‘Surprising’: Photos of Prince Harry smiling show Duke of Sussex seems happiest outside US
A string of photos of Prince Harry in recent times has revealed a bizarre trend as rumours about his personal life continue to swirl.
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Shiraz, gin, whiskey, shooting grouse, Daunt Books, weekends in Nice with shady Kazakh billionaires, the collected works of Sir Laurens Van der Post, the Peter Jones sale, new Colefax & Fowler paint swatches, a well-shod gelding.
If you asked me to come up with a list of the things that make various members of the royal family happy, these are just some of the things I’d jot down, not including patched Barbour jackets, Twiglets and The Goon Show recordings on vinyl.
Which is to say, they are not a deep bunch, congenitally predisposed to anything so horribly bourgeois as introspection. (Well, King Charles and his dog-eared copies of Van der Post aside).
Luckily, you and I are not restrained by centuries of cousin-marrying and a lifelong institutional repression of all emotions, and thus we can. Because this week’s events have thrown up something very strange indeed about Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex – something that is going to sound ridiculous at first blush.
Harry often looks happiest when he is not in the US. And Harry looks happiest when he is doing “royal” work.
Here comes the irony in 3, 2, 1 ….
The duke, along with his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, are of course the most famous royal malcontents since the fainting couch went out of vogue. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any soul outside of a remote Amazonian tribe who is not fully versed in the Sussexes’ laundry list of woes about royal life.
Lucky then that the Sussexes, back in 2020, found a way to yank themselves out of the maw of The Firm, borrow a pal’s $150 million-odd private jet, hightail to California and accrue massive business deals like some 90s child squirrelling away Pogs. It was happiness time.
Soon, the duke and duchess had two adorable kids, a boutique hotel-sized mansion and the joy of knowing no one was ever going to ask them to open the Chelsea Flower Show.
Paradoxically though, the photos that the world now regularly sees of Harry: the US Edition do not reveal a chirpy, bubbly bloke who has finally gotten so much of what he wants.
For example, in pap shots taken earlier this month while out to dinner with Meghan, he looked like he was privately coming to grips with his choice of a second crème caramel.
Photos of he and daughter Princess Lilibet watching a Fourth of July parade show him looking either sombre or constipated or both.
In others taken in January of him at the beach with the couple’s dog, he similarly looks so serious one would think he’d just gotten some bad news about a mole.
His public appearances Stateside have become exercises in po-faced prince-ing, a man developing frown lines faster than Elizabeth Arden can cook up new creams to fix ‘em.
All of which is hardly surprising – this is a man with a lot on his mind, from his estrangement from his British relatives to his myriad court cases back in the UK to the fact that he forgot to buy oat milk. Again.
Also in January he repeatedly popped up on screens to promote his book Spare, generally coming across like a man with broken glass in his underpants.
In late February, when the Sussexes were papped out to dinner in LA on the same night the world learnt that Charles had evicted them from their UK home Frogmore Cottage, the best Harry could manage was to momentarily lose his patent glumness.
Which is to say nothing of how upset and troubled he looked in May, when he, Meghan and her mother Doria Ragland were caught in a confrontation with the paparazzi in New York.
This seemed to be the new Duke of Sussex status quo – a deep-thinking, at times troubled-looking Harry, like a Rodin sculpture brought to life or a 21st century version of Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders. (And they say an Arts degree is useless …)
And then Harry flew to Japan this week for a sports conference and blew all of that out of the water.
From the minute that he and dreamboat polo player Nacho Figueras landed, the duke was doing more megawatt smiling than a man who has just found out he has won Powerball.
During the quickie trip, he merrily posed for selfies with South Africa’s Stellenbosch University Choir, made nice with the audience, enthusing about Japan, “I would happily live here if you’d have me” and even responded to a shouted question from a journalist with warm words. WARM WORDS. Not a glower in sight.
Brother H bringing joy to people! Love it.
— Misan Harriman (@misanharriman) August 10, 2023
Via @StellenboschUni â¤ï¸ pic.twitter.com/YVulhSimD0
However, before anyone hastily puts this down to simply being an aberration, a one-off, then rewind to May when Harry made a whistlestop dash back to the UK for his father’s coronation.
He might have faced being left in the third row – despite being the King’s son, he was seated between a former tequila ambassador (Princess Eugenie’s husband Jack Brooksbank) and the 57th in line to the throne (86-year-old Princess Alexandra) – but at various points before and after the ceremony, there Harry was, smiling and smiling some more.
In one notable exchange, the duke, his aunty Princess Anne and her extravagantly plumed chapeau were seen sharing a joke, with Aitch looking like he was having a positive blast.
Then there is the now shocking instance in September last year, when the Sussexes were in Dusseldörf, the host city for the next Invictus Games.
The duke looked more chipper and peppy than the first time Prince Philip let him brandish the family’s gold-plated barbecue tongs. He nearly glowed.
What unites these instances of Harry looking oh-so-merry? None of them took place on US soil and all of them were when he was undertaking “royal” activities.
Thus, the question must be asked, could the life that Harry finds the most rewarding, the most joyful, the most nourishing, be a version of the one that he just Houdini-ed himself out of? A life where he doesn’t have to finish every sentence with the forced jollity of “Have a great day!”, where he doesn’t have to pretend to understand the electoral college system and where he has the space to give over his non-parenting waking hours helping others?
This week, it looks a lot like Harry’s bliss lies in him doing “royal” activities – doing charity, delighting teenagers and earnestly enthusing about things that can make the world a nicer, better place, like a decent kickabout or a game of rounders.
While in Tokyo this week for his sports summit, Harry said, “I get a huge amount of fulfilment giving back to as many people as possible. My life is charity. Always has been, always will be”.
Except that the poor bloke has ended up in a life where for very basic, fundamental reasons he can’t spend all day, every day trying to make the world a better place.
He now, like 99.99999 per cent of the world, needs to give over a chunk of his life to that most annoying of things – work. Actual paying work to keep the lights on, the gardeners happy and the fridge full of yak milk or whatever California’s yogis are busy prescribing this week.
Harry’s heart might be in charity but the ability to devote himself to doing that and nothing else was one he unintentionally sacrificed when he and Meghan did their power walk off into the West Coast sunset.
When Harry and Figueras jetted out of Tokyo, the nearly impossible happened: he looked even happier still. At this rate, the duke is going to overtax certain generally unused facial muscles such that he might need medical intervention.
Bottom line: it is a really nice change – but how long will it last? Just to mangle the Bard a bit (knew that minor in English would pay off): “The course of true happiness never did run smooth”.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as ‘Surprising’: Photos of Prince Harry smiling show Duke of Sussex seems happiest outside US
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