We saw a portrait of an unhappy prince who wears his heart on his sleeve...
The 10-day tour to Africa was obviously going to be painful, especially when Harry retraced his mother’s footsteps
The Sussexes’ first official tour as a family was, by any measure, a huge success. The spectacular warmth and enthusiasm with which Harry and Meghan’s engagements were received, both on the ground in Africa and in the press back home, took us all back to that happy period when the couple first wed. After Sunday night’s ITV documentary, however, our abiding memory will not be of any of the causes they championed, but of the pair lamenting their own troubles in one of the poorest parts of the world.
Of course, Prince Harry, along with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, has done wonders to knock down the barriers that have long surrounded mental health. When the royal threesome set up Heads Together as part of the Royal Foundation in May 2016, he bravely revealed his own private battle, explaining how he had tried to suppress his grief at losing the mother he adored – “I buried my head in the sand” – when he was only 12. After several years of “total chaos” in his 20s left him unable to cope, behaving aggressively and suffering panic attacks, it was with Prince William’s support that he eventually sought help – and, he told us, felt much better for it.
In many ways, that spirit of openness and vulnerability was an enormous and welcome breakthrough, but seeing Harry interviewed by journalist Tom Bradby on Sunday night, he seemed overwhelmed by another huge wave of grief: admitting that every camera flash takes him “straight back” to his mother’s death.
Of course, the 10-day tour on behalf of the Queen was partly designed to follow the very path Diana, Princess of Wales took more than 20 years earlier. It was obviously going to be painful, especially when Harry retraced his mother’s footsteps over one-time mine fields in Angola.
Sadly, he didn’t seem to take comfort that at least he can continue with her good work, and thus keep her close.
Watching the documentary showed those of us who are fascinated by the Royal family why Harry, who wears his heart on his sleeve, has seemed so unhappy and stressed for months: he still blames the press for his mother’s death. That is evidently why he chose the penultimate day of the tour to issue a coruscating statement announcing a legal battle against the tabloid press that, 22 years on, he believes is treating Meghan in the same way: “I lost my mother, and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces,” he said, and having been “witness to her private suffering for too long… to stand back and do nothing would be contrary to everything we believe in”.
But the couple’s legal war with the press strays from the Queen’s favoured mantra: “Never complain, never explain.”
In fact, Meghan’s watery-eyed interview with Bradby reminded me of Diana’s confessional to
BBC Panorama journalist Martin Bashir in 1995.
More than 20 million
people tuned in to watch what was the nail in the coffin for her marriage to Prince Charles; they divorced the following year.
Diana rarely fell out with the press – she courted them as a weapon in her war with Charles, and if she was upset by something they wrote then she would invite them to tea at Kensington Palace and invariably win them over – but she certainly fell out with “The Firm”. The leading question is, are the Sussexes in danger of doing both?
Meghan’s lament that few people have asked is she OK could well be a hint that some members of the Royal family have not been as supportive as she would wish. Her claim that she is “existing not living” is also hard to hear: “It’s not enough to just survive… you have to thrive and be happy.”
Of course, it’s not easy to switch countries, get married, have a baby, move house and, most of all, learn how to be a royal in less than three years. But some have found her voicing her personal struggles at odds with other scenes in the documentary, such as visiting a project teaching teenage girls how to fight off rapists in South Africa’s “murder capital”.
Since their marriage, the couple has spent £2.4million redecorating their home in Windsor, enjoyed holidays with Elton John and the Clooneys and hung out with the Obamas. Meghan has also edited a “Forces For Change” issue of Vogue and has been able to support the campaigns, such as education for women and gender violence, that she cares about so much, becoming a role model to countless young girls.
So it is sad that the desperately miserable Sussexes don’t seem to have been able to help each other. Of course, that period post-first-baby can be very difficult, even if there is unlimited help to call upon, but isn’t it also wonderful to have a healthy child – something Harry has wanted for a long time – with the added bonus that your husband is handsome, rich and, most of all, adores you?
During the interview, Harry took another extraordinary step in confirming that his relationship with William isn’t as close as it once was: “Inevitably, stuff happens.” When I chatted to Harry at Kensington Palace just before he got engaged, he told me that he didn’t want to continue with Heads Together or the Royal Foundation as he wanted to go his own way.
It made sense to me that a young man in his early 30s would want to find a new exciting path with Meghan rather than stay tied to William and Kate.
It’s not been easy for Harry. From an early age, William had privileges, like going to tea with the Queen Mother, because he was going to be king, to which his younger brother wasn’t invited. Growing up as the spare to the second heir to the throne is a royal No-man’s-land, when you are not free to have a full-time career of your own choosing and make your own way in the world, but have to kowtow to your brother on key occasions.
It would be a shame if the Sussexes’ emotional outpouring overshadowed the Cambridges’ successful Pakistan tour. Perhaps just a little stiff upper lip could be useful, if what you say will be hurtful to your family and astonish the public who pay for the life of privilege you perceive as a gilded cage.
Diana fell out with ‘The Firm’ but rarely the press. Are the Sussexes doing both?