Tragedy behind smiling photo of Prince Harry
The Duke of Sussex has never looked happier than an at the Invictus Games – but behind the smiles lies a sad truth.
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Oh Harry, you stupid, infuriating, self-defeating, plonker of a caring, heartfelt so-and-so.
For much of this week I’ve been in Invictus Games mode, knee-deep in the never-ending tide of photos, videos and social media posts streaming out of Dusseldörf as this year’s sporting event plays out to full stadiums and roaring crowds.
I have no idea how to say “huge bloody success” in German, but let’s imagine I do.
The problem with wading through the, I conservatively estimate, 899 new photos of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, positively glowing in the German sunshine, with wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex in tow, is that it is a melancholy and slightly depressing task.
On one hand, here we have a bloke who is to charity what Stradivarius was to a violin or Marie Curie to a beaker set; a man who has created something unquestionably great, an event that has changed, and will continue to change, an untold number of lives.
Here is the duke, plum in his element!
There are many criticisms that can be lobbed at our émigré duke. But make no bones about it, at moments like this, he truly shines, nearly quite literally.
And yet Harry is also the same man who has managed to muck up his life such that he can now only afford to devote a segment of it to the very thing he is so good at and which seems to make him giddily happy.
The tragedy that lies beneath the deluge of shots of Harry looking like someone who has simultaneously won Lotto, Powerball and the meat raffle is that this week is only a temporary reprieve from his California life.
The Sussexes, in not only quitting life as official representatives of the crown but also flouncing out of the UK to make their home conveniently close to a Nobu, also managed to shoot themselves in the foot to the tune of millions of dollars. They got the brave, bold life of living their truths and making their own coconut yoghurt but they also had to pay for it.
Enter Netflix, Spotify, BetterUp and Penguin Random House. In 2020, as the world faced the rude shock of loo paper shortages, lockdowns and the scourge of elasticised pants, the Duke had to come to grips with something he had never had before – a job.
Harry joined you and I and a good five billion other people around the world who get up everyday and do jobs so that they can pay their mortgages and Dan Murphy’s bills.
In the last two years, Harry has worked with ghostwriter JR Moehringer to produce Spare, the 400-page bestseller, a process that Moehringer described in TheNew Yorker,saying, “When we weren’t Zooming or phoning, we were texting around the clock”. The Duke has shot or been a part of three documentaries totalling more than 11 hours in length – and along the way he has even suggested he might want to interview Vladimir Putin about his childhood emotional boo-boos.
Factor in here how many planning meetings, catch-ups, WIPs and ideation sessions all of this would have required.
My point is, the bloke has more on his plate than someone at a discount Las Vegas buffet.
No matter that Harry is the Mozart of charity – unnaturally skilled and innately adept at it – his life is such that I’m guessing he can no longer wake up, execute a sun salutation and then spend eight solid hours working out how to make the world a better place.
The Harry we are seeing at Invictus is a man who can only escape the grind of work and keeping his various commercial paymasters for part of his life.
Take a step back even further, doing a bit of squinting, the sad fact is, Invictus is Harry’s only real ace up his sleeve. Invictus: it is an achievement he is unlikely to ever surpass (or even replicate) again.
Meanwhile, back in London, William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales are only growing their operation, now with 60 staff and currently hiring a CEO (an unprecedented position in any royal household). In days, the Prince will be in New York as he continues his global soft power push, meeting with the UN Secretary General and overseeing the Earthshot Innovation Summit alongside Bill Gates and former Kiwi PM Jacinda Ardern.
Kate has been no slouch in the ambition stakes, scaling up her Early Years work to include a Business Taskforce for Early Childhood involving a slew of billion-dollar corporate giants.
Wherever the Waleses’ initiatives will be five or 10 years from now, they will be unquestionably bigger, bolder and even more enterprising and grand in scope. They will continue to outdo themselves, like setting new philanthropic PRs again and again. Someone ready a whole stack of laudatory press releases.
That’s a future that Harry, right now, would seem to have denied himself.
Without the big fat Royal Foundation bank accounts, without the convening power of an HRH and without oodles of time to spend focused solely on cause-driven work, what are the chances that Harry might come up with a second achievement of the calibre of Invictus?
There is also the question of happiness to consider. Harry in Germany is in fine fettle and is clearly in his element, looking more carefree and gleeful than he has in yonks.
Being submerged in a Twitter slash X feed of non-stop joyous Harry photos this week is a reminder that a life entirely devoted to charity, something he clearly excels at, would seem to be off the table.
Will or can the Duke of Sussex find the same delight in, say, turning out pulpy rom-coms for Netflix? Having to sit through meetings with executives named Brad or Thad, where they enthuse about audience synergy and cross promotion? Taking his turn to change the bottles at the water cooler when he turns up to his job as Chief Impact Officer at BetterUp?
It’s not only that I wonder how happy these various paying gigs might make Harry, really and truly deep down, but that he is not particularly good at them. Sure, Spare sold like the clappers, leaving him as the only member of the royal family who has a Guinness World Record to his name aside from Princess Anne’s for most ponies petted in one day.
But aside from Aitch’s big book of sad feelings and staccato sentences, the misses outweigh the hits when it comes to his US career. His and Meghan’s Live to Lead sank without a trace while his recent five-parter, Heart of Invictus, failed to make any sort of impression, not making the top 10 in either the US or the UK.
And Spotify? Should I quote the streamer Bill Simmons’ line calling the couple “f**king grifters” or will you? In two-and-a-half years the couple managed to only get one series (Meghan’s painful Archetypes) off of the ground, which was not renewed.
Even the successes that the Sussexes have scored, Spare and Harry & Meghan, are not wins that can be replicated or repeated.
There can be no question that this week’s Invictus Games are a whopping success and that Harry seems to be revelling in this brief return to what looks like his former life. But next week? The week after?
Thad called and he wants to talk about audience numbers.
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 Tragedy behind smiling photo of Prince Harry
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