Prince Harry has got used to busting royal protocol.
Whether for good (hugging foreign dignitaries, discussing mental health or dating a divorcee American actress) or for ill (who mentioned naked billiards in Las Vegas?
) Harry has never been one to mildly toe the line.His latest protocol-busting habit is to give unprecedentedly revealing interviews to newspapers and websites, a habit which he started last year and has taken up again with vigor this year.
It’s all in the noble cause of promoting either his charitable event for wounded servicemen, the Invictus Games, or in the service of bringing forward a discussion on mental health by opening up about his own struggles in that department.
He has thus far been widely praised for the honest and accessible remarks made in several of the interviews and one podcast. But his latest soul-baring comments, which included what amounts to a stinging attack on his father, Prince Charles, for obliging him to walk behind his mother’s coffin as a 12-year-old boy, were greeted with sharp intakes of breath in royal circles yesterday.
Harry made the remarks in Newsweek in the course of an interview in which, among other things, he suggested that neither he nor anyone else in the royal family desires to be the Monarch.
“We are not doing this for ourselves but for the greater good of the people,” Harry said, “Is there any one of the royal family who wants to be king or queen? I don’t think so, but we will carry out our duties at the right time.”
Of course, any fair-minded person can see what Harry means–that being the real life Monarch is pretty far from the fairy tale–but the comment just begs to be taken out of context.
The Daily Mail carried an extensive diatribe by Max Hastings, in which Hastings said the comments showed Harry to be unappreciative and over-entitled, and the papers in the UK are full of headlines stating that Charles didn’t want to be King (this is not correct, he does, and he wants Camila to be Queen by his side).
The way Harry’s remarks on the hardships of royal life have been portrayed illustrates perfectly why, for decades, royal handlers followed a simple rule – no print media interviews.
Except for very rare exceptions, with tame journalists, interviews with the royals only took place on television, and on-camera answers were not allowed to be edited without permission. Indeed, the BBC has a full time employee whose sole job is liaising with the palace about interviews with members of the royal family.
The Newsweek interview proves exactly what the previous generation of royal press handlers–who have all now left Kensington Palace to make way for a new guard led by thrusting young Canadian and lover of social media Jason Knauf–always argued: that there was nothing to be lost by being excessively cautious and deeply conservative when it came to media interviews.
In other words, this new interview has done nothing for Harry or his causes, and has served only to shine a deeply uncomfortable light on tensions between Harry and his father.
Harry, in his admirable effort to be relevant, stands accused of unwisely taking conversations more appropriate for the therapy…
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