Prince Harry follows the path of celebrity mother Princess Diana
Will the choice of the Queen’s childhood name of Lilibet for his new daughter restore Prince Harry to royal favour? Probably not. Here is someone born into one of the richest and most prestigious families on earth, guaranteed royal rank and celebrity status from childhood. Yet he seems to have nothing but complaints about how terrible has been his lot in life.
These complaints are broadcast to the world from his new home in – where else? – California after he has been deluged with money by American corporations desperate to link their names with the Windsor brand – arguably the world’s most famous.
Part of Harry’s fame is, of course, due to the fact he is the son of Princess Diana. There are many myths about Diana but the truth is she was a rather dim member of the Spencer family who was selected — the word is used advisedly — by the Windsor bureaucracy to marry Prince Charles. This was a complete mismatch, not only because Charles was fixated on a married woman of his own age, Camilla Parker Bowles, but also because he and Diana had almost nothing in common, hardly surprising when she was only a few years out of school and he was more than a dozen years older. Both parties should have had more sense than to agree to the marriage, although a much greater responsibility lay on Charles because of his advantages in age and experience.
The honeymoon on the royal yacht proved something of a disaster and a few weeks later psychiatrists were called to Buckingham Palace to look at Diana’s anxieties. Despite the legions of servants to take care of her slightest wish, she found the Windsors largely uninteresting, obsessed as they were with the preservation of their long-held role in Britain and the world. When the marriage broke down completely, Charles returned to Camilla and Diana found various consolations. Diana seemed puzzled by Charles’s interest in Camilla who was older than herself and, at least in conventional terms, not as beautiful. In fact, Camilla looked like what she was, an attractive woman, close to Charles in age and interests.
When the gloves finally came off, each side leaked damaging material to the press, culminating in two extraordinary television interviews where both combatants put their case to the world. Much has been made of the fact Diana was provided with false information by a BBC journalist before she agreed to the interview but no one has suggested she said anything she did not mean, despite the bad behaviour of the journalist in question. The divorce settlement left Diana with $40m and probably the world’s most famous face. But the media’s obsession with her every move, which she did nothing to discourage, gave rise to a level of hysteria that could not last indefinitely. It ended on the banks of the Seine in a Mercedes driven at colossal speed by a drug-fuelled chauffeur.
All this might suggest that choosing a head of state on a hereditary basis from a particular family is a curious constitutional model, no matter how respectable Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge appear in comparison with some of the other family members. But it has always proved difficult to generate any real excitement in Australia on the issue of whether the country should be converted to a republic. This is hardly surprising, given that the monarchy does not impinge on people’s day-to-day lives in the same way as the economic and social questions that dominate the political landscape.
In addition, there remains a significant division among republican supporters between those that favour an elected head of state and those who would prefer someone appointed by the parliament. The distinction is important because an appointed person would have a relatively formal role like the present governor-general whereas an elected person is likely to want a political role that would lead to him or her becoming a rival to the prime minister. And on the subject of governors-general, at least Prince Harry has taken himself out of consideration for that post when it next becomes vacant.
Michael Sexton’s latest book is Dissenting Opinions.
