Prince William and Prince Harry at Kensington Palace, London, in 2021. Photo / AP
Prince William and Prince Harry at Kensington Palace, London, in 2021. Photo / AP
OPINION:
Ah, the grudge, as baked into the royal family as the Jammy Dodger, the Highland Games and buying gin by the crate.
The Queen Mother never forgave Wallis Simpson aka the Duchess of Windsor for making off with Edward VIII and lumping her poor Bertie (George VI) with the crown.
Diana, Princess of Wales used to call her Kensington Palace bete noir Princess Michael of Kent the “U-Boat Commander”, a reference to the Australian-raised royal’s Nazi father.
And Prince Philip? He never relented and got over a still-married Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York trotting off to the south of France for some topless frolicking in the Mediterranean sunshine with her, cough, business adviser.
Today, the reigning (boom tish) royal antagonists are obviously Prince William, Scourge of Dog Bowls, and Prince Harry, a man who has done more to set back the men’s jewellery industry than anyone else.
Really, it’s a point that hardly needs making given that Harry devoted much of his and wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s six-hour Netflix self-pitying outing and his memoir Spare to really landing his brother in it.
But it turns out that there was one particular passage and of all the criticisms, brickbats and that one reference to William’s “alarming baldness, more advanced than my own” which reportedly upset the elder royal the most.
Was it that time that the Prince of Wales resorted to thuggish means and clocked Harry during an altercation in 2019? Or that his office had leaked negative stories about the Sussexes to the venomous press?
Prince William, Prince of Wales and Catherine, Princess of Wales arrive for a visit to Royal Liverpool University Hospital. Photo / Getty Images
Oh no.
The Harry revelation that “gobsmacked” the 40-year-old father of three was his sibling revealing the role that he and then-girlfriend Kate Middeton played in his wearing a Nazi costume to a fancy dress party in 2005.
In Spare, Harry writes that they had “both howled” when he tried on the get-up because it was “worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous!”
No one was chuckling when the Sun published a photo of Harry, then aged 20, wearing the offensive costume, or when he was hauled over the coals by the media, religious leaders and every commentator worth their Fleet Street expense account for his deeply regrettable choice.
(The timing of this could not have been worse given that it came only weeks before Holocaust Memorial Day and that the same month marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with Queen Elizabeth set to host a royal reception for survivors and World War II veterans.)
The problem was that while Harry got his knuckles painfully and all-too publicly rapped, William and Kate’s part in this shameful chapter, until now, had largely been obscured.
Now a chum of William’s has told the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes that what most dismayed the future King was “the realisation that Harry has been nurturing this grievance for almost two decades”.
“It just demonstrates how utterly f**ked the relationship is that Harry resorted to dragging up this thing that literally happened almost 20 years ago. William was completely gobsmacked by it,” the pal told the Beast.
(It’s worth noting that Sykes reports that “the friend did not suggest the story … was untrue”.)
What’s so intriguing here is the question of why this particular damaging disclosure, in a veritable sea of damaging disclosures, was the one that got under William’s skin to such a degree?
One possibility is that it involves Kate, now obviously his wife of nearly 12 years and the Princess of Wales.
Prince William, Catherine, Princess of Wales, Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex wave to members of the public at Windsor Castle. Photo / AP
While Harry and Meghan have both made the Princess out to be a bit of a cold fish who failed to dispense hugs or share lip gloss with appropriate enthusiasm, her involvement in the Nazi uniform escapade is not just unflattering but actually harmful.
Kate might have got plenty of bad press over the years for her penchant for the Caribbean and, for a while anyway, a loose understanding of the concept of “work”, but this costume detail represented a much more serious charge.
Another possibility is that the Harry costume revelation taps into the most combustible issue the royal family has to contend with right now: Race.
In 2021, Meghan shocked Oprah and the world when she said there had been “concerns and conversations” about her unborn baby’s skin colour, a comment that was globally interpreted as an accusation of racism.
(Earlier this year Harry told US 60 Minutes that the comment has been misinterpreted, saying the “British press, what they turned it into, was not what … it was.” Strange then that the couple said nothing back then, given they have been quick to correct erroneous reports at other times, nor did they call out the United States publications such as the New York Times, which reported on “allegations of racism from within the royal family”, or the Washington Post, which ran a story about “how the royal family’s racism lingers.”)
Then came William and Catherine’s ill-fated tour of the Caribbean in 2022, their first major official jaunt post Black Lives Matter.
Sadly it looked as if the couple had spent much more time packing their collection of tropics-appropriate co-ordinating cotton casuals than tracking the shifting political winds. When they landed, ready to lather on the SPF and wave like pros, they instead came face-to-face with not only the ghosts of Britain’s colonial past but the royal family’s 17th century ties to the slave trade.
Prince William and Prince Harry at Kensington Palace, London, in 2021. Photo / AP
Just before Christmas last year, the royal family found themselves in a situation that has become familiar - facing charges of racism. What should have been a slam dunk for Queen Camilla, hosting a Buckingham Palace reception for anti-domestic violence campaigners, instead sparked a new crisis after charity organiser Ngozi Fulani revealed that Lady Susan Hussey, William’s godmother, had asked her, “Where do you really come from?”
Within hours, Lady Susan fell on her sword and left her role as a lady of the royal household and William’s office put out a statement “racism has no place in our society”.
Against this backdrop, the Spare Nazi anecdote takes on a much more serious hue, coming at a time when not only the Waleses but the monarchy are trying to fight the image of them as prejudiced, as hangovers from the colonial era with some objectionable views on race.
What William’s shock and upset at this revelation might suggest is that he has, at least, worked out that there is no other issue with quite the same generational or social media purchase than race right now. What he clearly hasn’t is how to effectively counter the lingering fug of bigotry that has settled over Buckingham and Kensington Palaces.
King Charles has been trying, having, in the past two months alone, danced the Hora at a Jewish community centre, hosted a palace reception for British East and Southeast Asian communities, visited a London centre for African culture and heritage and spent time with the Bangladeshi community in east London during which he took his shoes off inside a mosque to reveal a hole in his sock. (Kinda endearing, no?)
All of this might be well-intentioned, but this sort of approach runs the risk of looking dangerously like lip service when the royal family have yet to do anything like publicly address the monarchy’s historical role in the slave trade. Sure, it was 400-odd years ago, but it was called the Royal African Company for goodness’ sake.
William and Catherine especially need to get a handle on the race issue and fast, not least because the Sussexes are reported to have potentially signed a multiple-book deal with publisher Penguin Random House.
One last thing that I think we can say with a fair degree of confidence: There will be fancy dress parties in Prince George, Princess Charlotte or Prince Louis’ future.
Daniela Elser is a writer and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
