Prince Harry and Queen Camilla’s extraordinary reversal of fortunes revealed

The Queen and the Duke of Sussex have just gone through a truly extraordinary switcheroo.

Back in the day – you know, back when housing was affordable and avocados were not generationally loaded – swapping lives, bodies and eras was a film staple.

Think The Parent Trap. Big. Freaky Friday. Face/Off. Trading Places.

Now, Crown Inc has been busy doing some life-imitating-art.

Queen Camilla and Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex have, without anyone quite realising, pulled off a historic switcheroo.

Let’s start with Her Majesty the Queen: Behind Closed Doors, a doco following Camilla’s domestic violence campaigning over the course of a year, having just screened in the UK to glowing reviews.

19 years after wedding her jug-eared inamorata, Her Majesty is now being deservedly praised for her dogged hard work on the issue, recognition long overdue in a certain royal writer’s books. (She started back in 2005.)

So, we have a woman who left school at 16 and was once the most hated person in Britain having made herself into a brilliantly feminist, activist Queen who is finally getting the appreciation and plaudits long denied her.

Prince Harry was once a royal golden boy … Picture: Ethan Cairns/Getty

Nowadays, Camilla sits high above him on royal popularity polls. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty

And Harry? The man who for years on end topped the polling every quarter as the royal family’s most popular member is now at risk of having a Greggs sausage roll chucked at his head should he ever linger too long at Heathrow.

Never has it been more obvious than now the extraordinary degree to which the duke and his stepmother’s roles have been flipped.

Don’t just take my word for it – Camilla, as of October, was sitting 47 points ahead of the failed podcaster in the most recent UK YouGov data. (The Queen came in at net +11 points and the Duke of Sussex on net -37 points.)

There is another doco about the 76-year-old set to hit screens soon called Queen Camilla: The Wicked Stepmother? In it, writer and Petronella Wyatt says, per the Sun, that “Harry and Camilla’s positions within the Royal Family have virtually reversed. Camilla used to be the hated outcast, now it’s Harry and Camilla’s seen with affection.”

The Camilla and Harry story has all the makings of Trading Places with none of the laughs.

Just stop and think about how far we have come in only a matter of years.

It’s an apocryphal story that Camilla, back in the 90s in the wake of Diana, Princess of Wales’ “three of us in the marriage” scorcher, was so despised that she had a bread roll thrown at her head in a supermarket.

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Once the reviled “other woman,” Camilla has settled into her new role as Queen Consort. Picture: NewsWire / POOL / David Gray

But that the story is believable really tells you something about how reviled she was, the smoking, drinking, hunting frump who had (the argument went) broken up the fairytale union of a devoted Jungian and a teenager who knew little beyond the first names of the members of Wham.

Yet today, we have gone from bread-roll-chucking folklore to a Queen who has somehow built up, if not widespread adoration, at least a very solid degree of approval and respect for her work. At a time when her cronies were really getting into grandchildren and gardenias, Camilla has been being plonked on the world stage and told to get on with it and to prove her worth to a nation.

And she’s done just that with a degree of commitment and urgency that few could have predicted.

That’s the rousing part of the story … and here comes the downer.

You don’t have to go that far back to find the day when Harry was one of the, if not the, biggest calling cards of the monarchy.

Somehow though, in less than five years, he has lost his relationship with his father, with his brother and sister-in-law Prince William and Kate the Prince and Princess of Wales, his job, his HRH, his military titles, his right to wear military uniform, his security, his British home, his allowance from the Bank of Dad, his purpose, his identity, childhood friends (reportedly), and the support of an entire country who now only just ranks him above his uncle who was great chums with a pedophile.

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Harry publicly blew up his life in recent years, setting up in America with wife Meghan.

There are downfalls and then there are downfalls.

Harry has managed to squander and waste nearly every ounce of goodwill and support he had built up through his years of military service, his work on destigmatising mental health issues and the launch of his Invictus Games. He has made himself into a byword for betrayal, having thoroughly ridden roughshod over his family’s privacy in his self-centred quest to prove himself a victim of a monarchy and a system that, yes, is patently unfair.

Does the occasional cheque from Netflix really make up for any of this?

This massive reversal in Harry’s standing is not just about the Sussexes’ decision to wholly and forevermore jump ship from HMS Crown, but what they did next. If in February 2020 they had announced that they planned on moving to a particularly dull bit of Shropshire to look after their mental health and to train polo ponies (him) and to train their credit card on Net-A-Porter (her), then I reckon the UK would have had very few issues. “Off you tootle then you two,” would have been the attitude, a tide of sympathy and best wishes following in the wake of the little boy who walked behind his mother’s coffin.

But obviously not. Harry and Meghan got to the US and, faced with having to pay their own security bills, did not consider that UK taxpayers would not merrily continue to foot the tab for their bodyguards, and proceeded to sell off their most valuable asset – the royal family’s inner secrets.

The problem is not that the Sussexes blew the whistle on an institution that they claimed was unconsciously biased, cruel, willing to ‘get into bed with the devil’ (aka the press) and nowhere near appreciative enough of hugely popular second sons but that they then got way too personal.

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A revealing memoir and a number of tell-all interviews gave the public Harry and Meghan fatigue. Picture: CBS Sunday Morning

Harry and Meghan claimed that Kate was a cold fish who didn’t like hugs, William attacked his brother, Camilla was willing to ‘leave bodies in the street’ in her quest for public approval, the late Queen sat by and watched while William raged at Harry, and Charles was a no hoper of a father (to name but some revelations).

Making the blowback worse for the Sussexes: This truth-telling push started while Prince Philip was dying, and then continued while the late Queen was suffering from a rare form of bone marrow cancer too. Forcing your grandmother to spend the final months of her life contending with the release of an imminent tell-all book and tell-some-more TV series is hardly the way to win over hearts and minds now, is it?

As Wyatt told the new Queen Camilla documentary: “I don’t think Harry thinks things through. I think it’s his nature just to press the nuclear button.”

Meanwhile, the Queen has been working. Example: One former CEO of a Rape Crisis centre in south London wrote to 100 celebrities for support, according to the Telegraph, but failed to receive a single response. However, when the CEO then contacted Camilla, she immediately offered her support.

Of the Queen’s campaign to stop the scourge of “heinous” domestic violence, she has promised, “I shall keep on trying till I’m able to no more.”

Whoever thought the woman dubbed “the rottweiler” by Diana would one day have earned a nation’s support and a hugely popular prince would have burned through the public’s admiration and esteem so fast it’s head spinning? And how long until Hollywood gets a hold of this story?

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.

Originally published as Prince Harry and Queen Camilla’s extraordinary reversal of fortunes revealed