Prince Harry has a point. That’s a sentence I thought I’d never write. Making money from exploiting your royal connections, while also complaining about them, as Harry is doing, is singularly unattractive. But there is one part of Spare that does merit sympathy: Harry’s views about his stepmother Camilla.
Harry has written that he and his brother ‘begged’ their father not to marry Camilla. In an interview with CBS’s Anderson Cooper he said, ‘She was the third person in their marriage. She needed to rehabilitate her image’. That pretty well gets to the heart of the thing, quite apart from the interesting question of the extent to which Camilla traded information with journalists.
Harry is that embarrassing character, the stubborn young man who doesn’t forget
The blame for Camilla and Charles’ adultery can plainly be evenly shared, but it is asking an awful lot of a young man to forgive and forget the pain that the affair caused his mother. It is asking even more of him to go along with the most successful PR campaign in modern British history: to turn the woman who was once pelted with bread rolls outside Sainsbury’s into a national treasure.
Harry is that embarrassing character, the stubborn young man who doesn’t forget. His sin is that he gives a truthful account of his stepmother’s transition from mistress to Queen Consort, apparently oblivious of the fact that it is now simply not done to recall these inconvenient truths. The silly knowing talk about the King’s ‘red line’ when it comes to Harry dissing Camilla is simply to say that Charles does not wish anyone to remember the past.
You can blame Harry for an awful lot, but one thing you can’t blame him for is saying exactly what he thinks of his stepmother’s bid to establish herself in the nation’s affections.
It’s possible that Harry is right to point the finger at Camilla for letting slip bits of information about him and William to journalists she liked in order to advance her cause. Personally, I’d give Charles all the credit for the PR victory that has transformed Camilla’s standing more successfully than Henry VIII managed with Anne Boleyn. But it simply isn’t fair to blame Harry for making Camilla the villain of his story.
The Daily Mail‘s editorial today says this:
‘Of all the spiteful attacks Prince Harry has launched against his family, perhaps the most unkind and undeserved was on his stepmother, the Queen Consort. Painting Camilla as one of the main villains in his narcissistic tale of woe when he knows she can’t publicly defend herself is an example of the very bullying he himself complains about.’
It all brings to mind that little ditty by Humbert Wolfe: ‘You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.’
Actually, ‘unbribed’ doesn’t quite cover it. Being in favour with the king by being horrid about anyone who is horrid about Charles’s wife is probably a pretty easy tradeoff. In this way, Prince Harry finds himself, interestingly, in the position of being dissed, not for milking his connections, but for saying what may actually be the truth.
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