Prince Harry: the Queen’s “protector”?
Prince Harry has awarded himself an “unlikely” new role as “Mighty Queen Protector”, said Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. Last week, after stopping off for tea with Her
Majesty on his way to the Invictus Games in the Netherlands, he told the US network NBC that he had been making sure that his grandmother is “protected and has the right people around her”.
The two of them had a “special relationship”, he said: “we talk about things that she can’t talk about with anybody else”. (By contrast, when asked if he missed his father and brother, he couldn’t even “find it in his heart to simply say yes”.) It’s ironic, really. Far from being the Queen’s protector, this “smirking assassin” has done a vast amount of damage to the monarchy. First there was the Oprah interview, which effectively smeared the entire royal family. Now this. He couldn’t care less “that the Palace is shocked, that royal aides are stunned”, that his father and brother “must be crushed by his words”.
“I don’t know why everyone is so down on Prince Harry,” said Giles Coren in The Times. If he doesn’t keep his grandmother on the straight and narrow, who knows what could happen? She could, say, marry someone unsuitable, or fall out with her entire family. If you think what an “absolute Horlicks the Queen made of her first 70 years on the throne”, it’s a miracle she hasn’t been “deposed or usurped”. Clearly, there’s still “unfinished business” here, said Camilla Tominey in The Daily Telegraph. Let’s see if the Sussexes turn up to the Queen’s platinum jubilee celebrations in June. They have reportedly been invited to appear on the Buckingham Palace balcony with the rest of the family, but haven’t decided yet whether to attend.
It’s bizarre how much Harry winds people up, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. If he says anything at all, our media is filled with “corpulent royal experts” and loyal monarchists protesting about how he must have upset the Queen. Yet we all know that the Queen hates a fuss, so why don’t they just ignore it? The truth is that Harry’s critics relish “the drama of the royal soap opera” too much. A true royalist wouldn’t show him the slightest bit of interest. “It can’t be beyond our famous British reserve.”