One of the royal summer storylines is “Prince Harry is copying his brother” and/or “Prince Harry is trying to rebrand himself as a normal, beer-drinking bloke!” I’ve already seen one story where Prince William is reportedly miffed about Harry’s appearance on Joe Marler’s podcast, because William already did a sports podcast a week earlier, with the Kelce brothers! And then Harry appeared on FIFA After Hours with James Corden on Sunday night. Now Tom Sykes is big mad because… William is patron of the Football Association! Why is Harry rebranding to be more like William! Why is Harry so charming and cheeky, he promised!! FOOTBALL IS MINE, HAROLD!! Nevermind that William was too lazy to show up to support England in any way during the World Cup. From The Royalist Substack:
It’s a new week, and it’s a new Prince Harry. The latest exhausting polish on the rebrand rolled off the production line last night on Fox’s World Cup after-show, and this season’s model is: Cheeky Chappie Harry. Beers on the table. Banter with James Corden. Swearing on American television. A right laugh!
If memory serves — and I have the memoir, the Netflix series, the Oprah sit-down and roughly nine hours of promotional interviews to consult — the cheeky chappie was the one thing Harry told us he never was. That was the Palace’s invention, remember? Spare is, at its core, 400 pages of a man complaining that the institution cast him as the thick one, the naughty one, the party prince, the lovable ginger idiot — a role assigned to him so William could be the serious one.
He was misrepresented, and, actually, he kept insisting, he was a thinker. A sensitive soul. A seeker. A man of depth and wounds.
Six years of that, and now here he is on Fox, doing the cartoon stuff again, voluntarily, one assumes, with an unconvincing look and an even more unconvincing glass of lager! Being packaged as a cheeky chappie was an unforgivable institutional cruelty when the Palace did it, now it seems to be a savvy relaunch strategy. Glad we’ve cleared that up!
It’s the same playbook we saw on the sad and embarrassing Joe Marler show last week, of course.
Trouble is, there is already a senior royal doing soccer/football, and it’s William. He is literally the President of the FA. The World Cup is his patch and he is pretty good at it. I mean, he has a headstart, living in a country where it is the national sport, and all. Is Harry even a fan of a local team?
Harry planting himself on a soccer broadcast to hold forth on England’s “mindset” is just an embarrassing attempt to stand on his brother’s toes, frankly.
We’ve had Royal Harry, Army Harry, Vegas Harry, Wounded Harry, Wellness Harry, Netflix Harry — and now, in the most brazen pivot yet, Cheeky Chappie Harry, a lovingly restored replica of the exact persona he spent a decade and a bestselling memoir telling us was a defamatory fiction!
I read Spare, I watched the Netflix docuseries, I’ve covered Harry for many years. He’s never tried to convince people that he’s not charming or silly or cheeky or funny or charismatic. He’s tried to show that his life has always been much more complicated than the palace-driven PR about himself and William. In fact, he’s often emphasized that he shares his mother’s silly, cheeky, temperamental side (and it’s true, he absolutely does). That is what upsets these people, that Harry has always been his mother’s true heir, in charm and personality. Plus, William and his supporters are constantly incandescent with rage whenever Harry encroaches on what they see as “William’s turf.” This is what William considers to be “his” turf: football, podcasts, environmentalism, charity work, Africa, fatherhood, the school run, and the UK entirely. William freaks out completely if Harry comes close to any of those subjects, countries or continents.
Prince Harry Duke of Sussex has some ideas on what England football needs to do to get to a FIFA World Cup Final
pic.twitter.com/IoOzCr97rh
— FOX Sports (@FOXSports) July 20, 2026
We finally get the definitive British Harrys ranking, straight from Prince Harry Duke of Sussex. pic.twitter.com/iXpFkbbW5a
— FOX Sports (@FOXSports) July 20, 2026
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.
