For days now, there has been great excitement about Prince Harry’s first UK television interview. Here, at long last, was a chance for a member of the great British press corps to ask the tough questions of the dilettante Duke of Sussex. Not for them, the soft-soaping, credulous quasi-therapy of an Oprah Winfrey light entertainment host. This would be probing, incisive, hard-hitting and accountable journalism at its finest.
So it was something of a disappointment then that Tom Bradby, ITV’s chosen man for the task, failed to live up to the hype. To be fair to Bradby, he had a tricky challenge. A longtime friend of the Prince, he was always going to face criticism for being too close to his subject. He also had to be respectful of the tragedy which Harry suffered at such a young age, while asking the difficult, but, necessary, questions about his interviewee’s (many) public statements concerning life post-Meghan.
Some, like Andrew Marr, thought the ITV veteran succeeded in his task. ‘Perfect click of right inquisitor, right subject, right moment,’ he wrote on Twitter afterwards. Quentin Letts of the Times agreed, writing that Bradby ‘proved commendably more rigorous than the queen of American daytime.’ A low bar, perhaps, but Letts offered up the exchange when Bradby listed to Harry’s ‘whinges about press intrusions’ and suggested that ‘he himself was betraying confidences.’
Such a moment was to Bradby’s credit but such flashes of interrogation were few and far between. He didn’t, for instance, point out that Fleet Street was overwhelmingly supportive of Harry and Meghan during their courtship, marriage and still largely up until their moment of departure. The reporting of respected journalists like Valentine Low of the Times on the Meghan bullying allegations was largely ignored, in favour of a focus on the now-largely irrelevant paparazzi of the 1990s. There was also very little discussion about Harry’s last major TV outing: the March 2021 interview with Oprah which produced several now-debunked claims. If we couldn’t trust everything he and Meghan said then, why should we accept it now?
Bradby’s approach did yield some dividends, even with an interviewee as prickly as Harry. It was therefore something of a disappointment that, when he stumbled on a news line, he did not ask more in the way of follow-up questions. The Duke remarked at one point that ‘people have had plenty of reasons to complain about us… sex crimes weren’t one of them’. It was the first time a royal has publicly criticised Prince Andrew’s links to Jeffrey Epstein. Yet the matter was swiftly dropped rather than further examined. At one point Harry said it was ‘essential’ that he did his Netflix deal. Why? And if so did it have to be for money – in this case for a reported $100 million?
The topics of discussion with regards to Spare specifically were also curious. Bradby and his colleagues chose to focus on a section in the book in which Harry wrote about William’s request that the Duke shave his beard for the-then Prince of Wales’s wedding in 2011. It led to a surreal discussion between the pair about how important Harry’s beard was to him. It was left to Christopher Hope of the Telegraph to ask where were the questions about Harry’s Taliban comments?
Undoubtedly, the way in which the book leaked ahead of Tuesday’s embargo did nothing to help Bradby. By the time of its release on Sunday night, people had formed their own conclusions about Spare: the media have now filleted the most damning parts and established the narrative after Bradby’s interview was recorded. In such circumstances, the use of no less than twelve voiceovers from the audiobook felt somewhat redundant – especially when they were not the ones exercising most viewers.
But the most telling moment perhaps was when Bradby joked he wasn’t going to ‘spoil’ the book. That reluctance to upset his subject, dispute their narrative and unsettle their promotional tour is perhaps why this interview will not be remembered as the proper examination that it could have been. Who knows when a British journalist will next get to ask such questions of Harry again?
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