It’s been interesting, to say the least, to watch royalists fumble and scramble to criticize Prince Harry’s $1.5 million donation to a worthy British charity focused on helping vulnerable British youths. We’ve already heard variations of: donating to charity is against royal protocol; why is Harry publicizing a donation if he wants privacy; he’s only trying to improve his image because of the emotional-support polls! It strikes me that absolutely none of these dumbasses has admitted that they were lying in all of their palace-encouraged reporting over the Sussexes’ finances. How can Harry be broke if he’s personally donating a seven figure sum to charity? Which brings me to this Royalist piece in the Daily Beast, in which Tom Sykes magically skips the acknowledgement of Harry’s flush finances and rages about how Harry only made his money by selling family “secrets.”
Prince Harry returned to the U.K. this week, ostensibly to promote several charitable causes close to his heart. Unfortunately for him, all anyone in the media wanted to talk about was whether he would see his brother or dad during the trip, which runs until Thursday. The problem was graphically illustrated when Harry himself joked about the difficulties of “challenging” sibling relationships at the WellChild Awards in London on Monday night. The off-hand quip was soon leading royal news feeds around the world.
The Duke of Sussex, of course, would have liked nothing better than all the attention to be on the boy he was talking to, 17-year-old Declan Bitmead. Declan is a hero. He suffered a horrific reaction to what should have been routine antibiotic treatment that resulted in him losing 96 percent of his skin. He was cared for in a specialist burns clinic while his skin slowly recovered; it’s still very fragile, and he has also lost much of his sight.
But Harry really should have known what would happen if he raised the subject of family dynamics while chatting to him. Asking if his brother “drove him mad” while noting that sharing the same school with your brother—as he did with Prince William—can make it “more challenging” was an unforced error. It felt like Harry fell into the trap of trying so hard not to talk about something that you end up blurting it out at the worst moment possible (in Harry’s case, this means in front of the cameras).
What was supposed to be a joke to put Declan at ease became an invitation for the global media to rehash the details of Harry’s resentment of growing up in his sibling’s shadow, or William once telling him to pretend he didn’t know him at school at Eton. And here lies Harry’s curse. His family feud sold spectacularly well for him. Now he can’t unsell it.
Having written books and produced films that monetized the conflict, he now finds himself unable to turn the interest off, no matter how much he might want his philanthropy—such as donating more than a million dollars from his own pocket to youth services on Tuesday—to be the story. While his seven-figure check drew praise in some quarters, others derided it as a self-serving exercise in hypocrisy, noting that it was funded by the very memoir and Netflix deals that tore his family apart.
For all his professed reverence for his grandmother—he made a point of visiting her grave on Monday—it is hard to forget that she was explicitly opposed at the so-called Sandringham Summit in 2020 to Harry and Meghan being “half in, half out” of the royal family. Yet here he is, living off commercial deals while seeking to resume the charitable patronage of a working royal. It is precisely the hybrid role Elizabeth forbade.
First of all, while there was coverage of Harry’s offhand remark about “challenging” brothers, it was a minor story which got secondary play to all of the other stories about Harry’s visit. Keep in mind, nearly every British outlet is doing a live-blog of Harry’s visit, and royal reporters are trailing Harry, not William. Judging solely from the volume of coverage, Harry is being treated like the most important royal, with everyone hanging on his every word and action. It’s insane. Also bonkers? “Living off commercial deals while seeking to resume the charitable patronage of a working royal…” For the millionth time, “charity work” is not exclusively royal. Anyone can serve, service is universal.
Incidentally, the second half of this Royalist piece is all about whether Charles will meet Harry, and how Charles has brought in a seasoned diplomat named Sir Simon Rycroft as his deputy private secretary. Rycroft “is thought to have been brought in at least partly to smooth tensions with Harry that [Clive] Alderton has exacerbated.” Then Sykes mentions once again the real story buried in all of the Harry-Charles speculation: that Charles and William barely speak, that all of their communications run through third-parties and that their relationship is “fragile” to say the least. They constantly make it sound like Charles has to walk on eggshells around Huevo.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
