A HARRY SITUATION
For the sake of my fam, I fled ‘toxic’ Brits
Prince Harry joined talk show host and friend James Corden for an interview where he opened up about his decision to withdraw from royal life, weighed in on the Netflix hit show “The Crown” and visited the house from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
The candid conversation, which aired on CBS Friday, showed a casually dressed Harry riding around Los Angeles aboard an open-top double-decker tour bus while discussing both light and heavy topics, including his move from England to the U.S.
“It was a really difficult environment, as I think a lot of people saw,” the royal told Corden. “We all know what the British press can be like, and it was destroying my mental health. I was like, ‘This is toxic.’ So I did what any husband and what any father would do... ‘I need to get my family out of here.’ ”
Harry noted, however, that the decision to leave Europe for North America was never about “walking away.”
“It was stepping back rather than stepping down,” he said.
The interview on “The Late Late Show with James Corden” comes just days after Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, confirmed they would not return as working members of the royal family, a move they announced early last year. The shocking 2020 announcement specifically blamed the couple’s tumultuous relationship with British media and tabloids.
The royal changes mean the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are officially giving up all honorary military appointments and royal patronages, including Harry’s appointment as captain general of the Royal Marines and several other military groups.
Harry, 36, described his new life in the U.S. as “continuation” of what he and Meghan were doing back in the U.K.
“My life is always going to be about public service, and Meghan signed up to that, and the two of us enjoy doing that,” he told Corden.
The younger of Prince Charles’ and Princess Diana’s two sons said he has kept in touch with his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of the family through video calls.
“We’ve Zoomed them a few times. They’ve seen Archie running around,” Harry said, referring to his 1-year-old son. Harry and Meghan have another baby on the way.
Corden - who attended Harry’s May 2018 wedding - also asked him about “The Crown,” a popular Netflix drama series about his family history.
“They don’t pretend to be news,” Harry said. “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.”
Harry said he prefers watching the show than reading the tawdry tabloid tales written about him in Britain.
On Richard Carranza’s last day as New York City schools chancellor, March 15, he will preside over an enterprise with 1.1 million students, most of whom haven’t been in a school building in months, some who haven’t been there at all since the initial COVID shutdown exactly a year before. But the fact that hundreds of thousands of kids are now in classrooms and that New York’s public schools have remained essentially virus-free is a success of Carranza and Mayor de Blasio.
Nowhere in the country has indoor, in-person learning resumed on such a large scale so safely. And while much remains in allowing high schoolers to return and letting remote K-8 families opt back in, the city’s plan has all but been copied by the CDC on how to do it right.
Carranza’s three years on the job running America’s biggest school system was dominated by these past 12 months, improvising and scrambling to balance health and safety with the academic, developmental, social and even nutritional needs of his charges, as well as tens of thousands of teachers, administrators and other staff as death stalked the city.
He wasn’t immune, choking up yesterday at City Hall recounting how he “lost 11 family and close childhood friends to this pandemic” and he “quite frankly needs to take time to grieve.”
During his first two, non-COVID years, Carranza too often stressed equity over excellence, when both are needed. Skewed racial and ethnic enrollments in the specialized high schools and gifted and talented classes for grade schools of course must be remedied. Do not exclude qualified kids, but increase the size and diversity of the pool of the qualified. Improvement through addition, not subtraction.
New Chancellor Meisha Porter is a city kid who grew in the system, from PS 215 in Far Rockaway, PS 123 in Jamaica, JHS 210 in Ozone Park and then Queens Vocational and Technical High School, even getting her degree from Hunter College. Her challenge: get the whole thing opened, safely.