Fathoming out the royal psychodrama

Picture: Apple TV/The Me You Can't See

What a mess. What an absolute mess. Forget the recriminations over Martin Bashir’s now-rogue Panorama interview with Princess Diana, with the BBC lurching into an existential crisis of its own doing. It’s the royal family I worry about.

Perhaps the mainstream media doesn’t, in its capricious relationship with the monarchy - a press owned by republican barons who feed off the royals’ misfortunes while fuelling them at the same time. With the Bashir scandal, a number of them have found themselves observers of a perfect storm, the opportunity to whip up right-wing frenzy over the BBC itself (the same old tropes about political bias and the licence fee), while more gorging at the never-ending feast that is the psychodrama within the House of Windsor. That began, arguably, when a young Diana Spencer met Prince Charles at a polo match in the summer of 1980. That set in train a sequence of events that, to take a gloomy view, would end with her death at the age of 36 in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris, and continue further as her sons grew up and, in the case of the youngest, became a target himself for media anger, rather than a recipient of sympathy.

The contrast in reporting has become polarised: Prince William and “Kate Middleton” (never the Duchess of Cambridge) are the wholesome, perma-smiling poster children of the monarchy’s future, with three delightful children and the right balance of working life and family life. Prince Harry and “Meghan Markle” (never the Duchess of Sussex) are spoiled and entitled, who’ve escaped royal duty and decamped to California where they carp and moan about how pitiful life in the Royal Family is, and how they’ve had to escape institutional dysfunction and racism to make the life they desire. That, I think, sums up the narrative.

The latest spin in the Sussex vortex is Harry’s revelations about his mental health to Oprah Winfrey, in essence, a continuation of the interview he and Meghan gave in March, but this time going into far more detail. So much more detail that Piers Morgan has compounded his apparent ongoing feud with the couple (which may or may not be rooted in Meghan allegedly spurning his invite for a drink some time back) which led to him calling Harry a “whiny little brat”. You don’t dare look at the comments beneath Morgan’s diatribes in the Mail Online, which amount to a national pile-on against Harry and his wife. There is no compelling evidence that the ire Meghan draws is racial in motivation, but you can’t help have your suspicions. Either way, she is seen as some poisonous gold digger, who stole a hitherto popular prince away from us. And how dare Harry cause so much pain to his grandmother and father, and indeed break up the once solid sibling duo with William? All of a sudden, Harry - who fought for his country and has admitted that he was probably at his happiest in the army - is being demonised…for what?

In the new interviews with Winfrey, Harry - speaking eloquently and without any of the histrionics he’s been painted as applying - opens up about the depths both he and his wife have been through, accusing the royal family of treating Meghan with “total neglect” when she was suicidal, and he has used drink and drugs to mask the pain of his mother’s tragic death. What is clear, and what those who criticise Harry seem to refuse to acknowledge, is just how deep the effect of Diana’s death, when he was just 11, has had on him. Which begs the question - who has the right to question that? Even his revelation that Meghan didn’t go through with suicide while pregnant with Archie was because she thought it unfair on him “after everything that had happened to my mum and to now be put in a position of losing another woman in my life, with a baby inside of her — our baby.” He added that Meghan persuaded him to go into therapy to address his demons - again, further fuel to the anti-Meghan brigade - as he says that he found life a nightmare, especially living in London, before he met his wife, because of the painful memories of his mother at every turn.

You can see his point or, at least, should. And you can see why Morgan, once a tabloid newspaper editor (let’s gloss over the Mirror front page scandal that he was ultimately responsible for...) is going to go for the attention Harry finds so traumatic, recalling how, as a young boy, sat in the back of his mother’s car, he saw how she was in tears while being pursued by press photographers, a darkly prescient event in itself: “The clicking of cameras and the flash of cameras makes my blood boil,” he tells Winfrey. “It makes me angry. It takes me back to what happened to my mum, what I experienced as a kid.”

Harry also reveals that Prince Charles’ own treatment of him hasn’t helped. “My father used to say to me [and William] when I was younger, ‘Well it was like that for me so it’s going to be like that for you’.” Charles, as The Crown appears to depict, was a somewhat morose child as he tried to figure out his place in the world as future king, in a family with cold emotion running through it, and a household of courtiers adding to the atmosphere with their institutional stuffiness. Harry’s revelations about his own father come at little surprise, but at least he’s being honest in talking about them, even if it risks the rift with his brother, who dutifully doesn’t speak about family strife, being prolonged.

I only lost my father, at the age of 90, to Alzheimer’s a couple of years ago, so I couldn’t begin to empathise with how an 11-year-old Harry must have confronted the death of Diana, at the same age he is now. More so, how he would have confronted it within the refined world of the royal family. “I wish she could have met Meghan,” he reflects to Winfrey, “I wish she was around for Archie.” You’d have to have a heart of stone to not find that statement sad. But, I think, you’d also have to have a heart of stone for not having sympathy for where Harry has ended up, and why - to his own admission - he made the decision to leave royal life and chart his own course in California. And, again, here he presents another stick for critics to beat him with. ‘It’s all very well Harry wanting out,’ runs the line, ‘but he’s still trading on his title’. Well, yes, true. But can you really blame him?

The arguments over Harry’s royal status could go on all day, but I keep coming back to the central premise of his appearance in Winfrey’s new series, The Me You Can’t See, which he also co-produced, for Apple+: at its core seems to be the continued inability for people to accept mental health issues to begin with, and secondly, that someone born into privilege, who has benefitted supremely from that privilege, has any right to struggle. “Poor, poor, pitiful me,” to reference the Warren Zevon song. “Whiny little brat” indeed. We stray, here, into the British predilection for indulging the politics of envy. Harry wants his cake and eat it, but does he not - as any bereaved son should - deserve some slack? Or is he just supposed to ‘man up’, the stock response to any weakness?

If, though, we are to take mental health more seriously, as we should, the criticism Harry has faced for opening up has been astonishing. As psychologist Wendy Bristow points out in The Times today, he’s faced accusations of whingeing, even from mental health professionals. And yet, she argues, despite greater public awareness of mental health problems, especially amongst men, Harry’s state is dismissed as weakness or, with another angle on his public image, wokery. I’m squarely with Bristow in her advocacy of therapy, which Harry tells Winfrey has been an essential part of coping. I went through it myself, a few years ago when dealing with combination of challenges. In the way I usually equate things with pop culture, I felt that if Tony Soprano could get therapy, then so could I. How much it materially helped, I couldn’t say, but it was certainly good to talk. 

Unfortunately, Harry is clearly not being given the respite his confessional to Winfrey might seek to achieve. A look at the Mail’s landing page sees him plastered across it. Countless stories, countless angles, and all the usual bovver boys steaming in with their why-oh-why think pieces. Helicopter up, and we see Harry featuring in a timeline of royal schism that shows no end. I do sympathise with the Queen at having to deal with all this, especially having only buried her husband a month ago. To some extent, I sympathise with Charles, too, though, as the rogue Bashir interview with Diana revealed, he doesn’t come out of things with much dignity. But I do respect Harry for wanting to do something about the “cycle of pain” of his own upbringing with his own children. “I don't think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody,” he told podcaster Dax Shepard recently, “but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I've experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I'm going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don't pass it on, basically.” In the interview he lucidly talked through where he was coming from: “It's a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on,” adding that he’d started to piece it all together from his father’s schooldays (miserably captured in The Crown), to the chain of events that occurred when his parents met, and he came into the world. 

I’m no flag-waving, bunting-stringing, street party-attending royalist, but I do like the royal institution. I think that it has a place in British society that is positive, for the most part, makes people smile. That Prince Harry’s commentary about himself and his family may be undermining the institution is open to debate, but perhaps it’s the revolution the royal family finally needed. In the grand scheme of regal schisms, dating back centuries, this is - to some extent - just a rift. Those who passionately take the red-white-and-blue bunting view of it all will still enjoy seeing the Queen on Zoom calls with Scout troops, Charles making his impassioned comments about the environment, and even William doing his earnest work with “Kate”, presenting a softer, more modern, chino-wearing profile for ‘The Firm’. But maybe, just maybe, we should cut Harry some slack. Because, hasn’t he been through enough?