WHEN Harry first announced his TV series, The Me You Can’t See, it seemed like a beacon of hope in a dark world.
Finally, I mused in blissful ignorance, the Prince of Sighs had chosen to go down the Buddist path to Nirvana, the last stage of which is to cease to exist entirely.
Or, like the title character in the cult 1950s film, The Incredible Shrinking Man, he had decided to become smaller and smaller until he could no longer be seen by the naked eye.
Hosanna! Our lives would finally be free from this fifty carat apostle of self pity.
World treated to ‘unedifying’ strip show
Hope may spring eternal, but not it seems, in the parched hills of Montecito, California.
Instead of a diminished, chastened Duke of Sussex, dressed in the sackcloth of wisdom, we were treated to another unedifying strip tease show, the full Monty, in fact.
After adopting the pose of Christ on the Cross, Harry started out by claiming he had been “bullied into silence”. Silence?
This is a silence that thunders across the world, assaulting our eardrums to the point where they scream for mercy.
As for his new assertions and accusations, which Royal sources say have deeply upset his grandmother the Queen, they have become more and more fantastical.
Meghan, we learned, was doomed to be persecuted until she “dies”; Prince Charles let Harry “suffer” when it came to media attention, “knowing no better because of how he was raised” by his mother, The Queen, and the Duchess of Sussex was so neglected by the Royal Family that she calmly discussed the “practicalities” of committing suicide while pregnant with her first child.
Hopes of reconciliation illogical
With all due respect, these tales of woe and ill treatment suspend belief to the extent that the listener suffers from vertigo.
I worry for Harry, I really do. He seems unable to reason from A to B, let alone from A to Z.
He hopes, for instance, that ‘speaking his truth’ will aid a reconciliation with his father, Prince Charles and his brother, the Duke of Cambridge .
That is logic akin to the belief that if you physically assault someone they will not only like you for it, but apologise for being your victim.
So far, Meghan has been fingered as the evil puppeteer, manipulating her weakling husband.
This time, Harry may have gone too far even for her. Publicity is like diamonds; its value depends on a controlled and limited output.
Meghan has made no secret of her political ambitions.
Her husband’s continual and increasingly intemperate outbursts will not do her any good in a profession where discretion and a cool head and prerequisites for advancement.
It is true to say that it was Meghan who first convinced Harry that he was unhappy and ill used, but once you have let the genie out of the bottle, it becomes hard to control.
‘Cycle of pain’ could outdo Bradley Wiggins
Moreover, there is the law of diminishing returns.
Harry’s “cycle of pain”, which he pedals so fast he could outdistance Bradley Wiggins, has become a bore.
When you first hear of someone‘s grief at the loss of their mother, you naturally feel sympathetic.
When it becomes the defining narrative of their life, sympathy is replaced by exasperation.
To walk behind your mother’s coffin aged 12 is a terrible ordeal, but let us remember that Harry did not walk alone.
His father and Prince William were at his side, and it is instructive how William, whose pain cannot have been less that his brother’s, has striven to overcome it ,and when he speaks of his loss he does so with quiet dignity.
Overindulged as a child
But Harry is the Brother Grimm. As a child, according to those who knew him, he was spoiled and overindulged by his mother, who failed to inculcate him with any sense of responsibility towards the Crown.
He grew up with no boundaries. An acquaintance of mine who holidayed with a 16 year old Harry told me he went around removing and hiding womens’ bikini tops, and playing other puerile practical jokes.
At the same time, he grew up to hold the view that there is really nothing left to live for as a Royal, and is proud of his unhappiness.
Harry enjoys being miserable, though it would be a mistake to think that because he enjoys it, he is not.
William, partly due to the steady influence of Kate, has never indulged in such Byronic Unhappiness.
He does not take the view that there is a superior rationality in being wretched, and complaining.
The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds excessive contemplation of his life painful beyond a point, he will think about something else instead.
But Harry, beware! You are going down the same road as misfits and oddities like Mohhammed Fayed, who accused the Royal Family of arranging the death of Princess Diana and his son Dodi, because the latter was a Muslim.
Each new claim must be more sensational
As I recall, he also accused Camilla of being a “crocodile”, and insisted the House of Windsor was a “Dracula family”.
If Harry progresses further down his present path, what other claims might he make? That Prince Charles is Nosferatu, William is a werewolf, and Kate a Cat Woman, who, when the moon is full, leaves Kensington Palace in search of her prey?
Far fetched? I am not so sure, for each new claim Harry makes must necessarily be more sensational than the last.
Hollywood sophisticates are already penetrating his bunkum, and if he abandons all discretion, they will soon have no more of him.
Where reason still holds sway, he may be doomed to become a sort of sideshow freak, for, to paraphrase Hamlet, poor Harry no longer “knows a hawk from a handsaw”.
