Already a subscriber? Log in
Hardly enough, you’d think, to make any breakfaster look up from their Cheerios, let alone stop scrolling their Instagram feed. Those who bothered would have seen a ginger guy with a posh English accent deliver a fluent series of answers to some pretty standard questions. He did well, as these things go, and the segment signed off with favourable comments from the programme’s hosts. I scribbled down some of the words: ‘open’, ‘honest’, ‘a great guy’. Then an unexpected twist as the interviewer, speaking to the camera, said that while they had been on air a legal firm representing Buckingham Palace had asked for a transcript of the interview ‘immediately’. ‘That’s something we don’t do,’ he assured viewers, with just a hint of a finger to the people who brought you George III. So. The great ginger guy has enemies in high places. Beady British legal eyes are watching, waiting for him to slip up. All over America, you can bet, undecided hearts softened towards the prince who spoke of still loving his strange, dysfunctional family even as they set the pedigree palace hounds on him. What better way to send boxloads of Spare flying out of Amazon warehouses from Oregon to Maine?
To purge myself of wrongthink on this great matter, I turned to the broadsheet British press. Sure enough, within minutes, I realised that I had almost fallen into the Sussexes’ cunning trap. Having come within a whisker of feeling a certain sympathy for the prince I remembered as an endlessly forgivable child, I now realised how much he was to be despised and reviled. Pages of anti-Harry invective were attributed to experts, friends, close friends and assorted surrogates of every shade of credibility – from mere biographers to anonymous sources – snarling across the media battlefield like Apache gunships. You’ve got to hand it to the palace war room: nobody does dignified silence like the British monarchy. Where has all this dignity come from? Maybe it’s an uneasy feeling in some royal guts that their command of the moral high ground is not as one-sided as their messengers would like us to think. Sure, a conscientious PA took the fall for spilling the beans on William’s first meeting with Camilla. But those who believe Harry’s accusations are safely debunked should revisit the murky ethics of earlier Camilla rehab initiatives, coinciding with his crucial, formative impressions of his stepmother. Many of these were aimed at creating an illusion in the public mind that Harry’s mother was nuts. So sad. By extension, even if Camilla wasn’t quite your cup of tea, at least she wasn’t a fruitcake. When Harry asks for accountability before reconciliation, this may be the kind of reckoning he has in mind.
And now, out of the dignified silence, come voices publicly questioning his mental stability. Imagine that. The explanation for Harry’s current bout of reckless candour is surely quite rational. The baffled, exploited, inarticulate boy has become an angry and dangerously lucid man seeking revenge on those who done his women wrong. And what timing. Happy coronation, Dad!
Relax, everybody. The coronation will happen and the reckoning almost certainly won’t. But nor, presumably, will any reconciliation with the Sussexes. ‘Quite right too!’ retort the frothing exponents of regal restraint. But even dignity has its limits. It seldom leads to actual healing. For that, the still small voice of forgiveness must eventually be allowed to break the silence, preferably before the lawyers do. New reigns are a good time for new beginnings. Although the quantities of humble pie to be consumed will be historic, so will the potential rewards. Leaders who talk reconciliation must sooner or later practise it or be remembered as too petty or conflicted to meet the moment. What an opportunity: after Elizabeth the Great, let history hail Charles the Peacemaker.
Also in Society
Also by Patrick Jephson
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in