One of the less edifying aspects of Prince Harry’s feud with his brother has been his apparent desire to claim ownership of their mother’s legacy. Hardly any speech or interview can pass without a reference to the late Princess Diana and her assertions about her wishes.
Harry’s latest TV interview suggests he is now also trying to invoke the memory of his late grandmother.
The courtiers I have spoken to in recent days are not at all impressed.
In last Thursday’s interview with ITV News’s smiling correspondent Rebecca Barry, Harry claimed that Queen Elizabeth had fully supported his legal battle against the popular press and had personally urged him to continue.
“We had a lot of conversations before she passed away and this is something she was very supportive of,” he said in a documentary, Tabloids on Trial.
“She knew how much this meant to me and was there to tell me: ‘follow this through to the end.'”
In last Thursday’s interview with ITV News’ Rebecca Barry, Harry claimed that Queen Elizabeth had fully supported his legal battle against the popular press and had personally urged him to do so.
Sadly, the Queen is no longer available to support Harry’s claim or deny it, so it might be instructive to look at her actions.
It is a tribute to the late Queen’s warm relationship with her grandchildren that all eight of them felt deeply loved.
However, Harry was convinced that he was in some ways unique. For example, in an interview with an American journalist five months before his death, he claimed that he enjoyed a “special relationship” with the monarch.
Absurdly, he claimed he was “protecting” Queen Elizabeth from the people around her, even though she had been living in North America for over two years.
Convinced that he really was special, Harry grew increasingly frustrated at not being able to see his grandmother in person to discuss his plans to move abroad with his new wife, Meghan.
In his bestselling memoir, Spare, the prince portrayed the Queen as a frail, elderly woman manipulated by officials, to whom she gave a series of childish nicknames such as “The Wasp” and “The Fly”.
Indeed, as the two prime ministers she met just days before her death have testified, the Queen remained lucid to the end. And, although her physical strength deteriorated, she was prepared to speak her mind, whether it was convenient for Harry and Meghan or not.
A courtier Richard Eden spoke to was less than happy with Harry’s “tasteless” attempt to claim his grandmother’s support in his ongoing “crusade”, adding: “There is something distinctly ‘off’ about it.”
Harry had become increasingly frustrated at not being able to see his grandmother in person to discuss his plans to move abroad with his new wife Meghan in 2020.
For example, rather than backing her plans for a “half in, half out” role with the Royal Family, she made clear that Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, would not be allowed to combine a life of public duty with greed in Hollywood.
So what 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 have such an enthusiastic opinion about these things?
It is certainly true that the late Queen passed a decision in 2018 to threaten News Group Newspapers with legal action over its apparent failure to respond to hacking allegations, as emails disclosed to the High Court have made clear.
But Harry has also alleged in court papers that his grandmother knew of a so-called “secret deal” between Buckingham Palace and the publisher of The Sun newspaper, under which he says the royal family agreed not to sue.
Not only was the allegation vehemently denied by all parties, but Harry’s claim was rejected by a judge for failing to “meet the necessary threshold of plausibility and coherence.”
One courtier I spoke to this week was less than happy with Harry’s “tasteless” attempt to enlist his grandmother’s support in his ongoing “crusade.”
As he told me: ‘There’s something distinctly strange about it.’
“We will never know what the grandson and grandmother said to each other. What we do know is that we will only know one version of the story.”
Many are likely to find Harry’s attempts to use the late Queen’s memory for his own ends distasteful, particularly given his disruptive behaviour in her later years.
The facts speak for themselves: Meghan and Harry conducted an explosive interview with the queen of American talk shows, Oprah Winfrey, even though the Duke of Edinburgh was 99 years old and in declining health.
The royal couple made deeply hurtful remarks, including an accusation of racism against unnamed royals. When the interview aired, Philip was already hospitalized with his terminal illness. Seriously ill, he died four weeks later.
The California-based couple spent the next 17 months until the Queen’s death working on projects that ended up causing even more damage to the Royal Family.
Just two months before our beloved monarch died at Balmoral aged 96, her “special” grandson announced the forthcoming publication of his “intimate” memoir, Spare.
It’s a shame that Harry is now trying to use the memory of a grandmother he hurt so much in his later years.
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