David Penberthy: Prince Harry has drifted into a vacuous, entitled, self-absorbed life

Prince Harry once seemed almost like the Royal you could have a beer with. But that’s all changed - especially this week, writes David Penberthy.

As a republican, the most obvious and damning criticism to be levelled against royalty is that it is framed around a baseless sense of entitlement.

When you look at the current configuration of the British royal family - who are our royal family too, given they provide us with our head of state - it is debatable whether that sense of entitlement is most pronounced among those who remain within the family or have chosen to live outside of it.

Previously I had a bit of a soft spot for Prince Harry. He always seemed like the royal you’d want to have a beer with, a knockabout bloke with a love of sport, good sense of humour, didn’t take himself too seriously. Sure, dressing up as Hitler for a costume party was a pretty dopey thing to do, especially given his own great-grandmother’s experience during the Blitz, not to forget the whole 1000-Year Reich thing. But when we are young, silly and drunk we all make mistakes, I suppose. And his searing anger at the treatment his late mother sustained from the British press remains wholly justified.

In the past couple of years though, Harry and his wife Meghan have increasingly drifted further and further into their own self-absorbed orbit. In the tin ear stakes, things reached something of a low this week with Harry’s musings about the value of turning your back on a job that you don’t like, and and telling the boss to shove it.

Prince Harry and Meghan on a visit to the World Trade Center. Picture: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty

Harry’s advice to all was that there was nothing quite like the liberating power of dropping out of the rat-race for a while.

He made the comments in his capacity as “chief impact officer” (yes, that’s his actual title) for the mental health advocacy group BetterUp, one of the new ventures he heads since he and his wife quit the Royals in January last year and made their new home in California.

The context for his remarks was a discussion about what’s known as “The Great Resignation”, the mass exodus of people from their existing jobs as a result of the self-reflection brought about by Covid.

“A lot of the job resignations you mention aren’t all bad,” Harry told the interviewer.

“Many people around the world have been stuck in jobs that didn’t bring them joy, and now they’re putting their mental health and happiness first. This is something to be celebrated.

“While on the surface it looks like these last couple of years brought all these issues to the foreground, the reality is these struggles and issues have been brewing for quite some time. We’re just at the beginning of the mental health awakening.”

Setting aside the wellness psychobabble epitomised by his final sentence, there are two things about Harry’s comments that are questionable.

The first is that they were made with the unyielding comfort of having a net worth estimated at between $40 million and $60 million, making the idea of chucking in your job on a whim seem a very affordable luxury.

The second is that this whole idea of “The Great Resignation” is the worst brand of middle-class tosh, suggesting that the workforce is something we can all dip in and out of at will. The reality is that almost everyone who has lost their job during the pandemic has done so because their business collapsed, their employers’ revenue stream imploded, not because they had some Eat Pray Love-style epiphany and realised that moving out of banking and into making terracotta pottery would be the best way to realign their chakras.

Harry and Meghan are now being derided as the vacuous pin-ups for a new “Me” Generation, where all roads lead back to the individually-focused questions of how do I feel about this, what does all this mean for me. It’s actually an unfair sledge against their entire age group, as there are plenty of people who occupy that millennial bracket who have the capacity to think beyond themselves.

The most indicative signs of their self-absorption came when Harry’s grandfather was ailing, and his grandmother, the Queen, was in hospital a few weeks ago, yet the pair of them kept on with their own pronouncements on everything from climate change to conducting their latest tell-all interviews with their American celebrity courtiers. At the same time the Queen was cancelling her official duties last month due to illness, Markle was off with Ellen DeGeneres sharing scintillating details of of she and Harry manage to remain “grounded” while living in a Santa Barbara mansion for which they paid $14.6 million.

Pointing out the contradictions this couple collects is like shooting fish in a barrel. They include lecturing us all about climate change while owning a home that has 16 bathrooms, a gym, a cinema, a spa, and is set on 7 acres. Or flying around the world in a private jet while tut-tutting about carbon emissions. Or Markle writing a showy open letter to Congress demanding the introduction of paid parental leave when the scheme had already been endorsed anyway.

It’s not so much that they lack self-awareness. They appear to have had the world’s most comprehensive self-awareness bypass. And when you compare their vacuity to the sober-minded and public service-driven approach of William and Kate, and the lifelong grace of the Queen, it is almost enough to test one’s commitment to the republican cause. Until you remind yourself that Prince Andrew exists, that is.

This is my final column for the year. Thank you for reading my offerings. Have a Merry Christmas and a safe and happy New Year. Here’s hoping that 2022 brings some long-overdue peace and quiet, and that we don’t have to familiarise ourselves with any more letters from the Greek alphabet. Cheers!