Remember the Heads Together campaign? It was back in 2017. Prince William, his wife Kate and his brother Prince Harry, who’d recently begun dating a conspicuously woke actress called Meghan Markle, launched a charitable endeavour to raise awareness about mental health. The princes gave interviews in which they ‘opened up’ about their struggles. Such public emoting made fuddy-duddy monarchists nervous, yet a new generation of royal PR operatives and suck-ups saw the future. The royals were appealing to a younger audience, cleverly rebranding the monarchy for a new age in which it is OK to not be OK. Move over, stiff-lipped oldies, the Windsors were moving on.
Then Harry married Meghan, the brothers fell out, and everyone went crazy. Fast forward to spring 2021, the middle of a global pandemic, and Harry and Meghan are in California, gassing to Oprah Winfrey about ‘their journey’. They’re whingeing about how the monarchy has let them down, how they’ve been silenced and victimised. Standing in a coop with Oprah, among the chickens she and hen-pecked Harry rescued from a battery farm, Meghan is quite seriously comparing herself to the Little Mermaid, the Disney cartoon character: ‘She falls in love with the prince and because of that she loses her voice. But in the end she gets her voice back.’
Harry and Meghan’s parade of self-pity is maddening — that’s the point. People like watching the incredibly privileged talk about how difficult their lives are. And once famous people start treating television appearances as counselling sessions, they can’t stop. That’s how Hollywood rolls. Harry and Meghan may be insanely annoying, but in a world in which celebrity and therapy are king, their logic is infallible. Their Oprah tell-all is a natural endpoint to Prince William’s Heads Together heart-to-heart with Lady Gaga. Except, of course, it’s not the end, because Harry and Meghan are now their own self-perpetuating media brand, a transatlantic rival to the House of Windsor’s PR machine.
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