Debt Harry can never repay to the Royal Bank of Dad

Prince Harry is back in the UK (or will be very soon), returning to the scene of the crime and quarantining at Frogmore before the unveiling of the Princess Diana statue next week.

One wonders how he must feel, back in the damp embrace of an english summer after the butterscotch, bittersweet californian sunshine. Back in a country where he severed ties with every aspect of not just his life, but his very identity, too.

no doubt he will have done his triggering exercises on the plane, tapping his temples, humming loudly; the busy prodigal bee, returning to give the royal jelly a good wobble. He will be laying low in the gifted crown estate house where he began his life as a parent.

it was Frogmore that became the focus of Harry’s first skirmish with the British public, many of whom were aggrieved that £2.4 million of taxpayers’ hard-earned money had been spent on gender-neutral paint for the nursery and a state-of-the-art aircon system in a house the couple abandoned at the first opportunity.

Under pressure, the sum was paid back in September last year, and here we are, at the crux already.

For be you prince or pauper, prim or improper, an innocent in the clutches of a duchess or a rake on the make, everything comes down to money in the end. Always.

Particularly now that we discover the truth about Prince Harry’s financial relationship with his father, which could perhaps be symbolised by a royal blue tit regularly dropping wriggling caterpillars of cash into the yawning maw of his last-born fledgling — gulp, gulp, gulp, burp.

Spool back to Harry’s pinched little face on the infamous Oprah interview, bitterly complaining that ‘my father literally cut me off financially’.

He sounded like an eightyear-old denied his tuckbox provisions or his Hilary term scrumping reimbursements, or whatever it is that the posh and the rich do and get.

CUT him off? thanks to official reports from clarence House, we now discover that the Prince of Wales did nothing of the sort. At that time he was still the munificent benefactor bankrolling his sons’ existence, the kindly Willy Wonka providing the wonga, HrH Sugar Daddy at the royal Bank of Dad.

But hey, so he should be, because they didn’t ask to be born into that family, right? As Meghan almost said.

the annual report shows that Prince charles gave the cambridges and the Sussexes £ 4.45 million between them during the first six months of 2020, a key period in the latter’s transition from working royals to exploiting royals. this sum was to ‘fund their activities’, despite the fact that their official royal duties ceased that April.

We know that these sums are usually split between the brothers, give or take. can we assume it was around £2 million? Pause for a moment to consider, as Prince Harry does not, about who gets that kind of lump sum in life, obligationand sweat-free, possibly even tax-free, too?

For most of us, that two mil would be more than enough to cushion the blows for the rest of our time here on planet earth — and those of our loved ones, too. even a quarter of that sum is, as chris tarrant used to say on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?, a life-changing amount.

not for Prince Harry. For him it was a modest sum. And he expected more.

As i recall, back then Harry was voicing complaints that he was heartsick of the institution that raised him and then ‘ trapped’ him. He was sinking into a pit of endemic racism, he was appalled that his apparently suicidal wife had been denied the mental health treatment she had requested. no wonder he wanted to escape. the utter horror of it all!

‘i want nothing more to do with the House of Windsor, emotionally or financially,’ he didn’t say back then. ‘Dad, you can take your money and stick it where the Platinum Jubilee don’t shine.’

the Prince did not go on to donate all the money to a charity called i Don’t Give A cluck, the Hollywood- based hen rescue mission run by english actress Jane Seymour, which feathers the nests of old birds, giving them another chance in the whoop-whoop coop.

Yes. that is exactly what didn’t happen. Because, just like Harry, i’m making it up as i go along.

the Sussexes have gone on to become hugely financially successful in a very short period of time, and good luck to them. Megxit has been a triumph for them. it has taken energy and application and a lot of smart thinking.

their netflix deal alone i s worth £ 112 million, although one wonders how many times they can juice that royal orange of outrage before it runs dry — or dilutes interest to the point of indifference. then we shall discover how fascinated their core audience really is in earnest nature documentaries about worried elephants or invictus Games fact- athons, as opposed to the gorgeous bubbling froth of an international royal soap opera.

So yes, Harry will have much to reflect upon in the self-isolation of his Windsor bolthole, prior to his next face-to-face with the family he has thrown under the gilded coach. not least in these reflections: how he got to where he is financially, what he has traded on to achieve prominence and what he has lost in the process — as well as the things he took for himself without asking.

THE Duke of Sussex, like so many troubled dukes before him, likes to depict himself as a man brought low by malign forces beyond his control. Whereas the truth might be that he crested the summit of his natural powers long ago, and is now only being carried higher and higher by the jet propulsion of his royal status.

Money makes his world go round? can it really be true that after all this time and this ocean of me-youcan’tsee angst that it is something as mundane as money that is the root cause of much of Harry’s baffling rage over the past few years?

nothing would surprise me. Least of all that the Sussexes still fail to acknowledge that the debt they owe to the Queen in particular, and the Windsors in general, is one that has nothing to do with money, and looks increasingly unlikely to be repaid.