A new year, a new grudge. Or, at least, a new expression of an old one, which is pretty much all that we’ve heard from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex over the past few years.
Yet after the interminable six hours of score-settling that Netflix punished us with last month in the form of Harry and Meghan, the forthcoming publication of Prince Harry’s hugely anticipated (in some circles, anyway) memoir Spare is being promoted with two major interviews, one in Britain and one in the United States. Based on the previews that have been released, they promise to be every bit as attention-grabbing – or attention-seeking – as everything else that Harry has been involved with recently.
The British interview is being conducted with ITV’s Tom Bradby; the only broadcast journalist in this country, it would appear, who Harry trusts, because he and his brother developed a friendship with him in the nineties. In the brief, twenty-second preview that has been released – the full 90-minute show will be shown on Sunday evening – there is nevertheless a wealth of talking points.
Harry states ‘it never needed to be this way’ at the outset – a statement heroic in its understatement – and then the usual notes are hit, with added vitriol. ‘I want a family, not an institution’, he says gruffly, as he complains that ‘the Firm’ has shown ‘absolutely no willingness to reconcile’. Then there is a concluding hint at who his major targets will be. ‘I would like to get my father back…I would like to get my brother back.’ And no doubt we shall learn in a few days what dark forces are preventing such a thing from taking place.
By now, everyone has made up their mind about Harry and Meghan. These shows are not likely to change public opinion
The American show, in which the Duke is interviewed by Anderson Cooper, host of 60 Minutes on CBS, promises to tread similar territory. The preview clip features Cooper asking why Harry could not have left the Royal Family in a less high-profile fashion, to which he answers that ‘the briefings and the leakings and the planting of stories against me and my wife’ have made such a thing impossible. He then ridicules the family saying of ‘never complain, never explain’, on the grounds that ‘it’s just a motto’, and then, in perhaps the most intriguing disclosure so far, ridicules his family’s pliant attitude towards the media.
‘They will feed or have a conversation with a correspondent, and that correspondent will literally be spoon-fed information and write the story, and at the bottom of it, they will say they have reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment. But the whole story is Buckingham Palace commenting. So when we’re being told for the past six years, ‘we can’t put a statement out to protect you’, but you do it for other members of the family, there becomes a point when silence is betrayal.’
By now, everyone has made up their mind about Harry and Meghan. These shows – undoubtedly full of headline-grabbing statements that they shall be – are not likely to change public opinion.
But the idea of Cooper and Bradby challenging the Duke on many of the statements that he has made and suggesting – in a way that Oprah Winfrey undoubtedly did not, let alone the Netflix show – that there might be another side to the story than the couple’s carefully stage-managed ‘truth’ is an intriguing one. Both men are veteran journalists who have not earned their reputations by being PR merchants, and it could well be that, underneath the gloss, greater revelations emerge than Harry, and his wife, might have bargained on. Either way, the interviews should be considerably more gripping than Harry and Meghan, and, blessedly, a great deal shorter, too.
Comments