Greg Bruce: Can’t we just leave Harry alone?

Prince Harry has not held back on details in his memoir Spare. Photo / CBS

I don’t care about Harry’s bombshell book and I didn’t want to watch the bombshell ITV interview in which he promoted it, but once news about it started landing in newspapers and websites all over the world, there was, very quickly, little room left to write about anything else.

The black hole of the royal family’s issues have now grown to the extent that even people who are deeply bored by royal “drama” are being drawn into its gravity. What I’m saying is: I was told to write about it.

I watched half of it on my phone in the dark, while putting my children to bed. This is time I would usually allocate to doomscrolling, so at least it wasn’t a total loss. I didn’t hate it, and even had real feelings at times, particularly when Harry was talking about his mother’s death and about the pain of his estrangement from his family.

I felt sorry for him, and became increasingly confused and appalled by the many, many anti-Harry comments that I knew had already appeared both online and in the tabloids and emerged from the mouths of enraged and unhinged talkback callers.

It’s fine to be pro- or anti-Harry, I guess - the uninformed judgment of others being among the strongest and most gratifying of human instincts - but one of the strongest strands of criticism appears to be from those who perceive Harry to be criticising his family in an inappropriate forum.

That is, from people criticising someone in public for criticising someone in public.

Leaving aside the hypocrisy of that position, it also represents an appalling lack of empathy. Harry fled his country out of fear, he’s estranged from his family, his brother once threw him on the ground, breaking his presumably very expensive necklace, and his mother’s horrific death was one of the epochal events of the 20th century.

“Ok,” you might say. “Life is suffering.” But where Harry’s suffering is definitively different to the rest of ours is that both he and his wife have both been repeatedly maligned, slandered and attacked in the press, online and probably many other places besides. If you’ve had this happen to you even once, you’ll know it doesn’t feel nice, and Harry and Meghan have had it fairly constantly for quite a long time now.

No quantity of Californian celebrity parties could make up for being openly and viciously hated by millions of human beings, and Jeremy Clarkson. All you can do is defend yourself but what do you do once that fails? All I know is I won’t be watching to find out.