Heart-melting pictures that prove Harry was born to be a dad
by Libby Purves
Trust Harry to cheer us up on a grey and fractious news day. Come spring, all being well, he and Meghan will have a baby. the Duchess no doubt will look wonderful cradling the child on the steps of the Lindo Wing, like her mother-in-law Diana and her sister-in-law Kate before her. But let’s come clean, it’s actually Harry we’re delighted for, isn’t it?
For as these glorious pictures show, here is a boy who was born to be a dad.
Our Harry, the likely lad, the mischievous redhead who didn’t think much of school but relished Army life — ‘running down a ditch full of mud, firing bullets — it’s the way I am, I love it!’.
this is the larky young man who, when caught out starkers playing strip-billiards in Vegas, handsomely apologised and explained that it was just ‘a case of too much Army, and not enough prince’.
But this is also a man who soberly pledged himself to his charities and duties, and founded the Invictus Games to bring respect and fun to injured servicemen.
He’s our Harry. Few characters are more beguiling than a wild boy who gets into scrapes but does no real harm, then settles down to duty far more merry, open hearted and tolerant of others than if he’d been a cautious prig all along. Hearts have ached for Harry, too, as he opened up publicly about losing his mother: about walking behind her coffin, trying for years to blank out the sorrow, at last coming to terms.
In 2016, when he was first with Meghan, he said he hoped Diana was looking down and approving of how he and his brother turned out. He added, ‘I’m sure she’s waiting for me to have kids so she can be a grandmother again.’
Earlier, a bit wistfully after a few failed courtships, he had admitted: ‘I’ve longed for kids since I was very, very young. I’m waiting to find the right person, someone who’s willing to take on the job.’
He has shown us and told us enough about himself to make us rejoice in the idea of him having a family of his own.
Not least because he should be good at it: one of the vital, underestimated qualities of good parenting is that you enjoy it. A reluctant, distant or runaway dad is a sad thing to contemplate. Every woman approaching the joys and unending anxieties of motherhood is delighted to find a partner who is properly, keenly, up for it.
We want a man who is not nervous of babies, enjoys the wayward comedy of
toddlers, and puts shy older children at their ease. So just look at how Harry keeps proving all of those things day after day, trip after trip.
See him cradling seven-week-old Jean-Luc in Barbados, high-fiving a young girl in Africa’s Lesotho, swinging a laughing three-year-old round like everyone’s rumbustious favourite uncle. See him lifting kids, upending them with squeals of glee, larking, pulling faces with an eight-year-old boy in hospital in Barbados, scooping up a young winner of a child bravery award (who had just asked him, ‘Where’s your crown?’) or holding hands and planting a tree with a fouryear-old orphan in Lesotho.
Watch him make pretend-fierce faces at that little girl who kept stealing his popcorn in the stands at the Invictus Games. Brilliant.
These are not just photo-ops, children carefully selected for charm and whisked away if they misbehave. His charities report it is hard to move Harry on, that he notices any shy or confused child in the background and includes them, that a malnourished or injured infant moves him to lean in with instinctive comfort.
Babies and small children move us all to protectiveness, and toddler mischief makes almost everyone laugh. But there are a few good omens too for Harry’s future children as they get older.
Who can forget his admission about growing up in a royal world of formality. ‘To be honest,’ Harry said, ‘dinner conversations were the worst bit about being a child and listening to the boring people around me.’
This, one feels, will be the kind of father who, after decent politeness, lets his children unobtrusively sneak away from the table.
AS for the teenagers, he should have enough fresh memories of his clubbing days both to give them advice, and to see right through any stratagems.
It is fashionable to pretend that mothers and fathers are not only equal parents but identical.
Certainly men can do traditionally female tasks with nappies and bottles (Harry seemed very adept bottle-feeding that baby rhino recently, even dropping a kiss on its horny face).
But there is often something refreshing and breezy about the male approach to childcare. As the poet and broadcaster Mike rosen once said, you do all the mum things but you do them in a blokey way. A woman with a young baby is tired, physically battered, exalted and proud, but also probably spends too much time half crippled with anxiety.
Most of us fret about getting everything right and not only being a perfect mother but looking like one: not only must we make the baby contented but avoid criticism from in-laws, neighbours or Mumsnet bullies.
fathers, on the other hand, are more likely to be just plain soppy with pride at having created this perfect creature. There’s no doubt Harry will be proud as Punch. And unlike many new dads, he won’t need much help or advice either.
He’ll be right in there, storming through, from nappies to Nintendo and beyond. Lucky baby.