Miranda Devine: Harry and Meghan enjoy the high life but leave a mess behind

Prince Harry used to be a go-getting, vital young man, but marrying Meghan Markle has turned him into a selfish psychobabbler, writes Miranda Devine.

Meghan and Harry are horrible hypocrites for whining about privacy when they’re in bed with Oprah Winfrey, a media juggernaut who is queen of the confessional interview.

That’s how Oprah became a billionaire in the very industry the sappy Sussexes keep railing against. She can fillet your gizzards and then convince you to spill your guts without you even noticing what she’s done.

Sure, Oprah and “Meg” are besties. Sure, Oprah wants to “work with” Harry as a co-equal producing partner. Believe that and I have an Oprah key ring to sell you.

Oprah made a motza out of the tell-all interview with Mr and Mrs Harry Mountbatten-Windsor in March. It was the interview of her life.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle threw the royals under the bus in their latest interview with Oprah. Picture: AFP

She cemented her place in the celebrity interviewer hall of fame. To hell with Harry’s family back home, thrown under the bus while the Queen’s beloved husband Philip lay dying in hospital.

Harry once was a boisterous, carefree lad, with a ready smile and a Viking dash. His ginger mop and twinkling eyes suggested a merry sense of humour and an independent streak more like his grandfather Philip than his rather wimpy dad Charles.

He was the boy who told dirty jokes and drank champagne out of a prosthetic leg.

But once Meghan got her hooks into him, with her coy manipulations and addiction to California therapy culture, all the fun leaked out of him.

He just seems sad and angry now and wound up as tight as a drum.

Presumably there are moments when he relaxes but there’s little evidence of it in all the car crash TV Meghan and Oprah have persuaded him to do. On “The Me You Can’t See”, the Apple TV+ show he allegedly co-produced with Oprah, he kicks his dad again.

Prince Harry was filmed undergoing a form of therapy known as EMDR, which is designed to blunt the trauma of painful memories, as part of The Me You Can’t See docuseries.

It wasn’t enough to imply Charles was a racist. Now he claims he was an inadequate father who made him “suffer” as a child. “Just because you suffered, that doesn’t mean your kids have to suffer.’’

It’s sad to see a once courageous, capable man — the top gun who flew Apache attack helicopters in Afghanistan and was resourceful enough to come up with the idea of the Invictus Games — reduced to being the cypher of a domineering B-grade American actress.

In one scene, cameras film him undergoing a bizarre therapy session, where he shuts his eyes, crosses his arms over his chest and allows his fingers to flutter like butterflies.

Apparently this is called ‘eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing’ treatment for the anxiety attacks he claims are triggered every time he flies into the UK.

It’s like watching someone who’s been brainwashed by a cult. He’s been locked in a room, forced to read White Fragility and renounce his white supremacy. He’s bought the whole critical race theory nonsense hook line and sinker. It makes you want to stage an intervention.

Meghan was jealous that the children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have priority. Picture: Getty Images

Meghan has him convinced that his family is racist and that’s why they had to leave England urgently, because she had been driven to the edge of despair by his white supremacist relatives, not because she was desperate to get back to LA to show off her new royal status and finally score an invite to dinner with George and Amal.

Racism wasn’t Meghan’s problem in the short time she spent in the bosom of the royal family. They couldn’t have been more welcoming. Meghan’s real beef was that she wanted to be Queen Bee and there was already one Queen in the family and a future Queen in Kate. Meghan was eaten up with jealousy that Kate and William and their three adorable children should have priority over wonderful her and Harry and their baby Archie.

The green monster is obvious every time she mentions her sister-in-law, which she only does obliquely — a giant tell in itself.

“There was no guidance,” she complained to Oprah. “Unlike what you see in the movies, there’s no class on how to speak, how to cross your legs, how to be royal…

“That might exist for OTHER members of the family,” she said, drawing out the word “other”, ever so slightly. “That was not something that was offered to me.”

Oprah Winfrey was there again for the interview as Harry and Meghan complained. Picture: CBS This Morning

Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but if you know anything about mean girl culture, that was Meghan being a prize beeytch about Kate.

The fact was Meghan just couldn’t stand being second fiddle in the royal pecking order. Why should she stand at the back of the royal balcony while Kate lorded it over her up front, next to the Queen. Why should Kate’s children get better titles than Archie. Pout pout. Sulk sulk. And if she doesn’t get what she wants she’ll call them all racists on TV.

With a private staff of 15 aides to show her the royal ropes, Meghan, 39, was hardly thrown in at the deep end when she joined the monarchy.

But she had to play victim to convince Harry to leave his country, his job, all his friends and family and the only life he has ever known. She can’t just fess up and say it’s because she’s a selfish plotter who prefers the grifting life in the celebrity studded hills of Montecito.

Meghan Markle has been playing the victim in this whole saga. Picture: YouTube/Global Citizen

So Harry is stuck in LA, with nothing to do except endless hours of therapy that would make anyone miserable and then he regurgitates it all to Oprah, who sits in rapt attention as if what he has to say is profound rather than cheap schadenfreude for over-sharers.

Self-pitying psychobabble is nutty enough in an American, but what happened to the stoicism and stiff upper lip that the British do so admirably?

Once Oprah gets out her filleting knife there’s just no stopping Harry. Every innermost thought, no matter how banal or transitory, has to be shared. You can almost hear Meghan’s voice as he speaks about his miserable childhood, as if he is a ventriloquist’s dummy.

There is no concern for the pain he is inflicting on the Queen who must still be in mourning for her husband.

Now that he’s a media tart, Harry also has taken to lecturing Americans about their constitution, which has won him no friends.

Last week he decided the First Amendment right to free speech is “bonkers” and complained that it protects the media in its “feeding frenzy” over his life.

The real royal story this week was Prince William slamming the BBC over its deceitful conduct around their 1995 interview with his mother. Picture: AFP

The worst part about all of Harry’s public confessionals is that they are overshadowing the genuine bombshell that broke in Britain this week about the BBC’s complicity in Diana’s death.

Prince William summarised the impact with admirable restraint: “It is my view that the deceitful way the [1995 Panorama] interview was obtained substantially influenced what my mother said. The interview was a major contribution to making my parents’ relationship worse and has since hurt countless others.”

His mother’s sudden death when he was 12 was a tragic blow for Harry. But riding the same fickle tiger of publicity that did her in, while complaining about the invasion of his privacy, is unwise.

It’s time he went home. America won’t mind.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph