THERE are now three cast-iron certainties in life: death, taxes, and Prince Harry behaving like a shameless, deluded, woefully entitled hypocrite.
There was a wearisome inevitability that just when the Queen least needed her renegade royal grandson to pipe up whining again from his Californian mansion, he would do exactly that.
For the past year, Harry seems to have delighted in making his 95-year-old grandmother’s life more difficult during the most difficult times of her life.
When the Queen’s husband Prince Philip was dying in hospital last March, Harry and his equally narcissistic wife Meghan went on TV to whack the Monarchy and spray-gun (without providing any evidence) the Royal Family as a bunch of callous racists.
And now, as she reels from taking what must have been an unbelievably hard – but very necessary – decision to publicly humiliate her middle son Prince Andrew over the appalling Epstein/Maxwell sex abuse scandal, Harry rears his perpetually angry, over-privileged head once more to rub salt into her emotional wounds.
His latest moan is a demand to have British police protection when he and his family are in this country.
The petulant prince is threatening legal action – is there ever a time when he isn’t? – unless the Home Office caves and restores the royal security he enjoyed before his dramatic flounce to America.
If he goes through with his threat, it will be the first time any royal has ever sued Her Majesty’s Government, and, of course, causes the Queen yet another massive headache at the worst possible time.
Harry’s legal representative said in a statement: “The UK will always be Prince Harry’s home and a country he wants his wife and children to be safe in. With the lack of police protection, comes too great a personal risk.
“The Duke and Duchess of Sussex personally fund a private security team for their family, yet that security cannot replicate the necessary police protection needed whilst in the UK. In the absence of such protection, Prince Harry and his family are unable to return to his home.”
What a load of disingenuous, self-serving, elitist poppycock.
It takes a rare kind of brass neck to want the right to trash the Royal Family whenever it suits you but also insist on enjoying the trappings of being a member of that family without performing any of the, often mundane, duties that come with those trappings.
But since they quit Britain, Harry and Meghan have proven themselves to be only interested in one thing: making as much money as fast as possible by ruthlessly exploiting their royal status.
And to do so by behaving in the most laughably hypocritical manner – from preaching about the environment whilst using private jets like taxis, to banging on about poverty while throwing lavish baby showers and constantly bleating about privacy at the same time as giving endless commercially beneficial interviews about their private life.
It’s got to the stage where every time they open their mouths to lecture us all on some new woke virtue-signalling cause, it’s a sure-fire certainty they will be exposed soon afterwards for doing the very opposite themselves.
And they’re quite happy to spew blatant nonsense in the process of playing up to their self-styled myth of being the world’s biggest victims.
After furiously denying any involvement in the repulsively sycophantic and clearly semi-authorised book about them, Finding Freedom, it emerged during Meghan’s recent court battle with the Mail on Sunday that she had in fact co-operated with it.
The couple’s then-chief aide Jason Knauf said in a witness statement that the book was “discussed on a routine basis” and “directly with the duchess multiple times in person and over email”.
He said Meghan provided him with briefing points to share with the book’s authors and revealed an email from Harry which said: “I totally agree that we have to be able to say we didn’t have anything to do with it. Equally, you giving the right context and background to them would help get some truths out there.”
Princess Pinocchio later issued a grovelling apology to the court but insisted she didn’t remember any of her fulsome literary co-operation.
What convenient amnesia for a woman who supposedly prides herself on having a great memory!
This latest legal row perfectly exemplifies the Sussexes’ desire to have their royal cake and eat it.
They don’t want to do any actual work for the Royal Family after falling out with most of them following their constant public attacks.
Nor do they want to live in Britain, the place that bestowed them with their royal titles. After all, why bother turning out for community fairs in East London or new hospitals in rainy Manchester when you can have sun-kissed cocktails with Oprah in Santa Barbara?
But they very much do want to keep their royal status so they can trade off being royals in the US without fulfilling a moment’s duty to earn them.
And they’re even more desperate to keep all the good stuff that comes with being a royal – like police protection when they’re in the UK.
There’s just one problem with this: they’re not entitled to it.
Only active royals who do their duty on behalf of the British taxpayers deserve that kind of protection, not runaways who’ve deserted their duty.
Harry and Meghan aren’t real royals anymore, they’re just another pair of Hollywood celebrities on the make.
And like any other celebrities, they can sort their own protection when they come here, just as they do in America.
They can certainly afford to thanks to their humongous multi-million-dollar deals with the likes of Netflix and Spotify.
The bottom line is this: why should these two money-grabbing clowns get preferential treatment over people who actually live and work here?
Like many public figures with a high profile in Britain, I’ve received nasty death threats, one of which – as The Celeb Report recently reported – is currently going through a legal process.
But that doesn’t entitle me to full-time police protection, even if, like Harry has done, I offered to pay for it myself.
No, if I want that, I’d have to get my own personal security team and request police help with any specific incident or threat like everyone else.
That’s what the Sussexes should do, too.
But Harry doesn’t see it that way because every pore of his body drips with shocking entitlement, just as it does with Prince Andrew.
To be clear, I don’t equate his antics with his uncle’s far more serious situation involving sexual abuse allegations that he has so shamefully failed to properly answer to but continued to deny.
However, they have both badly damaged the reputation of the Royal Family with their conduct and by doing so, imperilled the very future of the Monarchy.
They’ve also caused grievous distress to the Queen at the most vulnerable time of her entire reign.
Her Platinum Jubilee this year should be a wonderful celebration of everything she and the Monarchy represent.
Instead, it now looks doomed to be over-shadowed by Prince Privacy Harry’s ‘tell-all’ book later this year which will doubtless contain a load more family-bashing, and by the even worse threat of Andrew either appearing in court where his lurid and possibly criminal sex life will fill global headlines for weeks, or with him paying off a woman who says he sexually abused her when she was 17.
All of this will hurt the Queen even more.
All of it is an absolute disgrace.
Shame on you, Harry and Andrew.
Where the Queen’s proven herself to be the very best of royalty, you two – in very different ways – have proven yourselves to be the very worst.
