Harried #2: Close Protection Racket

The response to Prince Harry's memoir so far has been mob tactics from press and palace alike.

Previously in this series:
Harried #1: Soldiering on | The response to Prince Harry's leaked reflections on his deployments in Afghanistan is symptomatic of a broken media and a diseased society.

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There are many myths around monarchy; the latest is that Prince William and the Palaces are maintaining a “dignified silence” over the leaks from Prince Harry’s book Spare. William may not have said anything publicly but he and the royal machine are far from silent. The Firm is in full-on furious fight mode, aided and abetted by the royal correspondents.

Today’s Sunday Times front page carried a story headlined William ‘burning inside’ over Harry’s revelations, bylined to its Royal Correspondent, Roya Nikkhah, and illustrated with a photo of William and Kate with stoic expressions (or it could just be constipation). While the piece carried the usual boilerplate statement in print…

Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace have refused to comment on details in the book, including Prince Harry’s account of a fight in 2019 over the Duchess of Sussex, during which he said William threw him to the ground. 

… and a similar statement in the entirely different¹ text published online under the same headline…

Only stony silence emanates from Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace as the royal family braces for Spare’s global publication on Tuesday, but at Lambeth Palace, prayers for the royal family have been upped from once to three times a day. “They need some reconciliation, this undermines the whole institution,” says a source.

… it is clear that the range of anonymous sources and “friends of William” quoted are delivering attack lines and rebuttals that have got the royal nod.

In gossip journalism, “friends of…” are commonly either the celebrity in question, their PR giving quotes with a bit of artificial distance applied to them, or ‘friends’ who have been given the line to push. With the royal family, they’re courtiers, hangers-on, or ‘friends’ who have been given the go-ahead to talk to hacks.

Take this section from Nikkhah’s story:

Harry’s disloyalty in spilling the beans has staggered lifelong friends of the brothers, who thought they would always have each other’s backs, no matter how distant they grew. While fisticuffs in the Nottingham Cottage kitchen in 2019 have long been known about in their tight-knit group, nobody thought Harry would go there. Why? Because of how much “shit” on Harry friends and family have kept under wraps for years, much of which has so far not emerged in the book’s leaked extracts.

That’s a threat. Meanwhile, stories like DIRTY HARRY Harry branded ‘disrespectful’ towards women ‘during Swiss ski trip where he spent night with teen 8 years younger’ from The Sun on Sunday — The Sunday Times’ more monosyllabic sibling — are the threat being put into action.

They’re also evidence of the cash hose being turned on by the tabloids as “former pals” (in the case of the ski trip story) and “former lovers” (in the case of Catherine Ommanney’s kiss-and-retell² reheating rendevous from 2006) are offered a chance to cash in mixed with the threat of unflattering stories if they don't.

With the ski trip tale, The Sun on Sunday notes Harry’s age at the time — 27 — but doesn’t say the year the alleged behaviour took place — 2011 — because it would make a lot of readers say, “That was 12 years ago.” It’s also notable that while “the former pal” making the claims benefits from anonymity, The Sun on Sunday sets off a guessing game about the woman at the heart of the story even while pretending to keep her name out of it:

The Sun on Sunday knows the name of the woman — who appeared in Tatler magazine while younger and is now married — but has decided not to identify her.

The crux of the story is an apparently “crude joke” made by Harry but the paper does not print what he is alleged to have said and relies instead on innuendo. A quote from the “former pal” near the end of the story makes the intent clear:

"He can preach about every subject under the sun, but there are a lot of people out there who knew what he was like back then and knew him during his wilder days." The source said they decided to speak out about Harry’s behaviour towards girls after the Prince described himself as a feminist.

They said: “I feel this shows hypocrisy by Harry.”

A more good-faith reading might be that Harry has changed quite a lot in the 12 years since the alleged behaviour took place. The Sun is evidently disappointed he’s not still as racist and sexist as it is.

Saturday’s Daily Telegraph provided another example of the Firm’s false silence. Under the headline, Prince Harry’s Royal family ambushes ‘harmed Queen’s health’, Associate Editor, Gordon Rayner, and Royal Correspondent, Victoria Ward, wrote:

Prince Harry’s repeated “ambushing” of the Royal family had a detrimental effect on the late Queen Elizabeth II’s health in her final year, sources who were close to her have claimed.

The late Queen hated confrontation, and attacks on the family by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are said to have “had an impact” on her frail condition before she died last September.

Curiously, the paper hasn’t written a front-page story about the effect Prince Andrew settling the sexual assault case against him to the tune of what’s reported to have been £12 million of the Queen’s money³ might have had on her health.

Rayner and Ward’s story continues:

As well as having to cope with the damaging allegations made in television interviews, she was well aware that further revelations would be made in the Prince’s book, Spare, which was originally due to be published last year.

Yes, a 96-year-old woman whose cause of death may have been blurted out on live television by haunted waxwork and BBC Royal Editor, Nicholas Witchell, hastened her departure from the world of the living in order to avoid reading a memoir.

Later in the piece, a ‘friend’ of the Queen is quoted as saying:

“She never wanted to deal with confrontation, even going as far back as the start of Prince Andrew’s troubles, and this stuff was shoved in her face on an almost weekly basis. It had an impact. She had lost Prince Philip, and then the constant ambushing of the Royal family by a much-loved grandson did take its toll. At that stage in your life and your reign, you just don’t need that on top of everything else.”

Prince. Andrew’s. Troubles. Still in the world of The Daily Telegraph and the Royals, talking about your experiences is worse than having a close personal friendship with a notorious sex offender.

With a complete absence of irony, the Telegraph story, dripping with quotes from royal sources, ends like this:

One royal source told The Telegraph: “It is hypocritical for him to talk about other people’s mental health. The King may have spoken about his troubles at Gordonstoun in public, but it’s not for Harry to go into all that. The problem is he just doesn’t have any grown-ups advising him."

Another said: “It is very hard to understand how he has squared that in his own mind, given his passion for protecting his private life.”

The Duke was asked in an ITV interview, to be broadcast on Sunday, whether he felt he had invaded the privacy of his nearest and dearest without permission.

He replied: “That would be the accusation from people that don’t understand or don’t want to believe that my family have been briefing the press. I don’t know how staying silent is ever going to make things better.”

Along with the predictably acid briefings from “sources”, columnists continue to pump out columns that distort even the double-translated leaks from Spare.

In the first instalment of this series, I wrote about the way Harry’s comments about his experience in Afghanistan and particularly killing 25 Taliban have been twisted. Janice Turner’s column in Saturday’s Times took that to a new level:

And what of US liberals who loved his anti-colonial Netflix series, laden with black historian gravitas? Such as the Kennedys who just awarded him a Ripple of Hope for exposing royal family racism? How will they process a princely brag that he took out 25 people of colour like “chess pieces”, maybe civilians caught in crossfire as well as Taliban? Why has a man so preoccupied with his family’s security put bigger targets on their backs?

Turner — who is like me a veteran only of the Twitter Wars (2009-present) — slips in the idea of Harry killing civilians (“… maybe civilians caught in the crossfire as well as Taliban?”) while entirely misrepresenting what he told the ghostwriter as “a princely brag”. Joe Glenton, an actual veteran of the war in Afghanistan, wrote in The Guardian:

Whether this is a brag, a lament or a statement of fact is unclear, though I suspect it is the last. I’m quite interested in whether his understanding of the concept of othering is a sign of his own political development, or a term picked up in therapy or from his liberal (yet Chomsky-reading) wife. 

But, in any event, it is a frank and correct commentary on how the lives of the enemy and the occupied are devalued long before a soldier reaches a battlefield. It is, quite literally, just how it is out there. We can, and many will, ask if some of those were civilians. And in a conflict like Afghanistan, it is a valid question.

We don't know the individual stories of the people Harry killed in Afghanistan but there’s a huge difference between Turner's glib accusation and Joe’s⁴ reflection of the reality of that war and all wars.

The conclusion to Joe’s column is close to my own view:

I’m not entirely convinced there is some far-reaching truth to be gleaned from all of this. There is a churn of military worship, royalist sycophancy and Piers Morgan tantrums, set against Harry and Meghan’s grating brand of American cringe. I’ve been told he isn’t a bad lad, but it seems strange that he and his wife so correctly rail against the personalities and conduct of royals without ever addressing the real issue: that the whole parasitic enterprise of monarchy they describe has had its day and has to go.

I’m a republican — small ‘r’ British version — and I believe the monarchy should be abolished. It also means that I see Harry as a victim of a cursed fame. But when I was first writing this edition I was toying with comparing him to a mafia member turned whistleblower or state’s evidence. I didn’t because he still believes in the institution of royalty. He hasn’t made the final leap from his personal antipathy for the system and its mutually parasitic relationship with Britain’s media and the need for it all to go.

Of course, columnists and royal correspondents also can’t argue against the very thing which they obsess over; to admit that Monarchy is just a longer-running version of the Kardashians would be to admit that their ‘work’ is banal.

In the Telegraph, Camilla Tominey writes:

To his credit, Harry has identified a problem with the monarchy. It has struggled to keep a handle on its “spares”. The tortured history of those playing second fiddle to the heir stretches back to the reign of Richard the Lionheart, whose youngest brother John tried to usurp him when he went off to fight in the Third Crusade.

George, the Duke of Clarence, was famously so resentful towards his eldest brother Edward IV that he attempted to overthrow him no less than four times. Then we had Queen Mary conspiring to imprison her sister Elizabeth I in the Tower of London, and the “folly” of George III’s brother Edward, which brought George’s reign into disrepute. More recent experiences, with Princess Margaret’s hellraising and the Duke of York’s many controversies, shows this is a problem the Windsors have yet to solve.

Harry has a point, then. Yet the trouble with his response is its total lack of seriousness. Like a man-child who has thrown all of his toys out of the pram, such that he can no longer reach them, he serves up all his petty grievances without providing any solutions whatsoever.

So close. The problem with monarchy is the premise that some people can be born more special than others and that, among those ‘special’ people, the order in which you emerged from a magic vagina determines your level of specialness.

Imagine being Camilla Tominey and accusing anyone else of a “lack of seriousness”. Her greatest scoop was discovering that a man she didn’t know had a new girlfriend; the focus of her daily life now is analysing a family she doesn’t know, whose members are likely to consider her with abject disdain. She did not come from a magic vagina; her family was not given land by William the Conqueror, nor did they have the foresight to murder the right people several hundred years ago.

For The Times, Camilla Long — the British media has a surfeit of Camillas — compares Harry to Kaspar Hauser, who claimed to have been raised in total darkness, and writes:

The royal family couldn’t have created more of a monster if they had tried.

And they did create it. When you dig down beyond the bitching, the stupid chickens, the duchess prostrating herself on Diana’s gravestone, saying she was seeking “clarity and guidance” — what a fake — we have to accept that there are actual people who did this. Stupid, rigid, self-absorbed, unwavering old sadists who actively created the nightmare we are going through. And it wasn’t Harry.

They are mostly Charles and anyone else at the Palace who failed to grasp that this sensitive, dim second son wasn’t going to cope when the bottom fell out of his world. What happened to him as a child was dire, but no one gave a damn — all attention fell on William: the heir. Harry’s great failure is that he doesn’t have the heft to describe this, resorting to petty examples: the bigger bedroom William got when they went to Balmoral; the better wardrobe. I mean, really. It obscures the main point: he grew up in a completely unfair and inhumane system that no one wanted to change, even in the face of tragedy.

But again, she can’t and won’t take that train of thought to the next station; royalty is not a system that can be changed and reformed. It is the monster and it should be destroyed. And even as she admits that Harry’s life has been — at least before he met his wife and had his children — a tragedy, she reverts to her mean girl default:

This isn’t to excuse Harry: he said the words, he approved them and he will be paid lots for them. He is an adult. Many people lost parents but don’t have the benefit of riches, fame and palaces. But he’s damaged, adrift and still lonely — no match for the best ghostwriter in the world, nor even for Netflix, nor for any of the bloodsucking American graspers who have taken over his world.

Many people have lost parents; in fact, all of us do in the end. But how many of them have been made to follow their mother’s coffin in front of an audience of millions?

In The Daily Mail, Sarah Vine — while wailing about all the attention given to Spare — writes another attack on Harry wrapped up as a tribute to his grandmother:

I – along with almost everyone else – have spent far more time obsessing over the destructive behaviour of Harry and Meghan than I ever did reflecting upon the Queen’s brilliance. 

But that, I’m afraid, is the way of things.

Hard work, dedication, loyalty, restraint: those are the values of a lost generation. In today’s world it doesn’t matter how little you contribute, so long as you’re prepared to expose every aspect of your existence. 

The Queen’s “brilliance” was a product of the palace’s PR and her commitment to protecting the Firm at all costs. She perpetuated the misery that Larkin said “deepens like a coastal shelf”, for her sister, for her children, and for her grandchildren.

Vine — who monetised every moment of her marriage to Michael Gove and has often made use of her children’s lives in her columns — writes without shame that:

… what sets Harry and Meghan apart from the rest of the Windsors. King Charles and the Queen Consort, the Prince and Princess of Wales: they are Royals and their conduct reflects that. 

Harry and Meghan may have started out as the same but they have deliberately chosen to recast themselves as celebrities, which is a very different thing. 

It puts them in the same category as people like the Kardashians, who monetise every spit and toss of their existence, and others for whom no degree of self-exposure is ever too raw.

I made a comparison to the Kardashians earlier in this edition but, for me, it applies to the whole artifice of monarchy. Harry was born a celebrity. William and Kate pretend to be something more ‘regal’ while allowing their children’s photos to appear in Mail on Sunday calendars as a bribe. The Royal Family turns “every spit and toss of their existence” toward the furthering of their unearned place; they are celebrities without the honesty. And “raw exposure” of Harry was used to protect William.

A headline from the Telegraph is perhaps more telling than the “royal sources” who prompted the story might have wished:

Buckingham Palace ‘war gamed’ responses to Prince Harry – but worst fears 'did not come to light'

I rather suspect that their “worst fears” involve the state of William and KAte’s marriage. And perhaps the extent of William’s “temper”, which hacks wrote about and referred to a lot before Harry mentioned it.

The Telegraph piece claims:

… a small team had been heavily focused on [Spare].

“They have been wargaming every dispute, every clash the Duke had with his family that they feared could be made public in his book,” the source said.

“Every possible allegation they could think of has been run through in detail so they could feel prepared. They were taking it very seriously and wanted to be ready to react if necessary. They were on a war footing.”

No one at the palace was sent a preview copy and most senior aides are being forced to wait until Tuesday to get hold of it, digesting it instead via the excerpts of Spanish translations that have been widely disseminated.

Aides did not rule out issuing a response if it was considered necessary. However, they suggested it was unlikely they would even acknowledge the book unless the Duke made allegations so potentially damaging about an individual family member or the institution that reputations were at stake.

Elsewhere in today’s Telegraph, stories claimed that actually King Charles comes out of it quite well and he’d be very open to a reconciliation. These are not news reports but press releases funnelled through people with very dishonest job titles.

If you want to understand what’s happening once the ITV interview airs tonight, don’t rewatch The Crown. Stick on The Godfather or Goodfellas.

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster…”

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1. The Times and Sunday Times have a terrible habit of changing and updating the text in news stories without indicating it has done so which makes the idea of either as “the paper of record” laughable. In this case, the text news story from the front page of the print edition isn’t on the website and the headline leads to the copy from a piece published in a spread on pages 4 and 5 in print.

2. She gave The Sun on Sunday the same story in November 2022.

3. It’s really our money.

4. I write “Joe” instead of Glenton because I know him a little bit and it feels weird to use his surname like we’re at public school or something.