I’ve just been reminded of royal commentator/wannabe gadfly Petronella Wyatt. We haven’t talked about her in months, not since she made a series of cracked-out comments in the Telegraph and elsewhere about Prince Harry last May and June. According to Wyatt, her friends in LA are “always bumping into Meghan at parties” and Harry is a very lonely babysitter. Weeks later, Wyatt threw a hissy fit about Harry testifying against the tabloids who hacked him and every girlfriend he ever had. These days, it looks like Wyatt is getting her marching orders from Queen Camilla. My pet theory is that Camilla was banned from King Charles and Prince Harry’s brief meeting last week and Camilla has been throwing some hissy fits of her own. She clearly was behind that particularly nasty story to Robert Jobson, about how Charles didn’t even want to see Harry. Now Wyatt claims that it was Harry who told his father that he didn’t want to be in the same room as Camilla. Sure. And??
Hostilities flared up last week between Prince Harry and Queen Camilla. Or rather, the Duke of Sussex apparently launched an unprovoked volley in the direction of a 75-year-old woman. In an irony that will no doubt escape this self-proclaimed feminist and Lochinvar of the New World, Harry, I hear, preferred not to be in the same room with his stepmother when he spoke to the King about his cancer diagnosis, following the most precipitous and historic mercy mission to Blighty since Lend Lease. As olive branches go, it’s a massive opportunity missed by the Prince of Petulance – though it’s likely our laidback Queen wouldn’t have minded either way.
Remember the howls and lamentations when Meghan was excluded from any family conference. But the trouble with Harry is that he fights like a coward, refusing to stand up to a comparable foe, and on the rare occasion he meets one, he takes refuge in a dog bowl. In short, Prince Valiant he is not.
Harry, despite his one trick phoney Californian posturing, is the typical Anglo-Saxon who has stuck to his hereditary guns. He is so violently blowhard, and in this fact lies the cause of the ridiculous figure he commonly cuts in the eyes of others. He brags and blusters so incessantly that if he actually had the combined virtues of Jesus Christ, Aristotle and El Cid he would still go beyond the facts and so appear a mere Bombastes Furioso. This has taken on an almost pathological character and is probably no more than a protective mechanism erected to conceal an inescapable sense of inferiority.
Even so, I do not understand his continuing choler where the Queen is concerned. Perhaps, having dispatched his brother and sister-in-law, he had run out of family members to insult. I have known Camilla since I was 18, and she is palpably incapable of the scheming Harry has often accused her of. To what has sometimes been her detriment, she is incapable of machinations of any kind. With her clean tradition as the daughter of country gentry, her complexion that rejects make-up and the elements, and her forthright, genuine approach, the closest she has come to “scheme” is on a Scrabble board.
After Diana’s death, and when I was deputy editor of The Spectator, I sometimes breakfasted with Mark Bolland, who was Charles’s Deputy Private Secretary. Without wishing to betray any confidences, I received the distinct impression that it was Charles who desired to marry Camilla, whilst she was content with a less formal arrangement. The subject of her one day becoming Queen was never broached. There are some people who are devoid of ambition and snobbery, and Camilla is one of them. Thus I do not understand Harry’s bile, and cannot sympathise with it.
Like most forms of hatred it seems based on envy; envy of the fact that his father’s marriage to Camilla is, as he has publicly conceded in the past, “very happy”, and envy, perhaps, of the humorous and invaluable support she will give him now. Harry seems to have a problem with other people’s happiness, and has spent the past year trying to make his closest relatives miserable. He has a suspicion of anyone with a superior capacity for having a good time. Was Camilla wretched in her marriage, he would doubtless rush to embrace her and assure the public of his friendship.
There is possibly another, equally unpalatable explanation. It occurs to me that the Queen Consort’s life of royal service and her growing popularity in this country contrasts too deeply with Harry’s existence of grotesque futility abroad. I do not trust for an instant his continuous assertions that he is an infinitely more fulfilled and much better person. Could it be perhaps that under his shiny new skin, Prince Harry remains the sexist buffoon of his youth?
I called this woman a crackhead before, and I’ll do it again. What kind of drugs is she on? All of them? She barfed out this 3000-word prolix contempt all because a son allegedly wanted to speak to his father alone… and that’s it? Is Camilla really so tacky and classless that she would begrudge a son some one-on-one time with his father? That’s how it comes across, that Camilla was truly furious about it, furious enough to call up Robert Jobson and Petronella Wyatt and a dozen other royalists.
Also: “But the trouble with Harry is that he fights like a coward, refusing to stand up to a comparable foe, and on the rare occasion he meets one, he takes refuge in a dog bowl.” Wow. They’re really hellbent on rewriting “Prince William violently assaulted his brother because Harry refused to divorce Meghan,” aren’t they. These people need to get off drugs and get into therapy. Crack is wack.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, Instar.