There’s a strange thing that happens when you meet someone who is very famous.
People want to know what they’re like, but only if it matches the version of the famous person they’ve created in their own heads.
I mention this because about eight years ago I became friends with Prince Harry, and since then life has been filled with questions from people curious to know more about his character: has he been brainwashed? does he intend to overthrow the monarchy? does he smell of money? etc.
And when I tell them my honest opinion, that he’s kind, funny, and pretty normal, all things considered, I often see a flash of disappointment on their faces, quickly followed by words like, “well, you’d say that, you know him,” as if knowing someone should disqualify you from having a reliable opinion of them.
Bryony Gordon became friends with Prince Harry after she was invited to the launch of a mental health campaign, led by him, Prince William and Kate, in 2016.
Anyway, I wanted to write this column about what I know about Prince Harry, because, as he prepares to turn 40 this weekend, I’ve heard a lot of pretty negative things about him, character assassinations that bear no resemblance to the man I’ve come to consider a friend, the one who cares passionately about wounded veterans and who has done more than most to change perceptions of mental health in this country.
Becoming friends with the Duke of Sussex was not a turn of events I could have predicted in 2016, given that incompetent journalists like me who write about his many, many flaws (depression, OCD, addiction issues) were not usually invited to spend time with the royals.
Or at least they didn’t until the spring of that year, when Harry and his brother and sister-in-law, the now Prince and Princess of Wales, launched their mental health campaign Heads Together.
As one of the few journalists at the time championing mental health (and oh, how I insisted on it), I received an invitation to the project launch at Stratford Olympic Park, where I met the three “directors”, as they were called, and inadvertently volunteered to run the London Marathon for their charity.
(Heads Together had been selected as the event’s official charity partner, so it seemed like the right thing to do, rather than being able to take a proper bow.)
Over the next year, I spent quite a bit of time with the young royals, chatting about all things mental health. There were media events and training events and even intimate Christmas cocktail parties at Kensington Palace. I got on well with all three of them, but seemed to have a particular connection with Harry, with whom we bonded, as humans often do, over the fact that we had both spent time getting into mischief.
But I also got the sense that he understood the darkness he was talking about, and I found myself asking him if he would be the first guest on the mental health podcast I was about to launch.
To my surprise, she said yes.
Even more surprising was the honesty that came out of him as we recorded the podcast at Kensington Palace.
He was nervous about what he wanted to tell me, so nervous that I was forced to try to calm him down and reassure him. But there was good reason for his anxiety. In those days, members of the royal family were known for nothing but their rigid attitude. It was not proper for them to talk about their feelings.
And it was truly groundbreaking when Harry – or Haz, as I had begun to call him by then – spoke so movingly about the grief he repressed following the death of his mother, Diana.
“I can safely say that losing my mother at 12 and therefore having to bottle up all my emotions for the last 20 years has had a pretty serious effect, not just on my personal life but also on my work,” she told me. “It was 20 years of not thinking about it and then two years of total chaos.”
When the podcast aired in April 2017, it made headlines around the world. My social media feeds were flooded with people who were grateful to see such a prominent man from such a modest family speak so openly about grief.
Professor Sir Simon Wessely, then president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the Prince had achieved more in terms of communicating mental health issues in a 25-minute interview than Wessely had achieved in a 25-year career.
“It has a global reach that people like me can only dream of,” Wessely said. “It will have communicated in a way that I have worked my whole life to achieve.”
Marjorie Wallace, founder of mental health charity Sane, said: “It has done more good than many, many campaigns. It has sent out a message of hope – that feelings left to fester for too long can turn malignant, but it is never too late to seek help.”
Last year, Bryony traveled to Harry and Meghan’s new home in Montecito to interview him on the eve of the publication of his book, Spare
I thought it was a real turning point in terms of how we view mental health. For me, it was also a key moment in my own personal journey – the fact that this huge public figure had confided his story to me, not despite my checkered mental health history, but because of it.
I wasn’t expecting to hear from Harry again (he was royalty, after all), so I was thrilled when he called to congratulate me after I finished the marathon.
We stayed in touch through various mental health projects. In early 2018, he introduced me to his future wife, Meghan Markle, who I also consider a friend, and we met for lunch and worked with her while she was supporting charitable causes in the UK.
I visited them at their then home, Frogmore Cottage, in Windsor, stayed with them at Buckingham Palace on the day they left the UK in 2020, and last year travelled to their new home in Montecito to interview Harry on the eve of the publication of his book, Spare.
I spent an afternoon at home, with the children running around happily as we drank tea. Harry proudly showed me the photo wall he had recently created, featuring pictures of his mother.
As I left, accompanied by the happy couple with a jar of their homemade jam (which I later left in the back of a taxi in a jetlagged stupor; somewhere in Los Angeles, a cabbie has one of the first batches of American Riviera Orchard produce), I was reminded of the fact that they are a fairly ordinary couple existing in an absolutely extraordinary situation.
They don’t put on airs, they just want to protect their children from an increasingly digital world that loves to see the worst in people. A world that forgets that, no matter how famous a person is, all they do is give their best, just like everyone else.
This is not what people want to hear, but it is what I have discovered time and time again.
Happy 40th birthday, Haz. I hope you continue to make a difference for the next 40 years, despite the naysayers.