As we discussed on Friday, Prince Harry’s Good Morning America interview was just the right amount of royal gossip and Sussex gossip. Harry never spills his guts in his Invictus interviews and he always chooses his words carefully. We heard some generalities about how injuries and infirmities can have a reunifying effect in families, and that Harry hopes to see more of his father in the coming months. The reaction from the Windsors was immediate, with royal sources crying to Tom Sykes at the Daily Beast, shrieking about how Harry needs to “pipe down” and that it was “sickening” to hear Harry speak vaguely about how he immediately traveled to London to see his dad. Keep in mind, those same sources were probably barfing with rage that Harry did NOT mention his father at the NFL Honors, but I digress. It looks like people are starting to get wise to these reindeer games. From a new piece in New York Magazine: “Prince Harry Infuriates Royals by Saying Nice Things About King Charles.”
Have you ever had a moment when you’re relentlessly complaining about someone and then you suddenly realize that, actually, you’re the problem? It seems that such a revelation is long overdue for Britain’s royal family and many royal commentators.
Last month, Queen Camilla got the proverbial tongues wagging when she accompanied King Charles to his treatment for an enlarged prostate. Apparently, it is a breach of royal protocol to comfort your spouse of 18 years during a medical procedure. Now Prince Harry has generated negative headlines — and has reportedly infuriated the royal family — by speaking about King Charles’s recent cancer diagnosis to Good Morning America.
So what did Harry say that was so awful? Hope you’re sitting down. He said, “I love my family. The fact that I was able to get on a plane and go see and spend any time with [my dad], I’m grateful for that.”
Even before the interview aired in full, GB News anchors fretted about what Harry might reveal, and royal correspondent Rafe Heydel-Mankoo said he should have “sought permission” to speak about his father’s health. On another GB News program, host Stephen Dixon declared, “The king is going to hate this.”
Grant Harrold, Charles’s former butler, told the New York Post, “I don’t think William and the king will be thrilled about Harry’s interview. Even though the king has already shared some information on his diagnosis, he is very private.” He added, “I have no idea why Harry feels the need to speak out. That’s what I don’t understand.”
To be sure, with the tell-all book and multiple interviews and documentaries, Harry and Meghan have given the royals plenty of reason to tense up whenever he’s set to speak in public. But in the GMA interview, Prince Harry managed to politely respond to the questions on everyone’s mind without really saying anything at all. Doesn’t he deserve a little credit for doing exactly what the royals trained him to do?
Exactly – the thing about the royal freakouts is that they don’t actually sit down and listen to what Harry is saying and not saying. He left a lot unsaid in the GMA interview, but the only reason GMA spent the money to send Will Reeves to Canada in the first place is to get Harry to say something on the record about his family. He didn’t trash them, he didn’t reveal palace secrets, he didn’t even say how his father is actually doing. These royalists make clowns of themselves regardless of what Harry says.
Incidentally, the Telegraph had another pearl-clutching piece about the GMA interview, which was, apparently, “exactly what royal watchers had feared.” This Telegraph piece has everything, from vague suggestions that Harry’s words killed QEII and Prince Philip, to claims that the Windsors will always and forever prefer a “dignified silence” (all evidence to the contrary), to a flat-out admission that the interview “could have been worse.” I got whiplash from that: Harry basically killed his grandfather but actually his GMA interview was okay.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Backgrid. Screencap courtesy of ABC.