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There was one particular moment Prince Harry‘c 60 minutes interview with Anderson Cooper on Sunday night when the prince felt compelled to set the record straight. When Cooper said the royals’ family dynamic sounds like “Game of Thrones no dragons,” Harry first said he had never seen the HBO show.
“But there are definitely dragons,” added the prince, “And it’s the third party again, which is the British press.”
Harry then said a few sentences that sounded a bit like a statement of purpose for the extended media tour accompanying his memoir, spare, which will officially hit stores on Tuesday. “At the end of the day, without the British press as part of it, we’d probably still be quite a dysfunctional family, as many are,” he said. “But at the heart of it is family, without a doubt. I’m really looking forward to getting that family element back. I look forward to having a relationship with my brother. I look forward to bonding with my father and other family members.”
It might seem a little odd that he’s hoping airing some of the family’s dirty laundry will help him get back into good graces, but earlier in the interview Harry offered some insight into his logic. The royals read the tabloids at breakfast, he explained, and he puts his message where they can’t miss it. “Now, trying to speak a language you may understand,” said the prince, “I will sit here and tell you the truth with the words that come out of my mouth, instead of using some other, unnamed source to feed into lies or narrative about a tabloid media that is literally radicalizing its readers to potentially harm my family, my wife, my children.
Over the past few years, Harry has embarked on a journey in media criticism, from his collaboration with the online activist group Color of Change in 2020 to his 2021 tenure on the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Abuse. During Harry and Meghan, last month on the Netflix docu-series, he spent part of his time as a talking head explaining the relationship between the palace, its residents and the Royal Company, the press that covers them. Now, on the media tour for the book, he’s applying some of the information he learned in those roles to his own life.
For Harry, understanding the motivations of the news media helped him understand why Meghan’s time in the royal family went so badly wrong, but it also illuminated some of the reasons why his relationship with his family was dysfunctional even before she entered the picture. In his conversation with Cooper and in his 90-minute meeting with Tom Bradby, which aired in the UK earlier in the day, he criticized both Queen Consort Camilla and William on their relationship with the press for various reasons. Camilla, Harry claims, is spreading the word about him in an attempt to improve her own reputation. William, he told Bradby, never took the chance to get to know Meghan Markle because he was too distracted by the stories about her in the tabloids.
Spare apparently begins with a description of the night Charles told Harry that Princess Diana had died, and in his interview with Bradby he said he had some trouble remembering things that had happened in his life before that. In both interviews, he recalled hearing that the events leading up to his mother’s death were like a “bicycle chain,” a series of interconnected factors that set an event in motion. “If you remove one of them [links] the end result was not going to happen,” he explained. It is also clear from his extensive discussion of his pilgrimage to the tunnel where she died, and his close scrutiny of the paparazzi’s pictures of the crash site, that he has chosen to view the media as the only link in this chain that actually can do something.
By focusing on this relationship, it seems that he is trying to find a way to forgive his family, internally, for not supporting him in his time of need. As for whether or not it will work, it’s too early to tell, and when Harry told Cooper he didn’t think he’d ever return to royal life, he admitted he didn’t hold out too much hope. So think of his return to the spotlight this month as a bit of catharsis for Harry himself, an attempt to show off some persistent personal growth.
I’m listening Vanity Fair’s DYNASTY podcast now.
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