Harry had time to rethink his message – but it feels like another huge betrayal to Royal Family
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by 0 Harry had time to decide his message, and again it was his family who took the direct hit.
For all his efforts to say how much he still loves them, it felt like another huge betrayal as he compared them to abusers.
He didn’t mince his words when he said: “They’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile up until this point. And I’m not sure how honesty is burning bridges. You know, silence only allows the abuser to abuse.”
After the death of the Queen, and again spending time with the Royal Family, you would have thought he may have been more measured, calmer, but there was no sense that he wanted to row back on anything that he’d written in his book or said in that Netflix series.
He wanted to remind us that he equally blames his family as much as the press for his decision to flee the country “fearing for our lives”.
He accuses them of colluding with the tabloids and getting in bed with the devil. And while it is the royal staff who largely take the blame, he also accuses his relatives of doing the dirty work too, seeming to suggest that Camilla was responsible for leaking conversations.
The level of detail he decides to go into about the fallout with Prince William still continues to surprise. We already knew about that fight they apparently had at Nottingham Cottage, but there’s more; a row over Harry having a beard on his wedding day, and a disagreement they had on the day of Prince Philip’s funeral.
We hear Harry reading the words himself. Hearing it from his own mouth adds another dimension, an added rawness to the divide between two brothers who seemed so close. His voice tells his story, his truth, leaving you in no doubt that no matter how hurtful it may be to his family this is what he wants us to hear from him.
His reaction to suggestions that he and Meghan had called the Royal Family racist over questions about Archie’s skin colour is fascinating to watch. He quickly says that wasn’t the case, but then appears to suggest his family and the institution need to do more to address unconscious bias within palace walls.
You wonder if there may have been some small element of regret about how that Oprah interview had played out and how his grandmother was forced to respond.
In this interview, there are discussions about all those bits in the book that felt on the verge of oversharing, how he lost his virginity, his drug taking, and how it was Kate that made Meghan cry.
When you sign a lucrative book deal you are obviously expected to dish the dirt, but it continues to feel like he’s got the entire dirty laundry basket out and has willingly spread it around.
The biggest sadness is how much all that overshadows what is a heartbreaking story, his recollections of losing his mother.
He talks about how doing the book has been a painful process. His deeply held trauma leaves you in no doubt as to why he now believes it is his “life’s work” to continue his crusade against the UK tabloid press. That pain at times just gets lost.
Read more:
Harry cuts a sad, self-indulgent and naive figure in his memoir
A royal opening up in this way would have been shocking a few years ago, nobody in the family wanted a repeat of the fallout in the 1990s from Diana’s Panorama interview or Prince Charles’s with Jonathan Dimbleby.
But we’ve heard so much from Harry and Meghan that in some ways their level of sharing no longer seems to surprise.
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Despite everything, Harry keeps talking about reconciliation, while his family at least publicly remain silent.
They have clearly decided this is a personal matter, not a serious threat to the family business and the reputation of the monarchy, and as a result not worthy of comment.
You wonder how much of a frustration that will be to Harry, and his one-man campaign to bring down the tabloid press and break open the institution in the pursuit of getting his family back.
