Andrew Bolt: Harry and Meghan need a lesson on real duty

Prince Philip dedicated his life to service and yet Harry and his wife whose preferred “service” involves getting fabulously rich are the ones being applauded.

Someone please shove Prince Harry onto the next plane back to London to see what real duty looks like, before his 99-year-old grandfather dies.

What a last meeting that would be – between Harry, the runaway Prince of Woke, and Prince Philip, who gave 65 years of selfless service to his adopted country as the Queen’s consort plus 13 more as a naval officer.

Philip now lies in a private London hospital, officially for “observations”, but in a condition that had his son, Prince Charles, in seeming tears after leaving his bedside on the weekend.

Let Harry now leave his $19 million Los Angeles mansion and look Philip in the face one last time.

That would be a meeting between our new Age of Seeming and the vanishing Age of Doing, with virtues seeming all but lost.

The new is Harry, along with his simpering American wife, Meghan Markle, who fled Britain less than two years after their wedding at Windsor Castle in 2018, complaining they needed privacy and hated media scrutiny.

Meghan and Prince Harry.

Yet the couple then signed a $50 million deal with Spotify that included chatting about themselves, and signed an estimated $100 million deal with Netflix. Meanwhile, they posted pictures of themselves canoodling to announce their latest pregnancy, and next month will give a heart-to-heart interview to Oprah Winfrey.

This is the couple who claim on their website to represent “Compassion in Action”, yet last week – as Philip lay in hospital — attacked his wife for removing the last of their royal patronages after waiting vainly for a year for them to return to a “life of service” to their nation.

“We can all live a life of service,” sniped the runaway royals. “Service is universal.”

Yet the service they offered Britain was an in-our-spare-moment kind that diminished the royal family and the notion of “duty”.

Worse, their preferred “service” involves getting fabulously rich for fashionable politicking, platitudinous empathising, feel-good preaching and a little race-baiting — all applauded on social media.

That’s not service but self-service.

What a contrast with Philip. Unlike Harry and Meghan, Philip never told sob-stories in the media about his hard life, never trashed the monarchy, never abandoned the Queen, never fled Britain, never signed multi-million- dollar contracts to make himself rich, never whined that the press made him look bad, and never thought to make it all about him.

Nor did Philip take himself so monstrously seriously.

Harry and Meghan last week boasted that “their work over the past year” showed their commitment to “duty and service to the UK”.

Wow, a year? In contrast, Philip left his boasting until he turned 90, and then said only this: “I reckon I’ve done my bit.”

Prince Phillip has served the monarch for many years.

Yet he soldiered on with his royal duties for six more years before retiring, and even now is patron, president or member of 780 associations. What’s more, he did all that while enduring media coverage more hostile than anything Harry and Meghan cry over.

For decades he was mocked as gaffe-prone, cranky and racist, and was even outrageously accused of murdering his daughter-in-law, Diana.

More recently he had to endure a popular mini-series, The Crown, portraying him as a philanderer and cruel father.

Meanwhile, the good he did for countless charities was largely ignored, other than his presidency of the World Wildlife Fund and his Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, inspiring children in 141 countries to service.

If Philip was as self-pitying as Harry and Meghan, he’d have had more to sob over to Oprah than either.

Just take his childhood: his family fled Greece when he was one; his mother locked up with schizophrenia; his father leaving him to grow up almost alone; a sister killed at just 26.

Philip also sacrificed far more than Harry to do his royal duty.

He’s an alpha male — one of the youngest first lieutenants in the navy in World War II, and twice decorated for heroism. Yet he had to give up his career, publicly defer to his wife and keep his mouth shut, except for inoffensive pleasantries, at 22,200 official functions.

But when his wife was crowned Queen in 1952, Philip knelt and swore to be her “liege man of life and limb”. And for 69 years he has kept his word to a Queen who calls him “my strength and stay”.

Philip helped Elizabeth to be a rock for her country. Today’s Harrys and Meghans show no sign of even understanding the service and duty that such great work demands.