A month before the 2016 Dean Street Townhouse drinks that would change the course of royal history, drinks involving Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and a certain Suits actress, he granted a rare interview to the Sunday Times’ royal editor Roya Nikkhah.
During the sit down conducted at Kensington Palace, and ahead of him travelling to Florida
for the Invictus Games, Harry said: “I’m in this privileged position and I will use it for as long as I can, or until I become boring, or until George ends up becoming more interesting”.
That George reference created lots of noise – it felt hugely refreshing to hear a spare seemingly so sanguine and at peace with what lay ahead for him. (Let’s all enjoy a wry ‘hah!’ shall we?)
While George is a long way off being “more interesting” than his uncle, what Harry told Nikkhah next is spooky.
The duke said: “There’s nothing worse than going through a period in your life where you’re making a massive difference and then suddenly, for whatever reason it is – whether it’s media or the public perception of you – you drop off. You want to make a difference but nobody’s listening to you.”
Talk about accidentally manifesting something. Harry, circa 2024, is a man who has “dropped off”.
Call it irony or a cruel twist of fate or proof we really are “the stars’s tennis balls” but the one thing that Harry clearly feared back then has ended up coming true, only it was not George or his inevitable slide down the line of succession that caused it. This was his own
handiwork.
Since taking himself off the royal chessboard, he has yet to launch any large scale, meaty
projects that can equal the sort of work he was doing under the palace umbrella.
This month, Harry and wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex undertook their first post-Megxit home-brand royal tour, travelling to Nigeria in support of his extraordinary Invictus Games. It was the sort of rip-roaring success of a foreign sortie that courtiers must go to sleep fantasising about.
Harry might no longer get to have the Westminster Abbey bells rung on his birthday but for his work on Invictus, he bloody well deserves it.
But. Put the sporting event to one side – an event it should be noted that was incubated and launched under the auspices (and financial support) of William, Harry and Kate’s then shared Royal Foundation – and what exactly has Harry done that even vaguely begins to match up since then?
More broadly, in the last four years since ditching his royal platform, has Harry continued to make a “massive difference”?
Along with the duke’s continued, unswerving support of Invictus, his achievements since landing in the US have tended to be far less large-scale and high-profile. He and Meghan, via their Archewell Foundation, have added in causes such as combating misinformation, making online spaces safer, mental health and community good works to their mainstay issues (mental health, veterans and gender equality). Let the record show, all of this work is absolutely valuable and laudable.
The sticking point here is scale and impact.
In terms of non-Invictus work, does 2024 Harry still matter as much as 2016 Harry? Does his voice still carry the same sway and reach as far? Does the Duke of Sussex still have the same
power to change lives and to help in the way that he has in the past?
Now that he has gotten all the freedom he could ever have dreamed of, has that come at the expense of still being able to make a “massive difference”?
It’s hard to look at the 39-year-old father-of-two now and to not think that the very concern he explained to Nikkhah back in 2016 has ended up coming true.
In part, that’s down to logistics – the money, the staff and the incredible power to have people take your calls and answer your emails when it’s from a royal address are hard to beat. Lacking any official position, vast wodges of funding and a long-established office full of experienced hands, Harry is on something of a back foot.
But there is a bigger existential question here too. If the monarchy has not quite worked out what do with spares (besides letting them plunge headfirst into vats of claret or send them off to have a go on the crusades), then no one, not even Harry it seems, has quite worked out what to do with a spare who has taken himself off to go freelance in California.
2024 Harry is a man who, having emancipated himself from the pinstriped prison of royal life, has found himself struggling to find his footing and a redefined, solid public identity.
Still, that’s not to say if he had stayed in the UK things would be perfect either, because for the Duke of Sussex, there is a bit of a quality of damned-if-does, damned-if-he-doesn’t element here too.
If he and Meghan had remained in the UK and if King Charles had never had to learn what a
‘Netflix’ was then the duke would now be facing an oblique future also. If Buckingham Palace has a manila folder marked ‘ideas for what to do with spares’ tucked away in a forgotten filing cabinet somewhere, it would seem to be empty save for a couple of dead flies, a post-it note with a big question mark and an Annabel’s drinks receipt from 1984.
This puzzle, of what to do with spares, is one that Crown Inc better hurry up and find an answer to before Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis arrive in adulthood.
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Speaking to the Telegraph last year, he said that “though William and I have talked about it once or twice, and he has made it very clear to me that his kids are not my responsibility, I still feel a responsibility knowing that out of those three children, at least one will end up like me, the spare. And that hurts, that worries me.”
Back in 2016, the duke foretold and foresaw that a day would come when he no longer mattered in the same way and to the same degree. If only he knew how right he would accidentally turn out to be.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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2024-05-18 20:03:32Z
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