Cornwall, England. The need to turn Prince Harry is addictive is fiction. If you are a monarchist, that is what it is for. For the past few years, he has been trying to rescue himself from the imaginary portrait of Britain. Most recently, he was in court in London.
For more than seven hours in two days, Harry testified accusing the Mirror Group Newspapers of illegally obtaining information via various means, including phone hacking – the modern version of ear-to-the-door butler.
He is not the first royal to testify: Anne Boleyn was tried and executed in 1536. In 1891, the future Edward VII testified that an acquaintance had cheated at baccarat. But he is the first to go to court to seek revenge for his life. For now, he’s targeting the media — he’s also after Associated Newspapers and News Group Newspapers, publishers of British tabloids The Daily Mail and The Sun — but eventually it will reach the rest of the empire.
Harry is determined to define himself, and not to be, as described by Hilary Mantel in her essay “Royal Bodies,” a “panda”: “expensive to keep and ill-suited to any modern setting.” In this refusal to be the Prince that Britain wanted or deserved, he has become something much more interesting.
Like his mother, Princess Diana, Harry has been an instrument his entire life. The Windsor family is Britain’s national drama, and he was cast into the role at birth — long before he could consent to it — of shadowing the light of his brother William. The newspapers narrated his childhood; the love affairs of his parents, the nocturnal calls and the hatred. His mother was photographed as she lay dying in a Paris tunnel. Harry was filmed as he, aged 12, walked behind her coffin, his presence necessary for him to protect his father’s reputation. Not even the British media would recriminate an unfaithful husband in front of his son.
As a teenager and young adult, any and all of Harry’s mistakes were either pointed out or leaked. When he smoked cannabis, his father allegedly arranged a visit to a detox center for heroin addicts as a “brief, sharp shock,” and then the news leaked out and his father was portrayed as his savior. . Harry slightly fractured his thumb and made headlines.
Then he married Meghan Markle, and when the British media made her a target of abuse—which happens to all women who marry into family members, but this was a racist, classist, xenophobic twist—he did something sensible and loving to his new family: he left Britain. Since then her redemption has been sequential.
There was the interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which they described his family’s concern about the color of their unborn child’s skin. There was a documentary on Netflix. There was his memoir, “In the Shadow,” in which he described how his father sat on his bed to tell him that his mother had died. Now there is the litigation, and in time, I hope, the day you give up your title, accept that some things cannot be reformed, and redeem yourself with the application of self-knowledge.
It’s addictive, like I said.
I read “In the Shadow” as a portrayal of an abusive childhood and an act of denunciation, but most of the British media did not. He was mocked for writing about a youthful sexual encounter—how rude to mention, now we must find the woman!
Even to the sympathetic, Harry can seem ridiculous. He’s a panda, and pandas don’t usually defend themselves. For now, he believes that he can be meaningfully feminist and anti-racist while embodying the inherited wealth and power of a royal duke, which is absurd.
But Harry is brave and has already found his battlefield. I think if he could, he would kill it all: the monarchy, the media, all the horrible dancing.
We did not have your consent. For that, he will have revenge on him.
By: intelligence/Tanya Gold
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6763215, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-15 22:00:06
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