Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The trouble with Prince Harry

(Credit: ITV)

The promotional clip trailing Prince Harry’s upcoming interview – which has kicked off the publicity trail for his forthcoming memoir Spare – made for sobering viewing. This is a man who actually seemed smarter as a young squaddie than he now does as an adult father of two. Back then, dressing up as a Nazi could be countered by a nice chat with the Chief Rabbi; ignorance could be corrected. There was always the chance of moral and cerebral – I won’t say intellectual – progression.

But now, with psycho-babble leaking from every orifice, there seems absolutely no way this apparently brain-washed Californian vessel will ever find its way back to anything resembling the path of common sense. Though Harry talks a lot about ‘growth’, this was a portrait of a lost young man for whom the getting of wisdom is about as likely as Meghan serving up a Full English (with builder’s tea) for breakfast.

For Harry to be the hero of his own story, those who oppose him in any way must be painted as villains, for where is the epic ‘journey’ if everyone involved is simply a well-meaning, flawed human, trying to do their best and sometimes getting it wrong?

The Sussexes’ thoroughly modern mantra is ‘Always complain, always explain’

Thus Prince Harry says the royals have shown ‘absolutely no willingness to reconcile’ with him and his wife, and that though he wants to ‘get my father back” and ‘get my brother back’ he requires ‘a family, not an institution’.

This is not the opening gambit of a man who sincerely wishes to muddle through to some sort of compromise with alienated relations; this is a man setting out his stall as Saint George come to slay an archaic dragon.

As well as having a hero complex – White Saviour, even, to coin a social justice phrase, when he starts on about rescuing his wife from the Evil Racist Tabloids – Harry exhibit symptoms of something worse.

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