One myth Prince Harry has unfairly dogged for years
There is one myth that has long prevailed when it comes to Harry and his wife Meghan – and they’ve unfairly copped it for years.
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I think it’s fair to say that right now, we are living through some very strange royal times.
In the last week, Prince William was served a Cosmo in an edible seaweed bubble, King Charles was filmed boogying in a garden with spinning, mechanical trees and Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex has been in court fighting what is, technically, his father’s own government.
Here’s today’s unusual, unlikely royal moment. It’s time for a vigorous, full-throated defence of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex from one particularly bulls**t allegation that she has never been able to shake, one myth that has unfairly dogged for years: That she turned up in the UK with her hugs, green juices and a malevolent agenda and ensorcelled Harry away from his family.
Megxit, this theory goes, has only one set of fingerprints all over it, and they belong to someone whose big break was a gig on Deal Or No Deal.
Over the weekend this assumption got a fresh airing thanks to Paul Burrell, the former butler to Diana, Princess of Wales, who popped up on a conservative UK TV station to give his ‘insight’ into a family he has not had regular dealings with for the better part of three decades.
So, Burrell turned up on GB TV and said: “Am I the only person in the UK that is thinking, has Harry finally woken up to the truth? Has he finally seen the truth of what his wife is doing and that he’s been brainwashed and mesmerised by her beauty or something? Because we all know that, but he doesn’t seem to see it.”
That line about Harry “finally waking up to the truth” made headlines the world-over. Gasp! Might the bad dream of Megxit be about to end?
But, Burrell’s line is predicated on what would have to be the biggest lie about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex: That Harry was a happy camper who was entirely content chugging lager, shooting things and helping veterans BM (Before Meghan). Then the actress swooped in with her notions of living your truth and her trusty Nutribullet and somehow “brainwashed” Harry into walking away from his family and country.
For god’s sake. Meghan is not Charles Manson or Jim Jones or the Wicked Witch of the West Coast. She is not the Prada Pied Piper.
Do people think the Duchess has deployed some sort of Californian sexual sorcery to lure Harry away from what is right and good? That the seductive, malicious wiles of a cable dramedy actress who was sixth on the call sheet were so compelling that he was bewitched into giving up his old life?
This all just utter, sexist tosh.
Don’t take my word for it – take Harry’s.
In the last six months the world has learned more about the Duke than is wise or tasteful or something to be contemplated while eating. Harry, now a proud US resident, has clearly been infected by the local tendency to view sharing as a moral virtue and boy, has the man shared and shared some more via the couple’s Netflix docuseries and his memoir Spare.
And if there is one thing made crystal clear by his book’s signature staccato sentences it is that Harry has been an unhappy man for a very long time. Years, nay decades, before Meghan popped up in London to teach Harry about the power of downward dog and how to spell ‘unconscious bias’, the Duke clearly felt aggrieved and deeply unsatisfied with much of his life.
Take the fact that the notion of there being an heir and a spare was not just something the cruel press would chuck at Harry but was “shorthand” that was actually used by his own parents, Charles and Diana, and his grandparents, the late Queen and Prince Philip.
Aitch writes: “I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy. I was summoned to provide back-up, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow. This was all made explicitly clear to me from the start of life’s journey and regularly reinforced thereafter.”
This would be enough to have most adults lying prone on a therapist’s couch for years, let alone that Harry was also dealing with the intense psychological consequences of the loss of his mother, his complicated relationship with his brother and his belief that his father and stepmother had okayed damaging press leaks about him.
In this cocktail of hurts and grievances, there was also swirling, his arch enemy, his personal Voldemort – the tabloids.
Again, in recent months we have seen the depths of Harry’s antipathy towards parts of Fleet Street, thanks to the fact he is currently fighting more court cases against them than Prince Andrew has friends left. (Three if we are counting.)
Earlier this month in a witness statement written by the Duke, he blamed press intrusion for former girlfriend Chelsy Davy deciding to break up with him.
Add this all up – his family treating him like a walking bone marrow donor, the marauding press ruining his love life, who had had to leave the only career he ever truly loved and the fact the was feeling spurned by the Waleses who weren’t inviting him over for a kitchen supper on the reg – and you have the very picture of a man disenchanted with much of his life.
All of this, let’s just note, was very much BM.
So, when Harry and Meghan were set up on that fateful date in 2016, he wasn’t some content soul who had found deep satisfaction in opening suburban recreation centres and a life of walking, figuratively, behind his favoured older brother. The bloke that Meghan met that night was someone already disillusioned with his prescribed path.
Meghan did not bamboozle or dupe or somehow maliciously entice Harry away from Buckingham Palace and his Windsor rellies, dripping poison in his ear, the Lady Macbeth of the Yoga Mat Set.
That prevailing narrative or belief is not only deeply, deeply misogynistic but it’s just plain wrong. Just ask Harry. He’s said so himself.
You don’t have to agree with Harry’s choices to accept that he made them freely and willingly.
I wonder if the obstinate resistance from people like Burrell in terms of accepting that Meghan was not the puppet master behind Megxit lies in the fact that doing so requires us to reassess how we the public viewed and treated Harry. It’s uncomfortable to look back and see that his cheeky chappy persona was an artificial one created by a man who was lost and hurt. (And had a huge capacity for self-pity.)
It’s so much easier and less especially fraught to buy into the Meghan The Manipulator narrative and the entirely reductive idea that Harry was happy all along than to have to face the disquieting truth that Harry might have been a deeply wounded human and no one noticed.
It’s depressing to note that we are not that far off the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. It was poor Anne and her foreign ways who was blamed for Henry’s decision to chuck out the Catholic Church and embrace Protestantism; it was she who was demonised and blamed; it was Anne who was infamously called a “Naughty, goggle-eyed wh*re” and a “she-devil”.
Both Henrys, nearly five centuries apart, made adult choices about who they want to be with; both Henrys had complete agency when they made monarchy-shaking decisions; both Henrys deserve to bear the responsibility for the convulsions they unleashed.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as One myth Prince Harry has unfairly dogged for years
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