying in a tunnel in Paris. They filmed Harry as he, aged 12, walked behind her coffin at her funeral, his presence necessary to protect his father’s reputation. Even the British media wouldn’t heckle a faithless husband in front of his son.
As a teenager and young adult, Harry’s every error was noted or leaked. When he smoked cannabis, his father arranged for a visit to a detox centre for heroin addicts as a “short, sharp shock,” and then the story was leaked and his father spun as his rescuer. Harry chipped a bone in his thumb, and it was news.
Then he married Meghan Markle, and when she was abused by the British media — which happens to all women who marry into the family, but this was a racist, classist and xenophobic variation — he did something sensible and loving for his new family: He left Britain.
Since then his redemption has been sequential. There was the interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which they described his family’s concern about the skin colour of their unborn child. There was a Netflix documentary. There was his memoir, Spare, in which he described how his father, probably smelling of flowers and gunpowder, sat down on his bed to tell him that his mother was dead. Now there is the litigation and, eventually, I hope, the day when he lays down his title, accepts that some things cannot be reformed and is redeemed by the application of self-knowledge.
It’s addictive, as I said.
I read Spare as a portrait of an abusive childhood and an act of whistle-blowing, but most of the British media did not. They mocked him for writing about a youthful sexual encounter — how crass to mention it, now we must find the woman! — and for his affinity for Stewie, the infant prodigy in Family Guy, whom he described as “a prophet without honour.”
Even to the sympathetic, Harry can seem ridiculous. He is a panda, and pandas don’t usually fight back. And for the moment he thinks he can be meaningfully feminist and antiracist while embodying inherited wealth and power as a royal duke, which is absurd.
But Harry is brave, and he has found his battlefield. I think if he could, he would bring it all down — the monarchy, the media, the whole awful dance. We did not have his consent. For that, he will have his revenge.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Tanya Gold
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
