HARRY VS THE BRITISH PRESS: A BRIEF HISTORY
The only way you could possibly be surprised by Harry’s recent comments that the British press were “destroying” his mental health, would be if you hadn’t been paying attention to anything he’s said in the past two decades.
At 36 years old, Harry has had a long, tenuous, no-love relationship with the British tabloid media and has often discussed his disdain for them in the staunchest of terms.
It stretches all the way back to the heavily publicised passing of his mum, Princess Diana, whose death was partially attributed to paparazzi pursuing her vehicle. But, Harry was only 12 at the time.
Once the Duke of Sussex was old enough to speak for himself, it seems, he rarely held back.
“I DON’T LIKE ENGLAND THAT MUCH”
When Harry was 23 years old in 2008 — far before Meghan entered the picture — he explicitly expressed his feelings on the press. He had been serving in Afghanistan for 10 weeks at the time. “I don’t want to sit around at Windsor because I just generally don’t like England that much, and it’s nice to be away from all the press and the papers and the general [expletive] that they write,” he told Reuters.
These frank admissions continued for years — especially after the Sun published nude images of Harry in 2012 while he was in Las Vegas.
Harry the following year, again serving in Afghanistan, said his distrust of the press goes way back, alluding to mum Diana. “I think it’s fairly obvious how far back it goes — to when I was very small,” he said.
Despite this, he couldn’t help but read what the press had to say about him. “My father always says don’t read it, everyone says don’t read it, because it’s always rubbish. I’m surprised how many in the UK actually read it. Everyone’s guilty for buying the newspapers, I guess, but hopefully nobody actually believes what they read. I certainly don’t,” he said.
“But of course I read it, because if something’s being written about me, I want to know what’s being said. All it does is just upset and anger me that people can get away with writing the stuff they do, not just about me, but about everything and everybody,” he added.
PHONE HACKING SCANDAL, EXPLAINED
Harry also alluded to the longrunning phone hacking scandal that involved the now-defunct
News of the World paper (replaced by The Sun when it closed down) in the early 2000s. “Because we haven’t got mobile phones out here [in Afghanistan], they can’t bug our phones, so they don’t know what we’re saying,” said Harry, then 28.
This goes back to 2007, when Clive Goodman, then royal correspondent of News of the World, and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, were both jailed for intercepting voicemail messages of royal aides. By using factory-set pin codes to hack into celebrity voicemails, they were able to access — and publish to the masses — sensitive information. A trial in 2011 revealed that Harry and Kate Middleton were both victims of said phone hackers. The scandal is ongoing today. Harry revived the issue in 2019, when he began to take legal action against The Sun and
The Daily Mirror over phone hacking concerns.
MEGHAN’S PRIVATE LETTER
TO FATHER GOES PUBLIC
These legal claims from Harry arrived just days after he and Meghan had taken legal action British tabloids, including The Sun, for publishing a private letter from Meghan to her father.
“Unfortunately, my wife has become one of the latest victims of a British tabloid press that wages campaigns against individuals with no thought to the consequences — a ruthless campaign that has escalated over the past year, throughout her pregnancy and while raising our newborn son,” wrote Harry in a statement.
He called it “one incident in a long and disturbing pattern of behaviour” exhibited by the British tabloid press. “For these select media this is a game, and one that we have been unwilling to play from the start. I have been a silent witness to her private suffering for too long. To stand back and do nothing would be contrary to everything we believe in,” he said.
HARRY VS THE PRESS: WHERE DOES IT STAND NOW?
In an interview last week with James Corden, Harry rode around LA on an open-top bus (for the first time), and revealed just how badly the press had impacted him.
“It was a really difficult environment as a lot of people saw. We all know what the British press can be like. And it was destroying my mental health,” said Harry.
He also told Corden that he is far more comfortable watching the fictional depiction of the royal family on the TV series The Crown than he is with the actual press. “They don’t pretend to be news,” said Harry. “It’s fictional, but it’s loosely based on the truth. Of course it’s not strictly accurate, but loosely, it gives you a rough idea about what that lifestyle, what the pressures of putting duty and service above family and everything else, what can come from that.
ARE THERE PARALLELS BETWEEN PRINCESS DIANA’S LIFE AND HARRY’S?
In 1995, the late Princess Diana gave a landmark BBC interview with journalist Martin Bashir that showed the public a raw and painfully human side of her. She spoke openly about suffering from bulimia, the affair between her husband Charles, Prince of Wales, and Camilla Parker-Bowles, and intrusive media scrutiny.
An oft repeated quote from that interview — “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded” — might reflect the current state of affairs involving Diana’s second son Prince Harry and his wife Meghan. The couple have been in the eye of the media storm ever since their courtship and marriage in 2018. Their every step has been questioned, picked apart and incessantly followed by the media and public.
Following their departure from the royal family, it seems Meghan and Harry will give an interview as explosive and revelatory as Diana’s account all those years ago. In previews of their chat with TV legend Oprah Winfrey, Harry is seen referring to his mother as he talks about his split from the royal family. “I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for her going through this process by herself all those years ago, because it has been unbelievably tough for the two of us — but at least we had each other,” Harry tells Winfrey.
The Duke of Sussex could have been referring to the sense of loneliness Diana might have felt following her divorce from Prince Charles in August 1996. Diana died the next year in a car crash in Paris.