If Harry carries on his facile assault on our elected government, Charles must banish him to private life

OvER the past few years Prince Harry has said or written many outrageous and bizarre things about his family, the monarchy, and the Press. But however misguided his previous outpourings may have been, none of them rivals in offensiveness his contentions about the Government and the Press in a witness statement in his case against the publisher of the Daily Mirror.

I’ll leave to others to write about the merits of the case, though his evidence that any phone hacking did take place has so far been in very short supply. I’m interested here in Harry’s remarkable comments about the Government.

For what he wrote about it being at ‘rock bottom’ amounts to an unprecedented attack by a senior member of the Royal Family (Harry is fifth in line to the throne). No such royal broadside against elected politicians has ever before been delivered during the history of our constitutional monarchy. It is deplorable — and dangerous.

On one level his maunderings can be easily dismissed as they are so obviously wrongheaded. Yet coming as they do from someone in his position, they are bound to be taken seriously. Depressingly, some will agree with him.

This is what he said: ‘Our country is judged globally by the state of our Press and our Government — both of which I believe are at rock bottom. Democracy fails when your Press fails to scrutinise and hold the Government accountable, and instead choose to get into bed with them so that they can ensure the status quo.’

Where does one start with such nonsense? He is wrong on so many counts.

It may have escaped Harry’s notice that this Government is constantly being pilloried in Left-wing papers such as the Guardian and Daily Mirror (whose publisher he is suing!) and by the BBC. Centre- Right newspapers often give it a hard time, too.

THEidea that Rishi Sunak and ministers are not scrutinised and held accountable is preposterous. They are put under the microscope every hour of the day and night. Where’s the evidence that the Government and the Press are in bed together?

A year ago, many newspapers helped to drive Boris Johnson out of No 10. Even the Daily Telegraph, the publication for which he had worked most of his adult life, turned against him. Not so cosy.

In fact, you could probably make a better case than the feeble one Harry trots out if you said that the media in this country are sometimes too quick to berate politicians in power, and too naturally oppositional. But that’s what we journalists tend to do.

Prince Harry’s argument is ludicrous. One wonders whether he still knows the country in which he no longer lives, and indeed whether he has ever really known it at all.

As for the idea that the Press and the Government club together to ‘ensure the status quo’, that’s absurd. What, pray, is the ‘status quo’, which Harry evidently dislikes? Surely the Royal Family, of which Harry remains a member, is the pinnacle of the status quo.

Yet here is the highly privileged Harry, who wrongly accuses the Press as a whole of not holding the ‘rock bottom’ Government to account, doing his utmost to curb newspapers — so that they won’t be free to hold rich and powerful people like him to account. It’s mind-boggling.

This spoilt and entitled man can say whatever he likes, however self-serving. I don’t even mind too much his ignorant attacks on the Press since the Fourth Estate can look after itself, and has survived more formidable foes than Harry.

What I do object to is his assault on the Government — not because I like this crew very much or esteem their competence, but because they are our elected representatives, and shouldn’t be publicly excoriated by an unelected, and foolish, senior member of the Royal Family.

Our constitutional arrangements are a delicate organism, the product of past divisions and compromise. We tolerate — some of us may revere — an unelected head of state, and a Royal Family with all the trimmings, on the firm understanding that they stand apart from politics.

It has worked well enough for the past 200 years because, with a few exceptions, we have had monarchs who have understood the limits of their powers, and respected the right of elected politicians to govern, albeit with the benefit of royal advice.

Of course, no one better understood the importance of safeguarding this precious relationship between Crown and Parliament than our late Queen, Elizabeth II. How Harry’s coarse political invective would have grieved her.

He’s like an unguided missile, sighting enemies here and there, emitting a good deal of smoke and making lots of noise, before finally crashing to earth with an inevitable explosion — and then mysteriously taking off again, seeking some new target.

INSHORT, he’s potentially lethal. If he describes the Government today as ‘rock bottom’, next month or next year he will unearth another disobliging adjective in defiance of our constitutional traditions. Maybe — equally illjudged — he’ll be tempted to embrace Sir Keir Starmer.

Or he may direct his rage once more against the royal institution that nurtured him and endowed him with such significance as he will ever have in this world. His father the King hasn’t been immune to his criticisms in the past, and won’t be in the future.

Harry is a divisive figure. He sets people against each other on issues ranging from the Press to the Royal Family to racism and now, his latest bugbear, the Tory Government.

We can work on the assumption this tumultuous character isn’t suddenly going to learn how to behave. That’s never going to happen, with him 6,000 miles away in California, and Meghan by his side. Their future income depends on fomenting controversy.

Harry is the King’s number one problem. And it is not, as Charles should know and his mother certainly realised, primarily a family problem, though it’s partly that. Harry is chiefly dangerous because he is a constitutional liability.

The King loves his errant younger son, despite the lack of respect he has shown to him. I’m sure he hopes Harry will one day return to the fold. But think of the damage he could do before that happens. And of course he might never return.

If the two of them were still close, and spoke to each other, a way might still be found of persuading Harry to stop stirring. But he is alienated from his father, and the rift inevitably widens with every inept public intervention.

There’s only one way. It may be hard for the King as a father, but it should be easy for him as a monarch and head of state. Prince Harry must be told that if he wishes to remain a member of the Royal Family, he will have to behave as members of the Royal Family are expected to.

If he can’t accept this ultimatum — and I don’t imagine he could — Prince Harry must become a private citizen, in which role his facile declamations will soon be barely noticed, and cause no more damage to the country he once served.