New Harry interview highlights his bad habit of rewriting history
A new interview with Prince Harry highlights a bad habit that he is struggling to shake.
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Say what you will about Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex but the man has pretty impressive discipline.
Not long ago, no Mayfair nightclub, members club or two-bit boozer had really made it until Harry had been photographed by the paparazzi stumbling, shuffling or jostling his way out of said establishment’s doors in the wee hours looking decidedly worse for wear.
For years, Harry was to lager what Princess Anne was to a good 16-hands filly – perpetually and irrevocably drawn.
And yet, only last week, while in the Netherlands for the latest Invictus Games, his hugely successful sporting championship for wounded veterans and serving personnel, he was out on the town with the lads and, prepare yourself, drank one beer. Uno. Un. Ein.
In fact, according to the owner of O’Casey’s Irish bar where this shocking scene unfolded, he sat on one pint for three hours and turned down free tequila shots.
Then again, these days, Harry has become the poster boy for clean living having traded in his beer-swilling ways for meditation, matcha and Maya Angelou quotes.
But he still has one particularly bad habit that, if anything, has only got much worse since he and wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex defected from the royal ranks and hightailed it to the US two years ago.
He seems to be unable to resist rewriting history.
We got the latest taste of this particular peccadillo this week when he was interviewed by Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman for his podcast Masters of Scale. Harry was there in his guise as Chief Impact Officer of BetterUp, a job that makes up for in sound bites what it lacks in details.
At one point, Hoffman told listeners that when it came to “improving mental health outcomes” in the UK, “it was sometimes an uphill battle”.
Harry concurred, saying that when it comes to the United States versus Britain, “the cultural differences, they’re immense”.
“You talk about it here in California, ‘I’ll get my therapist to call your therapist.’ Whereas in the UK it’s like, ‘Therapist? What therapist? Whose therapist? I don’t have a therapist. No, I definitely don’t, I’ve never spoken to a therapist.’”
Firstly, let’s just pause here briefly and marvel at his inability to let any opportunity to put the boot into his homeland pass him by.
Having spent the last two years giving what feels like a non-stop procession of interviews, the man is media-trained to within an inch of his ubiquitous grey polo shirt. Which is to say, he could have easily answered this question without making the British sound like an entire island of emotionally constipated and psychologically repressed individuals.
However, the bigger issue here is his propensity to reframe and reshape the past.
Now sure, the British have a reputation for being highly suspicious of these things called ‘emotions’ but in 2016 when Harry and William and Kate, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge launched their mental health initiative Heads Together, the response was wall-to-wall supportive coverage in the press.
Ditto when, the same year he appeared on journalist and mental health advocate Bryony Gordon’s podcast and revealed he had come “very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions” and had sought counselling over the death of his mother Diana, Princess of Wales.
Not only his countrymen and women but the media responded with what amounted to a collective, national hug.
Of course there are differences in attitude between Montecito and Milton Keynes but as far as I’m aware, there was not a skerrick of public push back to any of Harry’s work on destigmatising mental health.
I’m not sure that overly positive and supportive reception quite squares with his characterisation. (What did Harry want the UK to do? Have the government provide free gong therapy and Tibetan meditation bowls on the NHS?)
This is far from the first time that eyebrows have shot up over Harry’s various declarations which have later been found to butt up against differing facts.
Take last year’s Oprah Winfrey outing when Harry told the TV titan, “my family literally cut me off financially”.
What a meanie! How dare Prince Charles stop forking out the approximately $5 million he had annually paid the Sussexes simply because they had entirely skipped out on the UK and had no intention of ever opening a Welsh leisure centre again!
Only problem, according to Charles’ Clarence House, that was not the case, with a spokesman last year revealing that the future king had continued to fund his son and daughter-in-law until the summer of 2020. (A spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess told the media at the time, “You are conflating two different timelines and it’s inaccurate to suggest that there’s a contradiction.”)
Or when Harry also told Oprah of their reported $120 million deal with Netflix: “During Covid, the suggestion by a friend was, ‘What about streamers?’”
He added: “We hadn’t thought about it … there were all sorts of different options.”
However, last year The Telegraph revealed that Meghan had been “in discussions” with the steaming giant in 2018 when they were still very much working members of the royal family.
It was also reported by the same outlet that the Sussexes had been in talks with the now-defunct streaming service Quibi in May 2019.
And then there are the more minor, but still curious, contradictory details.
During the Sussexes’ Oprah outing, Harry said of his toddler son and Archie: “I guess the highlight for me is sticking him on the back of a bicycle in his little baby seat and taking him on bike rides which is something I was never able to do when I was young.”
Photos of the Duke as a child riding bikes with his father and brother promptly emerged.
Or in 2017, Harry told Bryony Gordon that it had been William who had encouraged him to enter counselling … but then he told podcast host Dax Shepherd last year that it was his now-wife Meghan who had provided him with the impetus to seek help, saying, “She saw it straight away. She could tell that I was hurting.”
(To be fair, there is every chance both his brother and Meghan may have urged him to talk to a therapist.)
Look, Harry’s advocacy around mental health deserves all the gold stars and a thousand high-fives. He has shown great courage in making himself so vulnerable and talking about his own experiences and his commitment to trying to help others is irreproachable. His heart is very clearly in the right place.
But maybe the problem lies in that he has only spent about ten days in the UK out of the last 750 plus. Maybe if he went back a tad more he might remember that, sure, he has become a polarising figure in the UK, but when it comes to his mental health work, the entire country is behind him.
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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