OH DO STOP WHINGEING HARRY

The young Princes should quit baring their souls, ditch the self-pity, behave with dignity and, oh yes, get proper jobs

HAvE you heard the one about the rich kid who said he did not want to work in the family business? He would settle for just the money, thank you very much.

Some of the Queen’s subjects may have recalled that line as they read Prince Harry’s hot- off- the- press interview with an American magazine, in which he says that nobody in ‘ the firm’ wants to be king or queen.

He himself just wants to be ordinary: to carry on doing his own shopping and hope nobody recognises him, least of all one of the innumerable pretty girls panting to party with him.

I exaggerate a little, of course. What he actually said to Newsweek reads like this: ‘Is there any one of the Royal Family who wants to be king or queen? I don’t think so.’

But since we may assume he knows his brother quite well, it is fair to conclude that the Duke of Cambridge has confided that he dreads the day he will have to wear the crown.

This would be a perfectly normal attitude for anyone other than a lunatic egomaniac — the President of the United States, for instance — to harbour in his breast.

As with so much else in life, however, especially when it involves the royals, it would have been better had it not been acknowledged out loud, to a global audience.

This seems especially so in a week when the Duke of Edinburgh’s stay in hospital reminds us that even he and Her Majesty are not immortal. Harry’s generation will one day have to take up the baton.

Support for the monarchy is steady, but precarious among the young.

In pubs and clubs this weekend, insofar as kids talk about the Royal Family at all, they are likely to say: ‘Great work for some. We pay them all this money to live in palaces and party all night, and the best they can do is moan about how awful it is! We’d do a life swap any day.’

Wailing

Being royal encourages princes to feel sorry for themselves, because nobody dares tell them to snap out of it.

Many years ago, after listening to Prince Harry’s father wailing heroically for an hour or two, I gently suggested that all of us who were born into some comfort, even him, should recognise that we are privileged people.

He banged his fist on the table, rattling a mass of glass and silver, and responded: ‘Nobody but me can possibly understand how perfectly bloody it is to be Prince of Wales!’ That was just after he had split from Diana, so he could be forgiven for feeling raw, but unfortunately, his self-pitying tendency has got worse, rather than better, with the passage of time, and seems in danger of infecting his sons.

Those of us who passionately want the monarchy to survive and prosper should try to understand why they feel this way.

First, the manic intensity of 24/ 7 publicity has got progressively worse over the past half-century. Back in the mid-Fifties, my mother, as a guest on BBC radio’s Any Questions?, was jokingly asked: ‘Who would you like to be if not yourself?’

She replied, unhesitatingly: ‘The Queen.’ And in those days, many women felt the same. To be waited and fawned upon everywhere; to have cars and horses at the door; never a dish to wash or floor to vacuum — for centuries, to become royal was the stuff of fairy tales and, indeed, every fairy tale ended with the poor but honest country girl marrying her handsome prince.

Nowadays, the world looks a different place. Many girls might fancy a date with Prince Harry, but how many others with half a brain cell would really fancy the lot of the Duchess of Cambridge if they thought about it?

An eternity lies before her of looking beautiful and serene, while ensuring no conversation gets beyond the boundaries of ‘Have you come far?’.

And the price of a wardrobe malfunction on a Caribbean beach is to become the wrong sort of cover girl in a host of continental magazines.

It is something like a miracle that Kate Middleton has done brilliantly well so far, and it will be a bigger one if she retains her sanity through the decades ahead.

Where Prince Harry and other members of the Royal Family get it wrong, as implicitly revealed in the Newsweek interview, is that they cherish a terrific sense of entitlement.

They see their personal friends, almost all the children of aristocratic grandees or very rich men, having the life of Reilly without the media aggravation or rude questions in the House of Commons.

Escape

They assume that if they could only escape their royal responsibilities, they could have the same lives, play on the same polo pitches, without the 24-hour media attention.

If they were encouraged by those around them to have a spark of humility, they might instead see that, as men of moderate intelligence with no money other than that which the Royal Family has amassed over centuries at its subjects’ expense, they would be lucky to have jobs and homes of their own, never mind holidays in the Caribbean.

Neither brother seems likely to invent the Dyson vacuum

cleaner or play football for Chelsea. Here, I am not preaching republicanism or knocking the young princes — merely trying to inject a little reality into their pampered lives.

They are phenomenally lucky to have what they have, and will continue to enjoy it only by retaining the gratitude and respect of the Queen’s subjects, which is not a given.

Harry said to Newsweek about the monarch: ‘ The Queen has been fantastic in letting us choose. She tells us to take our time and really think things through.’

But since young royals, left to their own devices, almost always make wrong choices, it might have been better if the Queen had more often cracked the whip over her family.

In the 21st century, they are far more likely to lead useful lives, and to escape becoming an embarrassment, if they do not have fancy titles.

It was bonkers to condemn Prince Edward’s descendants to become Earls of Wessex, and mistaken to allow Prince Andrew’s daughters both to live as party girls, while also aspiring to royal status.

Princess Anne understood this in regard to her own children, as the others have not.

They would all be better off doing jobs, to impose structure and discipline on their lives, perhaps even to make them happier and more fulfilled. People without jobs are, for the most part, pretty uninteresting, and that applies even to royals. I suggested decades ago that the Prince of Wales should have been made chairman of the British Council, which promotes our interests around the world.

Instead of drifting from eccentric enthusiasm to enthusiasm, seldom finishing anything he starts, bereft of understanding of the cost of anything or, indeed, of how personally extravagant he himself is, he might have made a lasting contribution to society and found himself less of a stranger in the world in which the rest of us live.

The Queen is an incomparably more practical person than her eldest son.

Prince Harry should have stayed in the Army instead of allowing exasperation with a commanding officer whom he took against to persuade him to quit.

Everybody who knows him — as I do not — says he is a delightful, albeit not especially bright, young man, in danger of becoming spoilt by keeping bad or at least silly company and irregular hours.

The entire Royal Family needs a chief executive figure, to exercise a degree of discipline, especially over its younger members, which the Queen unsurprisingly no longer can, if she ever did.

Such an appointment will never be made, because it is not in the nature of royals to accept orders, or even much advice, from mere commoners. When it is offered, it is usually rejected.

Amid a rainstorm in London, I once ran into that lovely Northumbrian Sir John Riddell, now dead.

When I said it was a rotten sort of morning, he responded: ‘Every day is a sunny day for me, because I am no longer the Prince of Wales’s private secretary!’, a role that he filled in deep unhappiness for five years during the Eighties. Somebody should be telling both young princes that it is selfindulgent to grant interviews, as they did two months ago, describing their emotional tribulations following their mother’s death.

Letting it all hang out emotionally is the fashion among their generation, but keeping their own mouths shut, as the Queen has always done, is the only way to keep alive the fragile mystique of monarchy.

A Palace chief executive, or a private secretary who commanded authority, would tell the Prince of Wales he cannot bang on publicly about the evils of GM crops or bludgeon Health Secretaries into spending NHS money on homeopathic remedies.

Such a figure would persuade Prince Andrew that he cannot with propriety accept hospitality or money from Central Asian tyrants, nor extol the joys of Brexit.

He would prod Princess Eugenie into a nine-to-five slot; get the lot of them off the polo pitches, those symbols of cosmopolitan excess and vulgarity; ban media interviews by anyone with pretensions to royal status about anything more controversial than pets, gardening and the weather.

Now I hear some of you say: but then, their lives would be so boring.

Yes, indeed, but that is what being royal is about: pretending to be all things at all times to all the Queen’s subjects, and never being allowed to scream that you will have a fit if once more obliged to eat congealing chicken off cold silver plates at a banquet at which one is seated between a mayor with bad breath and a Labour politician who hates animals.

Prince Harry mumbled something to Newsweek about ‘modernising the monarchy’. No one seems to have told him that it is almost impossible to modernise an institution that is rationally unjustifiable, because it is based on mere accident of birth.

The hereditary principle has been abandoned everywhere else in British life except in the House of Lords, an object of global bewilderment.

The monarchy is an ancient tradition, a dignified illusion which must be maintained in order that its emptiness is not exposed, at which point we might as well vote for Adele to become head of state.

Its survival demands that whoever wears the crown and wields the sceptre behaves with discretion and dignity, while other members of the family do not infect it with ridicule or disgrace.

The first duty of kings and princes is not to make themselves feel good, but to make others do so. It is because it is doubtful that Prince Charles understands this that some of us are so nervous about the prospect of his accession.

Because Prince Harry is obviously at heart a decent fellow, most of us would sympathise with his predicament, his rootlessness and lack of direction if he was merely an amiable young anybody.

Instead, as son of the future king, he is an unguided missile, prone to explode when he opens his mouth.

Since he obviously revels in the considerable advantages of princehood, he will have to learn to live up to its responsibilities, just as we fervently hope that his brother will bravely endure the burden of kingship.