The crucial flaw in Harry’s palace take-down

As the dust settles after the prince’s latest attack on the royal family, one significant problem with his campaign has emerged.

COMMENT

‘Why’ is a question that doesn’t get asked a lot in the confines of the royal world.

Why is there a hereditary monarchy? Why does the royal house relentlessly hew to tradition and grimly hang onto the pompous trappings of the whole endeavour?

Why does the sovereign still mark their birthday on two occasions? And why can’t anyone sort out the Prince Andrew shambles once and for all?

To that long list of existential royal questions we have another one today: Why is Prince Harry, recalcitrant member of the royal household, and perpetual thorn in the palace’s side, waging such a public battle against the family firm?

RELATED: Two words that will break Harry’s heart

Yesterday his debut TV series, The Me You Can’t See, debuted on Apple which is a co-production with Oprah Winfrey and explores mental health and emotional wellbeing.

What is making news isn’t the Syrian refugee Fawzi’s recalling his brother being killed in a playground bombing but Harry’s renewed PR offensive against the royal family accusing them of “total neglect” and of “bullying him into silence”.

The question I keep coming back to is simple: Why?

Why excoriate your family on TV? Again. Why is Harry doing all of this?

RELATED: Harry opens up about his drug use

RELATED: Oprah defends Harry and Meghan on US TV

Prince Harry in The Me You Can't See. Picture: Apple TV

And this is where we get to the question that lies at the crux of this sour, sad situation: Has he really thought this wannabe global royal re-education campaign through?

The inevitable press and social media eruptions followed this latest round of anti-palace kvetching which has seen emotions reach even more of a fever pitch in the UK and newspaper fonts sizes edge ever closer to the outright hysterical.

None of this is a surprise. Not a jot.

Because what is still as unclear today as it was in those innocent days before he and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussexes’ Oprah interview in March is what the end goal might be here?

What do they actually want - or think they can - achieve?

Is some sort of royal self-flagellation their desired aim, a suitably chastened Queen appearing on a live TV address apologising to the couple for not dolling out more hugs and being better equipped to look after their mental health?

The monarchy crumbling and the Buckingham Palace grounds transformed into London’s newest public Instagram backdrop?

Oprah Winfrey defends Prince Harry on breakfast television. Picture: CBS This Morning

Where and how will this contra-royal crusade end for both the Sussexes and the Windsors? What I’m starting to wonder is, does Harry himself even know?

The consequences of Harry’s latest round of palace opprobrium are plain to see. On the personal front, the rift between the Sussexes and his UK family will only become more entrenched and the situation more embittered while on the professional front, Harry is perilously close to exhausting the supply of public sympathy for him.

While destigmatising mental health and starting a much broader, important conversation about the issue underpin The Me You Can’t See there is a line, somewhere out there - that is, a line between baring his soul for the greater good and something that is starting to look like outright bitterness and recrimination.

While Harry’s motives in regards to this new series are powerful - that is, to advocate for those who “silently suffer” (as he said way back when the project was announced in 2019), - one thing that will be fascinating is what effect, what real world consequences its release will have.

Will it help normalise conversations about depression, anxiety, trauma and personal suffering? Or is this sort of outing, coming in the midst of a roiling culture war, verging on politicising mental health?

Harry spoke about Meghan's struggles with mental health as well as his own. Picture: Apple TV+

For Harry and Meghan there is also a risk here from a financial perspective because defining their brand of being synonymous with victimhood is a big risk in a commercial sense.

While casting themselves as being locked in a David vs Goliath battle with the palace might put them in an excellent stead branding-wise in the US right now, how long will their adoring Stateside masses be willing to eat up the narrative of them as victims? This is only a short term strategy.

Surely the key to their longer term success lies in their public identities not being twinned with that of victimhood but as go-getting leaders achieving thrilling things and energising a battered nation emerging from the pandemic.

The gamble here is that once he’s revealed every last detail of his soul and flayed himself for the cameras, what does he have left to say?

Or, more accurately, will people feel like he has anything left to say and thus tune in?

Also, what is there left for him to do short of having a prostate exam on camera that would really pique or grip public interest?

Harry has achieved the formerly impossible: We have lost the ability to be surprised about what he is willing to say about the royal family.

And with that shock value now eroded, what will an interview with Harry be ‘worth’ in future?

In fact, in less than 18 months, Harry and Meghan have also managed to make the very act of seeing a prince and his wife besieging the palace or lambasting his father just downright quotidian.

The Sussexes are denouncing the palace again? Yawn. Change the channel.

In fact, seeing Harry launch a fresh round of brickbats at his family and the Firm has just started to become a tad boring. Predictable even.

It is starting to look increasingly like the duke and duchess are not working to some detailed master plan here but acting first and pondering later.

As a royal source told Vanity Fair’s Katie Nicholl previously, “The problem is [Meghan] and Harry have a tendency to hatch big projects over dinner and expect them to be actioned within days.”

Elsewhere a palace insider told Dylan Howard and Andy Tillett for their book Royals At War that when, post wedding, Meghan went about working out what charitable work she would take on, “It was all too rushed, without proper research.”

For the Sussexes, that alleged impetuous tendency could ultimately come at a high price because a disinterested, detached public is not going to obsessively stream podcasts and TV series with gusto.

Looking back, Diana, Princess of Wales sharing her suffering resonated deeply and the same was true, initially for her son. However, Harry’s palace diatribes are just starting to become tedious.

The only certainty in this whole sorry mess: Things are going to get worse before there is any chance, as remote as it might be, of them getting better.

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