A photograph promoting Prince Harry’s new TV show with Oprah Winfrey has the prince sitting with Meghan smiling over his shoulder.
It looks like a gap year snap of a delighted ginger Brit and his American friend in a hostel. Naivety, good intentions and a lad who reckons he’s scored. She looks like it is a polite thing to do.
Heaven knows the celebrity couples of this world don’t need another person weighing in on their relationship. Let them eat therapy and money – who are we to judge?
But judgement seems a crucial part of Britain’s love of monarchy. They must perform for us, else we will bait them into insanity.
This warped dynamic sounds like it could be enjoyable, in a baroque kind of way. In truth, it’s miserable.
Like insisting donkeys dive off high boards in order to keep donkey sanctuaries funded.
Prince Harry claims to have had enough. He says the institution forces people to repress normal emotions, which damages all involved.
To any reasonable observer, this seems blinding obvious. What Harry says in public must be what they all know in private.
However, as a general rule in life, it’s best not to splurge all your anxieties into the public domain, and unwise to betray family loyalties.
Performance over privilege
Sensible newspapers report royal aides wanting Harry, Meghan and offspring to lose their titles.
There is anger at all this ‘feelings’ business in the US media. The privilege of royalty is meant to be used for opening new hospital wings and protecting great wealth.
It’s not clear if Harry is brilliantly subverting that privilege, using his fame to wreck the instruction, or simply trading on it to enhance a shallow celebrity.
Refusing to sweat over links with paedophiles is proof of a very poor character
The idea of titles being dependent on performance, however, seems splendid. If Harry is to lose his, why stop there?
We can all agree that Prince Andrew is repellent. Refusing to sweat over links with paedophiles is proof of a very poor character.
He has made himself ridiculous, compromised the Queen and tarnished the national reputation, while his ex wife is a caricature of the honking yah.
It’s tempting to be rude about his children too, but, like Prince Harry, we should probably blame the parents.
Whatever Prince Michael of Kent contributed to royalty has not been recorded. He is, however, on tape selling access to Vladimir Putin.
Apparently the ex-communist autocrat is receptive to distant relatives of murdered Tsars. A case of Romanov knew my father, Putin Kent his son.
Harry has now joined the ranks of the ridiculous. He seemed like a regular posho with a fondness for getting trolleyed with the lads in the company of totty. Sadly, he woke up.
As if recovering from a night of champers, claret, whisky and a final slug of cooking sherry, he has vowed to never drink again from the royal cup and quite possibly vomit his entire past life to the American media.
He has achieved what years of PR failed to do and make the nation quite sympathetic to Prince Charles.
He is reported to want to open up royal properties to let the hoi polloi in – happy to dub them ‘People’s Palaces’ apparently. I know we paid for them, but a quick tour ending in the gift shop hardly makes them the people’s.
It smacks of crowd pleaser from a candidate running for student president rather than a man preparing to be king, but it’s a start.
Succeeding a beloved queen is going to be a tough job. Doing so when the public don’t much like you makes it harder
If Charles really wanted to win over the people, he should consider removing titles from all but a core of the family.
Succeeding a beloved queen is going to be a tough job. Doing so when the public don’t much like you only makes it harder.
King Charles will need a way of winning support and showing he understands the mood of the people. Stripping Harry, Andrew and the Kents of all titles would be great way to do it.
A genuinely slimmed down monarchy sits better with the times. Charles on the throne, William waiting in the wings, and his poor children adjusting to the horror of coming next.
In a truly humane country we would stop the whole palaver, but the people seem to enjoy The Only Way Is Windsor and the participants, for all the ridicule, confuse it for adoration. Thus a smaller operation seems to fit the mood.
Without some sign of reform, even idle republicans might get impatient with the privileged super rich using their status to further enhance their wealth, while offering Hallmark card homilies to the rest of us.
As for Harry, we get it’s been tough, and wish him well finding a happier life, but for the love of queen, country and all that’s sane, shut up. If not for British stoicism, or family loyalty, then the danger of committing the same mistake twice.
He has swapped one dysfunctional public life for another, the modern scourge of becoming trapped in the online realm.
If he does not want to keep passing the agony down the generations, then he would do well to turn his back on Oprah.