It cannot be underestimated: Prince Harry’s interview in Tabloids on Trial landed like another bomb in both Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace. First off, the tabloids in question barely covered Harry’s interview when it came out last week. They waited to see what way the wind was blowing at both palaces, and over the weekend, King Charles began pushing back on Harry’s statements about security. That’s been the main topic of conversation in royal news this week, the security fight between Charles and Harry, with Harry making sure to get his side out there. But during the ToT documentary, Harry also spoke about his grandmother, telling ITV that QEII supported his lawsuits against the tabloids and “we had many conversations before she passed, and this is very much something that she supported. She knew how much this meant to me and… she’s very much out there, going to see this through to the end, without question.”
I wondered if any of the tabloids in question would get around to throwing a tantrum about Harry speaking about his grandmother supporting his endeavors to bring the British media to account. Well, the Mail’s Richard Eden got a call. Some highlights from Eden’s latest column:
Harry’s “ownership” of Diana & now QEII: One of the most unedifying aspects of Prince Harry’s feud with his brother has been his apparent desire to claim ownership of his mother’s legacy. Scarcely a speech or interview can pass without a reference to the late Princess Diana and his claims about her wishes. Harry’s latest television interview suggests that he is now trying to invoke the memory of his late grandmother, too. Courtiers I’ve spoken to in the last few days are distinctly unimpressed.
Whether QEII really supported Harry: Sadly, the Queen is no longer available to support Harry’s claim or deny it. So, perhaps it would be instructive to look at her actions. It is a tribute to the late Queen’s warm relationships with her grandchildren that all eight felt deeply loved. Harry, though, was convinced that he was in some way unique. For example, in an interview with an American journalist five months before her death, he claimed that he enjoyed a ‘special relationship’ with the monarch. Preposterously, he declared he was ‘protecting’ Queen Elizabeth from the people around her, even though he had been living in North America for more than two years.
QEII didn’t support the half-in plan, so how would she support their lawsuits? For example, instead of backing their plans for a ‘half-in, half-out’ role with the Royal Family, she made it clear that Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, would not be allowed to combine a life of public duty with money-grubbing in Hollywood. What, then, do we make of Harry’s bold new claim that the late Queen had supported his controversial legal campaign against the Press? Did she really take such a gung-ho view of these things?
Charles’s courtiers are mad: One courtier I spoke to this week was far from happy with Harry’s ‘tasteless’ attempt to claim his grandmother’s support in his continuing ‘crusade’. As he told me: ‘There is something distinctly ‘off’ about it. We’ll never know what was said between grandson and grandmother. What we do know is that we will only ever know one side of the story.’
Distasteful Harry: Harry’s attempts to use the memory of the late Queen for his own ends is likely to be viewed by many as distasteful – particularly given his disruptive behaviour in her final years. The facts speak for themselves: Meghan and Harry conducted an explosive interview with America’s chat-show queen, Oprah Winfrey, even though the Duke of Edinburgh was aged 99 and his health was deteriorating…Just two months before our beloved monarch died at Balmoral aged 96, her ‘special’ grandson announced the forthcoming publication of his ‘intimate’ memoir, Spare. Shame on Harry for now trying to use the memory of a grandmother he did so much to hurt in her final years.
Eden asks his readers to allow QEII’s words and actions guide our view of whether she supported Harry. Well, she made sure that he had security for all of his visits (even sending some of her personal security guys to look after the Sussexes). She drove herself over to Frogmore Cottage as soon as Harry arrived in the UK in 2021. She made a point of inviting the Sussexes to her Jubbly. She and Harry spoke on the phone just days before her passing. It sounds entirely plausible to me that QEII was enormously fond of Harry and that she did everything she could to support him, despite being in poor health and cognitive decline. She also seemed very concerned about what Charles and William would do to Harry once she was gone. That’s the real story.
As for Harry trying to “claim” QEII as he “claims” Diana… I don’t even think Harry is doing it consciously most of the time, he just thinks about QEII and Diana so much and he feels he’s being guided by them. Harry references Diana and QEII because he feels like he’s acting to protect their memories and protect who they were to him. I also think the “Harry thinks he owns Diana” complaint is mostly from William, who desperately wants to claim his mother’s legacy and he’s mad that Harry is the one who is the most like Diana.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid and Cover Images.