Following Prince Harry’s appearances at London’s Royal Court of Justice last week, there’s a concerted effort being made by royal reporters and royalist columnists to call Harry a liar. One would think that if ANL/The Mail had a good defense against Harry and his co-plaintiffs’ lawsuit, there would be no need for Roya Nikkhah and Camilla Tominey to position themselves as nagging mothers, arguing that Harry doesn’t even know what he’s talking about, no one can take him seriously, after all, he wrote a bestselling memoir! Roya’s post-court-testimony piece was the more bizarre one, as she tries to convince her readers and herself that Harry actually *liked* being on display constantly and his girlfriends deserved to be stalked and harassed by the tabloids because of something something Harry wrote Spare!! An excerpt from Nikkhah’s piece:
On the stand, [Harry] explained that, in his former life as a working royal, he was bound by the institution’s “never complain, never explain” mantra, forced like the rest of his family to put up and shut up. But some recollections may vary. The King and the Prince and Princess of Wales have fought and won legal battles for invasions of privacy — Charles over the Mail on Sunday’s publication of extracts of his private diaries in 2005, William and Kate over photographs of the couple holidaying in France published in the French magazine, Closer, in 2012 and, last year, for photos published in Paris Match of their family skiing holiday in Courchevel, France.
As for Harry’s claim that he was “not allowed to complain” inside the institution, the history books again tell a different story. Harry’s grievances were given plenty of airtime by courtiers, memorably in November 2016 when he directed his communications secretary to issue a highly charged statement about the treatment of his new girlfriend, Meghan Markle, attacking a “wave of abuse and harassment” by the media. Issued while Charles was on an official visit to Bahrain and blowing his father’s coverage out of the water, it was hardly the action of a prince shackled by royal protocol.
Here is a central mission of Harry’s media crusade. Terse and tearful under cross-examination on Wednesday, he painted a picture of the most reluctant royal. Before he left these shores with Meghan for California in 2020, he said his years in the royal fold were marred by the pretence of being “forced to perform” for the press at events, despite his “uneasy” relationship with them. “There was no alternative,” he said. “I was conditioned to accept it.”
Much of being a member of the royal family is a performance — on palace balconies, on overseas tours, while hosting controversial heads of state with a game face on. Of all the royals I’ve watched over the years, Harry was best at winning performances and media stunts, ensuring maximum coverage for the family business and his own causes.
For the most part, he looked like he enjoyed it. If high jinks in Jamaica sprinting with Usain Bolt on a tour honouring Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee in 2012 were performed under duress for the media, then we were all fooled. If the “mic drop” video with granny and the Obamas, which marked Harry’s 2016 Invictus Games in Orlando, Florida, was performed for the press against his will, then he’s a much better actor than I thought.
“Hindsight is a beautiful thing, Mr White,” Harry told Anthony White KC, who was defending ANL in court. There is hindsight, and then there is revisionist theory. Come on, Harry, admit it — you were very good as a professional prince, and you didn’t hate every single second of it.
As for the duke’s witness statement that his treatment by the media “feels like every aspect of your life behind closed doors is being displayed to the world for amusement, entertainment and money”, and his witness-box broadside that “I’ve never believed my life is open season to be commercialised by these people [the media]”, imagine how those declarations landed with the rest of his family.
After penning a bestselling memoir that revealed many of his family’s most private moments, a back catalogue of splashy interviews with Oprah Winfrey, and a tell-all Netflix documentary, Harry has commercialised much of his private life and — without their permission — his family’s.
It’s breathtaking to watch these people twist themselves in knots to justify their own industry’s appalling breaches of privacy and decency. Beyond Harry and his lawsuits, people have sued these same tabloids for publishing private letters, for hacking into their phones, for accessing medical records, for literally breaking into homes. And yet, magically, the argument is that Harry actually deserved to be treated that way because A) he was born into this toxic system and B) when he eventually escaped the toxic institution, he told his story in his own voice. THAT is what is unforgivable to people like Roya Nikkhah, that Harry refused to let his abusers tell his story. As for her other argument, that Harry sometimes enjoyed being a prince – it’s far more likely that Harry learned that his position afforded him a wonderful platform, and for a time, that trade-off was somewhat acceptable to him. Then he met Meghan, and the same system which abused him turned their attention on the woman he loved. Of course that made him rethink the lifetime of tradeoffs.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.
