Harry’s no Hamlet, rather a Peter Pan in La-La land
He’s got the melancholy and cynical bit down pat, but when it comes down to it Harry is really just the boy who never grew up.
There has been a lot of fiction, a lot of “recollections may vary” and vague walk-backs in this season of Prince Harry Goes Rogue.
It has been a soap opera that feels as if it has been running as long as the Seinfeld and Friends television shows combined, yet instead of canned laughter there has been universal groaning as the artist also known as Henry Charles Albert David, Spike, Widow Six Seven, Harold, Darling Boy and Haz unleashes on everyone in his orbit.
Everyone but himself. Everyone, but mainly the press – in the press.
But one thing that is certain from this week (yes, it was only a week – a wet one, eh?), amid the leaked snippets from Spain, the TV appearances in Britain and the US, and ultimately in the highly anticipated release of the now half-price memoir called Spare, is that Peter Pan is real.
He lives in a sprawling mansion in the plush California central coast celebrity enclave of Montecito with organic chickens and his now free-range children.
He used to live in a tiny cottage. A cottage that was “palace adjacent” – that’s what he calls Nottingham Cottage. His former residence inside Kensington Palace. A home that was more outhouse than Apartment 1A, he reckons: “Constructed for smaller people, humans of a bygone era”.
“Frat house” is how his Wendy – Meghan Markle – allegedly saw “Nott Cott”.
“I was excited to welcome Meg to my home, but also embarrassed,” Harry writes. “Nott Cott was no palace … I watched her as she walked up the front path, through the white picket fence. To my relief she made no sign of dismay, gave no indication of disillusionment. Until she got inside.”
Inside she, who at the time had established an impressive and burgeoning lifestyle blog and tastefully curated social media account called The Tig, was confronted with the most harrowing scenes. Things most self-made, self-assured and self-respecting women in their late 30s would have retreated from – “shabby furniture” and decor that included “a Union Jack in the corner” and an “old rifle on the TV stand”.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a “brown sofa and browner bean bag chair” must be in want of a wife. Nott Cott wasn’t the fixer-upper, her 32-year-old boyfriend was.
The one enduring theme throughout Harry’s latest PR blitz culminating in this book is that he matures like a cheese. Judging from how he used to see the world, his upbringing stank more than a slab of roquefort and, in turn, it made him more dense than a block of cheddar.
The death of Princess Diana looms large in Harry’s life. How could it not?
The agony of losing a much-loved parent must be the worst pain a child can suffer.
Multiply that by the parent being the most recognisable and popular woman in the world, and the young son just two weeks shy of his 13th birthday, still scared of the dark and existing in a family where duty comes before anything – even a hug in private. Harry, as he recalls, was woken in the middle of the night to be told by his father that his mother had died. He was then left alone, no reassuring cuddle, just pleasant words and his bedroom door left ajar.
Unfastened, untethered and unsure is how you’d sum him up. The book lays out a child turned manchild crippled by a lack of love and too much privilege. Privilege he was blind to. The worst kind.
By the time Markle met “Haz” he was Prince Charming with an enduring pot habit. Who gets on the tequilas and lights up a few joints on a random Thursday night? He did after their first date.
However, it could be worse. We’ve seen more human mess come out of the royal family and Britain itself in recent times.
Harry’s shortcomings pale in comparison with his Uncle Andrew’s abhorrent behaviour, and his masculinity is not toxic like that other Andrew – TikTok star, renowned misogynist and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate.
Yet, what on earth did Markle – herself an accomplished professional with hustle and a good head on her shoulders – see in him?
Prince Harry may have been the world’s most eligible bachelor but he was not a tall drink of water. He was a sweet tea. Markle is the SCOBY that helped him evolve into his kombucha era as he becomes a healthier version of himself.
“What the f is parchment paper?” he texted her from the supermarket during their first public outing in disguises.
It was also the place where, according to the book, she was first harassed when their relationship went public. She dressed like he told her to in a cap and coat. She was forced to abandon buying turkey to escape the plague of iPhones then thrust in her face.
He arrived home to find her in a flood of tears – a common occurrence during their courtship and engagement, says Harry. He also once found her sobbing because Catherine, now Princess of Wales sent a blunt text message. Despite all that Meghan still made him lunch.
During their first camping trip to Botswana Harry recalls her opening her suitcase.
“Here it comes, I thought. The mirror, the hairdryer, the make-up kit, the fluffy duvet, the dozen pairs of shoes. I was shamefully stereotyping: American actress equals diva. To my shock, and delight, there was nothing in that suitcase but bare essentials. Shorts, ripped jeans and snacks. And a yoga mat,” Harry says before lambasting his brother William for allegedly sneering about Markle a few pages later.
Harry has the same approach to former lovers too. He admired Chelsy Davy – a Zimbabwean businesswoman – for not being enamoured with his former honorifics.
“Unlike so many people I knew, she seemed wholly unconcerned with appearances, with propriety, with royalty. Unlike so many girls I met, she wasn’t visibly fitting herself for a crown the moment she shook my hand. She seemed immune to that common affliction sometimes called throne syndrome,” Harry writes.
“I’d always wanted to know what it might be like to meet a woman and not have her eyes widen at the mention of my title but instead to widen them myself, using my mind, my heart. With Chelsy, that seemed a real possibility. Not only was she uninterested in my title, she seemed bored by it. ‘Oh, you’re a prince? Yawn’.”
He met her after completing a short cattle muster in Australia during his gap year from Eton.
A time when he was still tossing up whether he wanted to be a fondue attendant at his favourite ski lodge in Switzerland, an instructor at Klosters – “No, Darling Boy,” Charles said of the idea of him living where he holidayed every year since before he could walk – or enlist in the army.
A place where he felt the most free, the most like himself. Markle is now the “captain of my soul” but the battlegrounds of Afghanistan saved him.
When his tour was cut short due to New Idea breaking one of the most important embargoes of the modern media, he was welcomed home to a squeeze on the shoulder from his father.
Before that he didn’t know wearing a Nazi uniform, complete with Hitler-esque moustache, to a party was not only poor taste but deeply, deeply offensive. That’s despite his great-grandmother Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who was more Churchillian than Churchill, not fleeing London during the Blitz. He blames his actions on William and Catherine.
“I phoned Willy and Kate, asked them what they thought. Nazi uniform they said … They both howled,” Harry writes.
He also didn’t know using a slur to describe his friend of Pakistani heritage was racist.
He also smoked pot in quantities described as “supermarket bags” – an amount he now strongly advises against, and came close to having a blood type that was Red Bull and vodka +.
Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell – who also wrote a book about life with the royals and who Harry gives an ear clip to in his book about life with the royals – unleashed on Markle this week during various TV appearances. Burrell claimed Harry changed when Markle came on the scene.
The vitriol, the haranguing, the hand-wringing the pearl-clutching. It’s all wrong.
Thank heavens Harry met Meghan.
Their story isn’t a fairytale of a prince meeting a girl and turning her into a princess, their story thus far is about a woman who was let down not by the palace but by her paramour.
She met the late queen on less than an hour’s notice and was thrown into a world that not even the 1 per cent would understand, let alone a middle-class American who was tone-deaf to British customs, culture and comedy.
They were told to stick to the script, but it was Harry – as outlined in the book – who wanted to complain and explain. He longed to bust out of his gilded cage where pens were considered Christmas gifts – Princess Margaret once wrapped him a biro – and people such as Catherine have to conceal their “silly sides” even when off duty.
Harry needed Meghan, but Meghan needed a translator. However, although the bi-racial former actor and divorcee had a rough apprenticeship at The Firm, a question remains: why didn’t Harry help her more?
If they wanted to make it work inside the system, they could have. She was his life saver but he had already hit the eject button as she struggled to fit her life jacket. She symbolised a way out despite saying she was all in, she just needed more help navigating and translating the archaic monarchy.
Harry is no Prince Hamlet. Sure, he’s got the melancholy and cynical bit pat, but when it comes down to it – after all 407 pages with an Elizabeth II epilogue, including thankyous to dozens of “professionals, medical experts and coaches” – he’s just the boy who never grew up.
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