LONDON — With
soaring fuel prices, a sagging economy, disruptive strikes, and lengthy waits
in hospital emergency rooms, Britons could use a vivid distraction from what is
shaping up as an otherwise dreary new year. And it has come from a reliable
source: Harry and Meghan.
اضافة اعلان
This time, it was
Prince Harry airing yet more grievances about his brother, Prince William, and
the rest of the royal family in teasers for a pair of television interviews to
promote the publication of his memoir next week.
In one, with the ITV
network, he said, “I would like to get my father back; I would like to have my
brother back.” He added, apparently referring to William and King Charles III,
“They’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile.”
In the other, with
Anderson Cooper on the CBS program “60 Minutes”, Harry accused Buckingham
Palace of planting negative stories about him and his wife, Meghan, and then
refusing to defend them in the face of scurrilous attacks by London’s tabloids.
“There becomes a point when silence is betrayal,” he said.
The interviews will
air Sunday evening, two days before Penguin Random House rolls out Harry’s
memoir, “Spare”, which royal watchers expect to cast the harshest spotlight yet
on the royal rift. Whether the book ends up being the last act in this
long-running family drama, however, is far from clear.
Still making
headlinesThere are murmurings
that Meghan might write her own tell-all book about her marriage to Harry and
her treatment at the hands of his family. The couple has a multimillion-dollar
programming deal with Netflix, which last month aired a highly rated, six-part
documentary, “Harry & Meghan”, about their acrimonious split from the royal
family in 2020 and new life in Southern California.
On the website of
their company, Arche well Productions, Harry and Meghan said their goal was “to
produce programming that informs, elevates, and inspires”. Among other
projects, they are producing a documentary that chronicles athletes who took
part in the Invictus Games, a sports competition for former military service
people that was started by Harry, who himself served in Afghanistan.
Yet the couple’s
commercial and pop-cultural currency remains firmly tied to their vexed
relationship with the House of Windsor. The television interviews, and the
claims in Harry’s book, guarantee that their story will stay on television
screens and front pages for at least a while longer.
“I would like to get my father back; I would like to have my brother back… They’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile.”
On Tuesday, the clips
from Harry’s interviews were splashed across virtually every London tabloid,
with nearly identical headlines.
“Harry: I want my
father and brother back,” said the Daily Express. “I want Dad and brother
back,” blared the Sun. “Harry: I’d like my father and brother back,” echoed The
Daily Mail. Even the more upmarket Times of London and the Daily Telegraph ran
front-page headlines featuring his lament about William and Charles.
Only the Financial
Times went in another direction, declaring “UK recession will be deepest and
longest,” while a couple of papers kept the focus on the crisis in the National
Health Service and transportation strikes that are crippling much of the
country.
Gossip and press
leaksThis is the kind of
distraction that royal family gossip has long supplied to a beleaguered British
public. To that extent, the couple is playing into the same bread-and-circuses
spectacle that Harry has so often denounced.
In his interview with
Cooper, Harry reprised his complaints about what he has said was a
transactional, deeply cynical relationship between Buckingham Palace and the
tabloid press. Public relations aides to the royals, he said, compete to
present their bosses in the best light. That can involve “leaking” unflattering
information about other royals to select, “spoon-fed” reporters, he said, who
then append an obligatory no comment from the palace to suggest the information
came from elsewhere.
“The family motto is
‘never complain, never explain,’ but it’s just a motto,” Harry said. There was
“endless” complaining and explaining behind the scenes, he said, much of it
damaging to him and Meghan.
For Harry’s British
interview, he chose Tom Bradby, an ITV correspondent who has nurtured a close
relationship with the prince and his wife. He conducted the first interview
with Meghan, during a tour of southern Africa in 2019, in which she disclosed
the depth of her unhappiness with royal life. “Thank you for asking, because
not many people have asked if I’m OK,” Meghan said to him.
Bradby appears to have
succeeded again in drawing out his subject. Harry claimed he had sought a
rapprochement but was rebuffed by his brother and father, an assertion that is
disputed by one person with ties to the palace. “They feel it’s better to keep
us somehow as the villains,” Harry said.
Conciliatory
Charles and Silent WilliamBuckingham Palace has
not commented on the excerpts, in keeping with its lack of response to the
Netflix documentary. Charles recently put out word that Harry would be invited
to his coronation in May, suggesting that he would like to rise above the
rancor and play a healing role in the family.
“The family motto is ‘never complain, never explain,’ but it’s just a motto,” Harry said. There was “endless” complaining and explaining behind the scenes…
“He has rightly
avoided getting into a slanging match against Harry and Meghan,” said Vernon
Bogdanor, a professor of government at King’s College London, who has written
about the constitutional role of the monarchy.
William has also been
silent, though royal watchers said that was less a sign of any impending
reconciliation than of the chasm between the brothers. London papers have
reported that the family expects Harry’s book to be especially hard on William,
although the palace is also prepared for the possibility that his estrangement
with Charles will feature more prominently than it did in the Netflix series.
As a ghost writer,
Harry hired J.R. Moehringer, a novelist and former journalist who wrote memoirs
of tennis champion Andre Agassi and Nike shoe founder Philip Knight. Those
books suggest Harry will delve deeply into his emotional life, including his
grief over the death of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.
Still, as the latest
television clips suggest, it is Harry’s continuing clash with his family that
will grab the headlines.
“Every single time
I’ve tried to do it privately,” Harry said to Cooper of his attempts to mend
fences, “there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against
me and my wife”.
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