OPINION
If there is one thing that we can say about Prince Harry, the sword of “truth”-swinging Montecito Muckraker who, I’m not sure if you know this, has a book to sell, this weekend is that he really puts the “d*ck” into “royal family”.
This week we learned far, far too much about titled “todgers” thanks to accidentally-on-sale-too-early copies of Harry’s tell-all Spare. Not only does the book inform us he and brother Prince William were indeed “snipped” as babies but that when he stood by his sibling’s side in 2011 for his wedding to former part-time accessories buyer Kate he had frostbitten phallus after a charity trek across the Arctic.
Like some Wodehouseian toff he had stupidly used Elizabeth Arden cream to try and mend his mangled member, only for him to be forced to actually consult a doctor because standing and shagging were proving ever-so-uncomfortable. (Just imagine the purloined bags of frozen peas nicked from the Buckingham Palace kitchens that I’m imagining he had been carefully applying to his crown jewels).
I hope you’re having fun with all this penis punnery – dear god, I am – but look beyond the wang witticisms and what has really gone in the last 48 hours or so is actually pretty grim.
When it comes down to it, what we have witnessed in the last two days is one man totally and utterly torching his closest relationships, most notably with his father King Charles and William, aka “Willy” as we have learnt the Prince of Wales is known.
While Buckingham and Kensington Palaces have staunchly refused to comment so far a friend of the elder prince has now spoken to The Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes to reveal what William really thinks of his blabbing brother and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
“It’s impossible to exaggerate the extent of [William’s] contempt for Harry and Meghan now,” the friend said.
“He absolutely hates them, and can’t believe that Harry would do this to him and to Kate. He feels utterly betrayed and deeply saddened by everything that has happened. There will be no way back after this.
“The thing that is so sad is that this was a tight family. Harry has blown it all up. For what? He has literally turned his entire family against him.”
Come May, should the Sussexes set the course in one of their rented private jets for London to attend Charles’ coronation, they should not, according to this chum, expect to be greeted with anything but the coldest of cold shoulders and will be stuck in the “cheap seats”.
In the most perfect example of British understatement, the friend said: “If they decided not to show their faces, no one would mourn their absence.”
![William ‘absolutely hates [Harry and Meghan], and can’t believe that Harry would do this to him and to Kate’. Photo / AP](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/LXRYXI4SYBGNHFG7IXVUWRT4YE.JPG?auth=b9421df69a4550dc746a681c56a8fe406a856a49918c3922a687c13ce31e36eb&width=16&height=11&quality=70&focal=1065%2C311&smart=false)
The Prince of Wales’ hard line stance is easy to understand given that Harry’s book would seem to paint him as an aggressive, willing-to-descend-to-fisticuffs bully.
In Spare, the former army captain reveals that William the (Dog Bowl) Conqueror physically assaulted him during an altercation in 2019 over Meghan, with William calling her “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”.
In a clip for one of Harry’s four – count ‘em – TV interviews set to air this week to promote The Duke of Sussex’s Big Book of Family Pain, he tells the UK’s Tom Bradby, “I saw this red mist in him. He wanted me to hit him back, but I chose not to.”
(Quick! Someone start strumming kumbaya …)
At the heart of this current mess is the simple fact that Harry has just enthusiastically humiliated his family, horrendously invading their privacy after railing for years against that very thing, and serving up a buffet-full of bitterness, largely and oh-so-ironically via the industry he has long hated, the media. (Funny how handy the Fourth Estate can be when a man has millions of copies of a book to shift and publishers to keep sweet.)
It’s not just what Harry has chosen to reveal that is so startling but the very fact that he seems to have set out to embarrass and demean the people he was once closest to namely, Willy, but his Pa and the “sister he never had”. (With relatives like these and all that).
And yet despite being the one who has just pantsed his family while the world watches on, slack-jawed, Harry somehow seems to be holding onto the absolutely deluded belief that his father and brother are the ones in the wrong. In one of the approximately 98 trailers for his interviews circulating he says oh-so-magnanimously, “the door is always open, the ball is in their court. I really hope that they are willing to sit down and talk about it.”
(While Harry has charged his brother’s camp with leaking to the press about him, interestingly he has not, as far as I’ve seen, responded to the revelation made by prominent Kiwi journalist Dan Wootton on Twitter that “Prince Harry’s communications team briefed the media (including me) during him and Meghan’s entire time in the Royal Family, right up to the Megxit story. It’s literally their job.”)
This weekend, short of Queen Camilla locking all three men in a room for 24 hours with the collected works of the Dalai Lama, a round of roast beef sandwiches and strict instructions not to come out until they have all made peace, it is impossible to imagine this breach ever being healed.
What this comes down to is two princes, both alike in dignity (ie none), who feel that the other has “betrayed” them. (Oh and a father slash King who once begged his sons, after his own father Prince Philip’s funeral in 2021, “Please, boys … don’t make my final years a misery.”)
And what that in turn means is that the feud narrative that has been omnipresent in headlines for years is now totally and utterly baked in and will only become more entrenched, more intractable and more of a distraction for the Palace.
Once Charles’ crowning is out of the way, will we ever see William and Harry in the same room again, let alone the same country?
Harry’s life is very clearly in California, given he can now energetically pedal up and down the length of the Pacific coast with his children, a simple pleasure that was, in his telling, denied to him during his emotionally malnourished childhood. (Never mind those pictures of Charles riding with his boys).
William meanwhile is busy preparing for his own turn with the St Edward’s topper in the years to come as he and Kate inch irrevocably ever closer to their destiny and finding their heads on one pence stamps.
What could possibly bring the brothers back together in the future but some sort of tragic event that requires the Archbishop of Canterbury out of mothballs.
And no matter whose side you might be on here, that is a tragedy.
Back in 2012, when Charles was cooking up his slimmed-down version of the royal family, the Kate Moss of monarchies if you will, it was always with both of his sons at the centre of things. In that year, when the late Queen took to the Palace balcony for her Diamond Jubilee, the handful of HRHs allowed out there were Philip, Charles, Camilla, the boys and Kate. The idea was that when Harry finally landed a girl willing to trade her freedom, autonomy and privacy for his love, a title and lifetime of summering in Scotland that she too would join the “slimmed down” ranks. Out the three couples would go into the world to enthusiastically fly the flag for King and country for the decades it would take until William and Kate’s own children were old enough to be allowed to open a Scout hall somewhere on their own.
That picture of one not-so-big family all happily pulling in the same direction, one that effortlessly projected unity, has obviously long gone out the window.
Not only did Megxit deny Charles this version of a trim working royal cadre but has made the House of Windsor synonymous with acrimony, anger and enough hurt feelings to fill Wembley stadium.
Can you imagine any of the parties involved here ever ceding an inch in this sorry situation? No, neither can I.
There is no better way to sum up where things stand than to finish with those famous lines from the prologue to Romeo & Juliet: “From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”
In 2023, this “new mutiny” looks here to stay.
Daniela Elser is a writer and royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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