The echoes of Diana in Prince Harry

Oscar Wilde’s Algernon observed: ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.’

No man? Not quite. Prince Harry is in so many ways turning into a version of his mother. The first sentence of the joint new year statement from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex on their Archewell Foundation website declares: ‘I am my mother’s son.’ For those of us who were around when Diana was on the scene, there’s a pang of recognition here. Prince Harry is indeed his mother’s son. He’s what might have happened to Diana if this essentially English girl had been transported to California, had learned to think and speak woke, and had the redemptive down-to-earth aspects of her character removed.

Harry is what happens when royalty is crossed with celebrity and ends up as a new kind of privilege, without duties but with lots of attitude. Did you make it through the Archewell Audio Holiday Special? It was beyond awful — emotional effusion as a substitute for politics — but it was interesting in that it showed how royalty, unanchored, can be captured, lobotomised, capitalised and monetised. It could, you think, have been Diana’s fate.

Consider too those alternative awards that Harry and Meghan launched last month as a kind of rival honours list to the Queen’s. The checklist of progressive causes, from environmental stewardship to mental health, shows what might have been if Diana had lived to institutionalise her own value system.

This year Diana would have turned 60. Undoubtedly she’d still be beautiful, undoubtedly we’d still be obsessed by her, undoubtedly she’d still be the most fabulously glamorous and devoted grandmother.