Harry and Meghan have made life in the UK 'just that little bit grimmer', writes Andrew Marr
9 January 2023, 16:00 | Updated: 9 January 2023, 18:49
Andrew Marr gives his views on the incendiary claims made by Prince Harry in a series of interviews
I want to hold my hands up high, surrender, give up and perhaps even apologise.
Right the way through the Harry and Meghan hullabulloo I’ve prided myself in ignoring it … It seemed to me an exercise in self-indulgent exhibitionism, cynically intended to lure us all into a private family fight and there was no obligation, I felt, for the rest of us to obediently jump right in.
As between team Sussex and team Wales, I’ve been resolutely don’t-care. Their sibling rivalry, their family feud, not ours.
Even though I’ve written a book on the Queen and, and interviewed both William and Harry, I refused to write or talk about this. But this evening, I have to acknowledge I was wrong.
Things have gone so far, and for better or worse the monarchy itself is now in play.
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Andrew Marr's powerful reflection on the feud between 'deeply damaged people' Harry and William
So, if you’ll forgive me, a few thoughts on this wretched business.
First, let’s start with the human and obvious. Harry and William are both deeply damaged people, for good reasons. They were brought up oddly and they lost their mother in the most traumatic circumstances, never having known her as well as they needed to.
And at this point I have to say Harry is completely right in pointing the finger at the media, British and foreign, in the way we pushed, and we shoved, and we nosed our way into their private hurt.
His account on ITV of the paparazzi milling about ghoulishly taking their shots as his mother lay dying is hard to listen to. But they were doing it because papers were paying for it, because they thought that’s what we wanted.
All of this, for the brothers, seems to have turned what had been painful enough into a lifelong and agonising trauma. Harry clearly sees the tabloid media as a vast octopus of evil, what he calls the antagonist.
Worse, he now believes this evil has been brought into his own family by the way others – in particular, Camilla the Queen Consort – feeds the monster to help her own position with us, the public.
Clearly, we can’t go all the way with Harry. He shows very little empathy for his brother William, who must be just as hurt, just as scarred, as he is. He tells the world that when William says to him at his grandfather's funeral I just want you to be happy, I love you, swearing on their mother’s memory, sacred words, Harry says he doesn't believe him.
How do you come back from that? He reveals the story of how William thumped him. He is proud he didn’t hit back, as he said William wanted him to.
But what he’s done since, on air and on the page, amounts to a much more ferocious beating meted out to William than Harry’s ever had. By accusing Camilla, his father’s wife of getting into bed with the devil – his phrase – it’s hard to imagine them standing near one another at the coronation, never mind the full reconciliation he claims to still to want.
But here is the final thing where he seems to me deluded: he claims still to be a supporter of the monarchy, 100%, and doesn’t think, apparently, he’s damaging the royal family itself.
Oh yes he is. He’s painting the rest of the Royals as cold, manipulative, cowardly because they hide behind media leaks, and deeply messed up.
If he’s right, I’d rather do without them. If he’s wrong then this is the most disgraceful, petulant and damaging smear of all time.
At any rate, it matters. We can’t pretend it’s tittle-tattle, or just look away. Since Harry got out of the family he’s used his ability to, in effect, create his own media empire – the Netflix documentary, the tell-almost-all book, the devastating broadcast interviews – to attack the rest of them and the British media. What he’s now said can’t go unanswered.
Have senior Royals been talking to journalists to smear Harry and Meghan? If that is how they behave, we will just see them differently. Even the paper flag-wavers will wave less enthusiastically.
Carrying on and saying nothing - stiff upper lip – never apologise, never explain – now looks like denial. It will suggest to me, and many more, that Harry’s right.
Cards on the table: I think he IS right in portraying the relationship between the house of Windsor and the media as corrupt. In its power to shape big stories, it’s like the old Downing Street lobby system before it was reformed, a system of vicious and anonymous attacks, which could never be cross-examined in daylight. Unfair. Wrong. Is that how Royal journalism operates in the 2020s? There are lots of grand organisations across print and broadcast journalism, with grand people in them. Well, they’ve got a real job to do now.
Let’s end with Harry again and with you. I feel a lot of sympathy for Harry – who couldn’t? – and in his TV interviews he came across as more thoughtful, open and frankly nicer than I’d expected.
But attacking people once so close to him so publicly – however angry and unloved he feels – is itself a profound failure of empathy, a failure of love which will, in due course, make him lonelier and less happy.
None of this means I’m particularly pro-William or pro the King for that matter. We should feel for them not because of their titles but as – if I can put it this way - fellow British citizens.
I know a lot of you listening will have drawn encouragement and support from the monarchy, emotional nourishment even, particularly during the reign of the Queen.
And this feud between brothers will make you feel miserable. At an unhappy, difficult time in our history, when so many are struggling so much, Harry and Meghan have made life in this country just that little bit grimmer. Thanks, guys.
