Harry’s version of The Crown, now starring the real Queen
Nobody imagined the half-in, half-out royals Harry and Meghan would go quietly. Few could have predicted quite how noisy it would be.
Picture the scene. The Netflix documentary about Harry and Meghan opens with the couple walking into Windsor Castle last week. Bathed in spring sunshine, hands clasped, they’re reminiscing about their wedding day, almost exactly four years before. “The duke and duchess are back in England together for the first time in two years,” the voiceover might say, “and they’ve been invited to tea with the Queen.”
Netflix is said to have paid $US100 million to make programs with Harry and Meghan, including a documentary about their lives. Netflix’s executives haven’t paid so much because they’re interested in the speech the couple gave last year in Central Park, or even the Invictus Games, which anyone can see on TV. What they’ve paid for is a real-life version of The Crown.
The streamer needs the Sussexes on the palace balcony in June, not off in California feeding the chickens with Archie. Which brings us to the latest Sussex truth bomb to detonate at the heart of the royal family: Harry’s star turn yesterday (Wednesday) on American breakfast TV, billed as “Prince Harry: one-on-one”. In it he boasted that he had a “very special” relationship with the Queen, who he said can talk to him about things that she can’t talk to anyone else about.
“Being with her, it was great,” he told NBC. “It was just so nice to see her, she’s on great form. She has always got a great sense of humour with me and I’m just making sure that she’s protected and got the right people around her.”
Cue jaws dropping. As Roya Nikkhah, The Sunday Times’ royal editor, told BBC Radio 4’s Today program yesterday (Wednesday), Harry knows that whatever he says will be pored over. The “making sure she’s protected” comment about his grandmother wasn’t even the answer to any question: it was a preprepared line that he shoehorned in. But why?
The comment could have been a dig at Prince Charles and Prince William - Harry sidestepped a question about whether he missed either his brother or his father. Another possibility is Angela Kelly, the Queen’s dresser, personal adviser and one of her closest aides. The daughter of a Liverpool dockworker, Kelly wrote a book, The Other Side of the Coin: The Queen, the Dresser and the Wardrobe, an updated edition of which will be published next month, revealing that she helped to remove the Queen’s coat after the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh, and watched as she went into her private sitting room to mourn alone. It was widely rumoured that in 2018, in the run-up to the Sussexes’ wedding, tiaragate centred on a conversation between Kelly and Harry. Harry allegedly lost his temper with her and shouted: “What Meghan wants, Meghan gets.” In response the Queen summoned him for a dressing-down.
With the Queen turning 96 today (Thursday), Harry told NBC that “at some point people get bored of birthdays. She’s had a few Jubilees now. I’m sure she’s looking forward to it.” Asked if he would be at the celebrations in June, he was vague, referencing the “security issues” that have led to him suing the Home Office over the level of protection that might be offered to him in the UK.
Ahead of The Queen’s 96th Birthday tomorrow, @windsorhorse have released a new photograph of Her Majesty.
— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) April 20, 2022
Taken last month in the grounds of Windsor Castle, The Queen is pictured with two of her fell ponies, Bybeck Katie and Bybeck Nightingale.
Happy Birthday Your Majesty! pic.twitter.com/8m46e3SvpX
He went on to complain about the difficulties of working from home with two small children and when asked - somewhat nauseatingly - if he felt “peaceful”, he replied: “I don’t know how many people feel truly peaceful.” Today he finds healing, he added, in helping others.
“My mantra every day, and it’s a dangerous one because I have to make sure I don’t have burnout, is to try to make the world a better place for my kids.”
He feels his mother’s presence in everything he does, he said, especially since Megxit ("over the last two years even more than before"), and is sure that Diana is watching over him and his family. He effectively claimed his mother’s ghost for himself.
“It’s almost as if she’s done her bit with my brother, got him set up and now she’s helping me,” he said. “That’s what it feels like.”
Today, with the Sussex PR offensive in full swing in the lead-up to the Jubilee, the next scheduled brickbat will be Harry’s autobiography. Conveniently that won’t be published until the autumn, long after Netflix has got its money shot (or not). It’s rumoured that the person who feels the full force of Harry’s displeasure in the memoir is Camilla. According to Tina Brown - whose new book, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, is published later this month - while William has made his peace with his father’s relationship with Camilla, and her future role as queen, Harry makes no secret of the fact that he can’t stand her. When the Queen released a statement in February saying that it was her “sincere wish” that Camilla would become queen consort when Charles is crowned, the Cambridges “liked” the post on Instagram. There was deafening silence from California.
“He doesn’t want Camilla to be queen, he’s very angry that it’s happening. He has not made his peace with it and he probably never will,” Brown said recently. Relationships between the two brothers are terrible, Brown continued, and there is “absolutely nothing going on between them”. The situation is all the sadder, she writes, because of the “tight fraternal alliance” they once enjoyed “in the stifling royal bubble”. Received wisdom was that William needed Harry just as much as Harry needed William, because Harry was the one person William could be absolutely sure didn’t hang out with him because one day he would be king.
The strategy now being pursued from California appears to be for the Sussexes to get exactly the sort of hybrid half-in, half-out relationship with the royals that the Palace thought had been ruled out. It was in January 2020 when the Sussexes announced that they were going to step back from their roles as “senior” members of the royal family, but also that they would “carve out a progressive new role within this institution”. They would, they said, “work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty the Queen”.
Tina Brown quotes a Palace source from the time saying that the family was supportive of Megxit if the couple were so unhappy, “but they wanted it done in an orderly way and they also wanted it done in a way that set the right precedent. William has three kids. The precedent they set for this generation would affect his children. He’s very mindful of that. So they wanted it done properly.”
In the end the Sussexes flounced off first to Canada and then California, and the royal family have been left ever since wondering where the next blow might fall. The Sussex business model relies on the royals, and the royal family’s business model increasingly relies on not becoming collateral damage.
His NBC interview ended with what could be seen as yet another warning shot across the bows of the Palace.
“This was a life that she signed up for,” he said about Meghan, waving his arm to reference the Invictus Games, “and we’re doing it as a couple for ever. Because of the circumstances we’ve now moved that life of service to the States and will continue to do all we did before. Nothing has changed for us. It’s just a little bit more complicated.”
Harry was always acutely aware that he was the spare to the heir, that William and Kate would always be front row, with him and Meghan at the back. He used to get the Sunday-night blues, he said in his interview: not any more. Now the Sussexes are the stars of their own show. Nobody imagined they would go quietly. Few could have predicted quite how noisy it would be.
The Times
