Spare Us...

Harry’s Magical Misery Tour shows no signs of ending

So, here we are again. Prince Harry is telling us all about his life, how awful it is to be born a royal, how everyone has been vile to him and his wife, how he had to run to California to save himself and his family. Only this time, it’s not on Oprah. Or on Netflix. This time, it is in a book, a memoir called Spare (because — sad background music here — he is the spare to Prince William’s heir). 

Well, I’ve just finished the book — which is a cracking good read; full marks to ghostwriter J R Moehringer, who has translated Harry’s stream of consciousness into a tight narrative — and here are some thoughts. 

• Harry and Irony are complete strangers to one another. Here he is discussing his exit plan with his father: “I really hope and trust that we will be able to have further conversations without this getting into the public domain and becoming a circus.” And then, Harry proceeds to detail private conversations with his grandmother, his father and his brother, without the slightest awareness of the fact that he is, in fact, the ringmaster of this particular circus. 

The same Harry, who is livid that the Daily Mail published the letter Meghan wrote to her estranged father, reveals the full texts of the messages exchanged between his wife and sister-in-law as they discussed the fact that Princess Charlotte’s bridesmaid dress needed reworking. Meghan sued the Mail for publishing her letter and won; presumably Harry is sanguine about releasing these texts because he knows the future Queen of the United Kingdom won’t sue him. 

• Harry is clearly a glutton for punishment. After telling us what utter hell life in the royal institution was, he then insists that he never wanted out completely. He wanted to spend part of the year abroad making money while making flying visits back home to fulfil his royal duties. He is incandescent with rage when he is told that he can be either in or out — there is no royal half-way house. Even now, after he has written an entire book about how his life was utter misery in the royal goldfish bowl, he says he would quite like to work for the Commonwealth (which his Netflix show described as Empire 2.0). Does he not realise that would mean working with the same courtiers he despises so much that he can’t even call them by their names (dubbing them the Bee, the Fly, and the Wasp instead)?

• In Harry’s mind, his grandmother is a prisoner of her senior staff, who all seem to have it in for Harry. The Queen’s dresser, Angela Kelly, gives him the runaround when it comes to Meghan’s tiara (for the wedding). Her private secretary, Edward Young, scuppers a private meeting between Harry and the Queen. When Harry calls up to ask why the meeting was cancelled, she says something came up that she wasn’t aware of. Harry writes: “Her voice was strange. Can I pop in tomorrow then, Granny? Um. Well. I’m busy all week. At least, she added, that was what the Bee told her … Is he in the room with you, Granny? No answer.” The Queen as Hostage: now we really have heard it all. 

• Harry genuinely seems to believe that the monarchy has some sort of mysterious control of the tabloid press. When his father says “You must understand, darling boy, the Institution can’t just tell the media what to do!” Harry is disbelieving. “I yelped with laughter,” he writes. “It was like Pa saying he couldn’t just tell his valet what to do.” So the media is like Charles’ personal servant, and follows his every command? Wonder why Charles didn’t just order them not to carry transcripts of his famous ‘Tampongate’ conversation with Camilla, in that case. 

• Harry is genuinely besotted with his wife.  He fell deeply in love with Meghan. He believed that his family would fall in love with her too. When they failed to do so, a normal person may have made his peace with it and moved on. Harry simply cannot. That is the essential tragedy that lies at the heart of this story. The royals can’t bring themselves to love Meghan like he does. And he can’t bring himself to forgive them for failing to do so. 

Royal Progress

The latest season of The Crown is more fiction than fact; but great fun nonetheless

It’s more than a little disconcerting when a ‘period drama’ is about events that you remember all too clearly because you lived through them. Not only does it make you wonder how old you have become, if you are anything like me, you spend your entire time shouting at the TV screen, “No, no, no! That’s not how it happened at all!”

So, yes, that’s how I watched season four of The Crown, the Netflix series based loosely – and on the evidence of the latest episodes, very loosely indeed – on the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II and her family. And now that I have finished bingeing on the series, here are some of my entirely random thoughts and observations.

•       This season of the show owes more to writer Peter Morgan’s imagination than it does to history. Even in the earlier series, Morgan had played fast and loose with facts (Prince Philip was never implicated in the Profumo affair; and nor did he have an affair with a ballerina) but the plot remained true to essential facts. That is not
true of season four at all. Instead, Morgan cheerfully makes things up to move the plot forward, which has the effect of making even the events that are rooted in reality seem fictitious.

•       The nuanced portrayal of the royals in the previous seasons has given way to an almost caricature-like quality. The Queen is depicted as a cold, awkward woman, so distant from her children that she asks her courtiers to prepare notes on each child’s hobbies and interests before she meets them so that she is not ‘unprepared’. The sensitive Prince Charles of season three is nowhere to be found; instead the heir of the throne is a self-pitying figure consumed with jealousy of his young wife. Princess Margaret is reduced to a boorish presence with a complete lack of charm and grace. Suffice to say, it is difficult to recognize these characters as the same ones who populated The Crown’s universe in seasons two and three.

•        I am no fan of Margaret Thatcher but, honestly, the Iron Lady deserved better than the mincing, parody-like performance that Gillian Anderson offers in her rendering of the British Prime Minister. Anderson plays her like a hunched old woman, perpetually put upon, both weary and worn-down. You never ever get a hint of the force of nature that Thatcher, a truly transformative figure, was during this period. And that is truly a missed opportunity.

•       The best thing about the show is Emma Corrin’s performance as Princess Diana. She gets Diana’s charm and coyness just right, that slight tilt of the head as she looks up through her lashes at the world, that tremulous smile. But where the show fails – and this is Morgan’s failure rather than Corrin’s – is that it fails to capture the essence of Diana’s personality. Yes, she was naïve in some ways, but she was cunning and manipulative in many others. She may have started out as Shy Di but she soon learned to play the media like a maestro. There were myriad dimensions to her personality and to project her as a mere victim is to do her injustice.

•       Was 80’s fashion really as awful as it is portrayed in this series? I was a college kid, and then a young professional, during this decade and I always thought that we dressed reasonably stylishly. But I couldn’t help cringing at the young Lady Diana’s wardrobe in this series. All those piecrust collars, novelty cardigans, and
meringue-like gowns seem so hopelessly dated, even downright dowdy. That sent me scurrying back to my own photo albums of this period to revisit my own ‘look’ during this time. And you know what, the series has got this entirely right. The 80s really are the decade that fashion forgot.

•       And finally, is it fair to make a TV series about people who are still alive and susceptible to being hurt by the portrayal of their inner lives? How would Charles and Camilla feel, for instance, about being reduced to adulterous fornicators? And how would Prince William and Harry feel about watching their ‘mother’ with her head stuck down a toilet bowl? Is turning other people’s lives into our entertainment
ever a good idea? There are no easy answers; but it’s worth thinking about, anyway.