James: Why I've Changed My Take On The Royal Family

4 May 2017, 12:02

In the past two weeks, James O'Brien admits that he's changed his mind about the Royal Family. This is why.

On the day that it was announced Prince Philip would be stepping down from royal duties, James admitted that the past few weeks have seen him reflect on the role the Royals play.

"My attitude to the Royal Family has changed in the last two weeks as a result of the interventions that the young Royals have made on the question of mental health.

"Rightly or wrongly, Prince Charles could've done things differently but he seemed to be more obsessed with architecture and organic food, which never struck me as particularly urgent problems facing the nation."

But James thinks the next generation of Royals could be the ones to make a real, lasting difference to the country:

"When you have that level of profile you can use it to do good and what Kate William and Harry did a couple of weeks ago, not just when they visited the Global Academy which is part of the parent company of LBC, Global Radio, but the comments that Harry made before that about receiving therapy to deal with the grief that he felt some 20 years after his mother's death, a couple of quite pointed comments from his brother about going off the rails because you don't know how to process the pain.

"I think they did, as the head of the College of Royal College of Psychiatrists said, the stuff they did was quite quite incredible.

"They did more more In 20 minutes, Prince Harry, by speaking about what he'd been through and seeking help from therapy than the head of the Royal College of Psychiatrists had managed to do on the same field in 20 years.

"If this younger generation turn out to do stuff that is truly helping the people of the country in areas where they're not getting the help from perhaps the political establishment or elsewhere, maybe even raising issues that our increasingly scaremongering, obsessed media fails to raise responsibly, then their position as a force for good would be huge.