Prince Harry’s glaring Kate Middleton snub in new Netflix show

Prince Harry’s latest Netflix offering has landed but there’s an obvious omission that show’s Harry is pointedly ignoring an inconvenient truth.

COMMENT

Deja vu is an occupational hazard in this job.

Having only just recently recovered from having to watch the nearly six hours of tortured pouting and treacly iPhone photos that made up Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Sussex’s debut Netflix docuseries, the duke is back. Back on camera. Back on the streaming platform and back doing his bit to make the royal family look as fossilised and useless as possible.

On Thursday, AEDT, the duke’s Heart of Invictus documentary series dropped, five episodes charting the course to the 2022 Invictus Games in The Hague and the personal struggles and journeys of a small group of competitors. Consider yourself warned: Watching Heart will require tissues and plenty of them because it is, by turns, deeply moving, harrowing and powerful. I found myself in tears again and again, leaking like a Temu teapot.

(It is worth hitting play alone for Ukrainian volunteer medic Yuliia “Taira” Paievska. The footage she captured inside a frontline field hospital is perhaps the most powerful and haunting thing I have ever watched.)

Prince Harry is back in the Heart of Invictus Netflix documentary series. Picture: Netflix

But, we are not here to talk about these incredible humans and the determination and strength they show repeatedly but about Harry the executive producer and what seems like a very deliberate attempt at some DIY historical revisionism.

There is one thing that is nearly entirely absent, that is neatly ignored, and totally and utterly skipped over in Heart of Invictus: The fundamental part the royal family, and Harry’s membership of said family, has played in the Invictus story.

If a person were to sit down and watch Heart not knowing a jot about the Games, then you would come away from this series under the firm impression that the whole amazing kit and kaboodle was created by a man named Harry who has children and dogs.

The same Invictus origin story gets wheeled out: Harry goes to war in Afghanistan, is forced home after a second tour and then decides to do something to help veterans and returned service personnel.

At this stage in his life, he tells the camera, “all I was trying to work out and navigate was, ‘I’ve got this platform. I just had this experience. What can I do with this?’”

Heart of Invictus presents Harry as a man with kids and dogs who wanted to make a difference. Picture: Netflix

What is this “platform”? This is never gotten into. If the words “royal family” or “monarchy” were mentioned once in all of Heart then it was a ‘blink and you will miss it’ situation, given I did entirely.

When episode two opens it is with file footage of him giving a speech at the 2018 Veterans’ Mental Health Conference at King’s College London and clips of hosting the 2017 Buckingham Palace Garden Party for the Not Forgotten Association which supports service people and veterans.

Again, the ‘r’ word – royal – is totally left out of things.

“When I joined the military, mental health, mental illness, was a dirty word,” Harry says in Heart. “One of the things I’m proud of is the work [Invictus competitor] David Wiseman and I did giving talks to people inside the military.

“If there’s a stigma within the military, then there will be stigma within society. So if we want to cure the stigma within society, we have to lead the way.”

And if a person didn’t know any better, they would have to assume that it was Harry and only Harry who inside the royal family had single-handedly taken up the cause of mental health and passionately run with it.

Prince Harry in Heart of Invictus on Netflix. Picture: Netflix

Except that is not the whole truth or the full picture. Far from it.

Somehow, William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales have been entirely excised from the story of the royal family and mental health work.

One of the first organisations that the princess became patron of was children’s mental health charity Place2Be, adding the Anna Freud Centre and Maternal Mental Health Alliance later too.

It was not just Harry but his brother and sister-in-law, the three of them equally and together, who used their shared Royal Foundation to start Heads Together in 2016.

The same year, it was the three of them who posed for delightfully hammy photos wearing headbands in support of the initiative along with rolling out a video of them sitting around a picnic table in Kensington Palace’s private gardens discussing its genesis.

“It was your idea,” Harry tells Kate.

The princess in turn explains, “because it’s a common thread, mental health seemed to run between all the different areas we were working in.”

Prince William, Kate Middleton and Prince Harry launching Heads Together in 2016. Picture: Nicky J Sims/Getty Images for Royal Foundation

Heads Together launched a national video campaign featuring a series of high-profile Brits to encourage people to talk openly about depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

The success of this work was clear. In 2019, an ad voiced by the Waleses, Harry and Meghan the Duchess of Sussex promoting the Every Mind Matters website was so successful and so many people tried to access it that it crashed.

The same year, William took part in a documentary about mental health and talked about experiencing “pain like no other pain” after losing his mother Diana, Princess of Wales when he was only 15-years-old.

I could go but, you get the gist – it was not just Harry but also William and Kate working away at the mental health coalface.

And yet, all of this is missing from Heart, with the story being presented one where Harry was the sole HRH to spearhead to reframe the conversation around and to destigmatise mental health. Any part played by anyone else is overlooked and the contributions of the Waleses on this front are entirely omitted.

Prince Harry conveniently forgets his past in Heart of Invictus. Picture: Netflix

I’m not trying to take away from what Harry has achieved with Invictus – he is indisputably the driving force and beating heart of this organisation. But there is no mention of the fact that, for example, “the Royal Foundation played a key role in supporting the development of the Invictus Games” back in 2014, according to a press release from the time.

With the Invictus Games, the duke has built something incredible that has changed and is still changing an untold lives. That is more of an accomplishment than 99.9 per cent of the world can attest to and the 38-year-old former working royal deserves credit, plaudits and some sort of shiny award for doing so.

To watch Heart is to be reminded of what a powerhouse force the duke can be; of just how natural and genuine and good he is at listening to and supporting those who are struggling.

But failing to make even the most oblique reference in Heart to the part that his family has played feels petty and a bit of a transparent dodge.

To Harry’s way of telling it, how he arrived at where things are now with the Games feels a bit like staging Romeo & Juliet but only reading one half of the star crossed lovers’ lines. It’s only part of the picture.

I’m not trying to knock the duke down a peg but it does him no favours to not offer a fuller picture of how this came to be and being upfront about the fact that it was his membership of the royal family that allowed him to create this magnificent thing that is the Invictus Games.

It might not tally with his anti-Firm rhetoric these days but it was the resources, contacts and convening power of the crown that made the Games possible in the first place.

Post-Megxit, it might be an inconvenient truth but it was not just him but his brother and sister-in-law who have been fighting the good fight for years when it comes to helping the untold millions with depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses.

The duke might have a quiver chockablock with grievances against the Waleses and countless bones to pick with them but he could still have, even indirectly, paid them their dues and recognised their part and their work rather than pointedly ignoring them.

Still, watch Heart. Have a cry. Aside from the numerous scenes where we have to sit through Harry doing Zoom meetings, the rest of the series is every bit as rousing and inspirational as you might imagine. And trust me: You will need the tissues.

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’s glaring Kate Middleton snub in new Netflix show