This isn’t to say that Harry causes modern ills. He only personifies some of them, providing an illustration so vivid that they are laid bare in all their hideousness.
On his visit to Australia, Harry tried to convey a royal stature to which he probably, and his wife definitely, is no longer entitled. The Australian public was given the impression that Harry came as a son of their head of state, rather than a greedy chap on the make trying to ‘monetise’ his family links.
Those links can indeed be lucrative, and this is the part of his royal descent Harry likes. What he rejects is the duty of service inherent in royal privilege.
Nothing new or unique about that: many people don’t mind getting something for nothing. About a quarter of Britain’s working age population subsist on state handouts, so Harry isn’t short of an understanding audience.
The leading cause of their idleness is ‘mental health issues’, such as stress, depression, anxiety and general nervousness. The cynic in me has to believe that this popularity of emotional instability is largely caused by the ample opportunities for malingering such conditions provide. It’s easier for clinical tests to disprove liver failure than a persistent bad mood.
Grief, sadness, stress are and always have been inalienable parts of the human condition, but only our deracinated modernity sees fit to medicalise them to such a ludicrous extent.
Having lost God and unable to develop their own inner resources, people – millions of them – are happy to demand long-term disability benefits so they can wallow in their misery (real or, as often as not, imaginary or, worse still, feigned) without the distraction of work.
Doctors are happy to oblige for various reasons. First, they want to avoid violent rows erupting in their surgeries, which tends to happen when stupid, brutish people feel they are being denied their just deserts.
Second, doctors themselves are modern people. Their brains too have been scoured of any critical faculty by decades of psychobabble propaganda, and they don’t want to come across as cold-hearted scoundrels denying succour to their suffering fellow men.
Such is the background against which Harry thrives in his highly remunerative capacity of a mental health guru. He has milked the loss of his mother to its full pecuniary potential, secure in the knowledge that few people would dare question the legitimacy of a middle-aged man still reeling from a childhood trauma.
Losing one’s parents is indeed traumatic, but most people manage to cope with that tragedy with the passage of time. Diana was killed almost 30 years ago, meaning that Harry is no longer entitled to the lachrymose grief he is so adept at turning into cash.
This is how he explained his feelings to the Australian multitudes. Every word is so precious that I hope you’ll forgive a long quotation:
“After my mum died just before my 13th birthday I was like: ‘I don’t want this job. I don’t want this role wherever this is headed, I don’t like it.’
“It killed my mum, and I was very much against it, and I stuck my head in the sand for years and years. Eventually I realised – well, hang on, if there was somebody else in this position, how would they be making the most of this platform and this ability and the resources that come with it to make a difference in the world?
“And also, what would my mum want me to do? And that really changed my own perspective.”
Now, Harry, now in his 40s, is an Old Etonian later educated at Sandhurst. Therefore he has no business talking like an underprivileged teenager from a bad council estate, but evidently in some cases even expensive education fails to leave a mark.
Someone ought to remind this royal Peter Pan that referring to one’s mother as ‘mum’ ought to be off limits for anyone old enough to vote. And the locution ‘I was like’ instead of ‘I thought’ or ‘I said’ is childhood slang to be shunned by anyone who has children of his own.
Note also Harry’s referring to his royal status as a “platform”, enabling him “to make a difference in the world”. The ‘platform’ of the royal family can indeed make such a difference, but not by acting as a launchpad of psychobabble exhibitionism.
A member of that family can use the authority of his constitutional position to unite a nation being rent asunder by divisive ideologies. He can act as a walking, ideally also talking, symbol of his realm’s continuity, tying together its past, present and future. He can do his utmost to strengthen the Commonwealth. Most important, he can embody the strengths and virtues of the national character and tradition.
In short, he can do all those things that Harry’s grandmother did, and his father is trying to do, with so much dignity and honour. Yet Harry takes his cue not from them, nor from his paternal grandfather or his aunt, but from his ‘mum’, a self-serving woman as short of mind and morals as she was long on conniving manipulation and ‘I-want-to-be-me’ egoism.
If Harry genuinely thinks it was her royal status that “killed his mum”, he is even dumber than he looks and sounds. She was killed in a road accident, riding in the back of the car with her revenge lover, one of a legion she had taken to punish the royal family for reminding her of her duties.
Harry is right about one thing though: his ‘mum’ would do exactly what he is doing. She wouldn’t have missed this glorious opportunity to turn her idiotic complaints about her family’s obsession with public service into a lucrative publicity stunt.
Actually, I think Diana has come back as Meghan, who displays all the same manipulative qualities and similarly offsets a deficit of intelligence with a surfeit of perfidy. Sigmund Freud would have a field day: the Oedipus Complex exists and it’s working overtime.
The man Nabokov called ‘the Viennese quack’ insisted that men subconsciously seek a mate who possesses similar traits to their mothers. Freudians call this ‘sexual imprinting’, with early childhood experiences setting the template for adult attraction.
I don’t know whether little Harry wanted to copulate with his mum, kill his dad and poke his own eyes out, but Meghan is so similar to Diana that one has to accept that, in this isolated case, sexual imprinting does work.
What’s worrying is that, though Harry was made to relinquish the HRH title, he still remains a prince, fifth in the line of succession.
I’m not sure what could be done about that: a royal status is after all acquired by birth, not merit, and a good job too. So I’m afraid that Harry and Meghan will continue to annoy those of us who wish the monarchy well, doing the same thing his ‘mum’ did so well: hurting our vital institution.
Yes, young man, make use of your “platform” to encourage others to wallow in self pity and ignore their responsibilities. Brilliant. And what exactly does he mean by “this ability”? Whinging? Poor Harry has latched onto the type of woman he should have avoided: one who will encourage and increase every bit of this weakness.
Elizabeth I was 13 when her father died. Edward was just 9 when he took the throne. Did any of Harry’s psychoanalysts mention that and hold up either of them as an example? Imagine Elizabeth crying, “The monarchy killed me da’ (and me bruv and me skin). I don’t want this job, djahmean?”
As for Harry’s prole speech, he also forgot to use the subjunctive mood and accidentally followed a singular antecedent with a plural pronoun. But that just shows he’s a man of the people.