Andrew Bolt: Royal crisis shaking the monarchy all about jealousy

Enough of the old, sexist game of blame-the-witch, Prince Harry, not Meghan Markle, is doing the real damage to the royal family.

It’s too easy to blame Meghan Markle more than Prince Harry. She’s the social climber who tells the most outrageous lies.

Did she tell you the one about her son having to be plucked from a burning bedroom? About the Archbishop of Canterbury marrying her twice to Harry?

Prince Harry, in contrast, tends to be the one we excuse.

He’s just weak, we say. He’s dim and damaged from losing his mother so young, and now the poor dope is the victim of a Lady Macbeth who’s magicked him with her sex and cunning.

But enough of this old, sexist game of blame-the-witch. No more excuses for Harry. With his new memoir, Spare, and the two interviews he’s given to promote it, he stands revealed as the chief villain in this disgusting farce.

Nothing can excuse what this mewling, vain, self-centred, poor-me hypocrite is doing to his father, his brother and his country.

He’s full of the vicious resentments and jealousies that explain why many kings in more savage times – from the Ottoman’s Sultan Mehmed III to Britain’s Richard III – thought it safer to kill every relative who might eye off their throne.

Nothing can excuse what Prince Harry is doing to his father, his brother and his country. Picture: Netflix

For a start, Harry is not some lost boy, for heaven’s sake. He’s 38, when men are meant to be men.

What’s more, it’s Harry, not Markle, doing the real damage. Markle may be the bigger schemer but this grifter couldn’t hurt the royal family without Harry to let her inside and then licence or endorse her every lie and betrayal.

“What Meghan wants, Meghan gets,” Harry ordered his palace courtiers, but now it’s clear that Harry also wants plenty, too, and won’t take no.

In one of two TV interviews to be screened ahead of next week’s launch of Spare, Harry demands his father and brother “reconcile” with him, piously bleating: “I would like to get my father back. I would like to have my brother back.”

What a lie. Even Harry cannot be so brain dead as to believe the best way to get back his father and brother is to tell the world – in books, TV specials and interviews – they’re cold, back-stabbing liars.

What he wants is not reconciliation, but some unimaginable kind of total surrender.

That’s why he refuses to admit to a single error of his own that’s caused this rift. That’s why he can shamelessly attack his father and brother for allegedly doing what Harry in that very moment is doing himself.

The Palace “betrayed” him and his wife, this Judas, complains in his interview to be screened on CNN.

It is impossible to believe that even Harry, with his reputation for dim-wittedness, is too dim to see his hypocrisy.

He’d tried to tried reconcile “privately” with King Charles and Prince William, adds this foghorn who’s publicly attacked them for two years, since the infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey, while his father and brother stayed silent.

But “every single time I’ve tried to do it privately, there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife,” says this fraud now earning tens of millions of dollars by briefing and planting stories against his family, and leaking private conversations.

Again, it is impossible to believe that even Harry, with his reputation for dim-wittedness, is too dim to see his hypocrisy.

But hypocrisy would matter to him only if he really did want peace with his father and brother – something that takes generosity and a willingness to judge yourself as much as you judge others.

So what does Harry actually want, apart from – obviously – the millions he’s getting from Netflix and Penguin Random House for being such a bastard to his family?

I’d say it’s something he can’t have, and it’s killing him.

The whining title of his memoir, Spare, says it all. He was always the spare, and not the heir. Not the man who’d be king. Not his brother.

The jealousy is so obvious, so rank, that it inspires the word Harry uses to sum up his life. Jealousy – that’s all that this royal crisis shaking the monarchy is really about.

No wonder that nothing Charles or William do will satisfy Harry. They could say sorry, but he still wouldn’t be king. They could dress Meghan in ermine trimmed with the curls of Kate but she and Harry would still be second.

Second. To two such monstrous egos, this cannot stand, and both now lash out at this unjust ordering of the world.

In Markle’s case, it’s laughable.
But from Harry it’s worse, because the family and traditions he’s destroying in his green-eyed rage are his own.