A question that public relations advisers ask their clients as they weigh up interventions is: what is the outcome that you want? Prince Harry seemed to be shifting in his interview this week with ITV’s Tom Bradby towards a kind of truth and reconciliation commission.
There was a softening of the most damaging accusation to emerge from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview: Meghan Markle’s assertion that there had been “concerns and conversations” about the colour of their son’s skin. Prince Harry said the royal family was not racist after all. It was, he said, the British press that had stirred this up. If he is mellowing towards his family, his war against the British press is increasingly kinetic.
Prince Harry loathes the tabloids and they are not keen on him. He lobs his accusations, they heckle and fact-check him back. The best thing for everyone would be to leave each other alone. We are at another moment of reckoning between the tabloids and the royals.
Looking back, I can see there was a hideous dance of death between Diana, Princess of Wales, and the global media. August tends to be a quiet month for news but in 1997 the pictures piled up on the Telegraph production desk. Diana’s life was so eventful: she was a latter-day Jackie O, glimpsed on yachts with a playboy, in Paris, and then, unbelievably, gone.
I was deputy editor at the Daily Telegraph at the time, when the then editor Charles Moore and I burst into a meeting of Fleet Street editors brandishing a letter from Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother, in which he denounced the behaviour of the tabloid press; Moore too felt strongly it needed to be restrained. The tabloid editors patiently explained there was collusion on all sides. The royals, like politicians and actors, they argued, used and needed the press when it suited them to keep the public onside.
I also remember the princes’ wretched recognition that they had to live with the predatory press. A truce was negotiated and it has held pretty well until now.
I observed Prince Harry in the hopeful stage of the romance, when in 2017 he guest-edited BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, just as he introduced Markle to a Sandringham Christmas. I was then editor of the programme. He spilled over with ideas and plans, warm-blooded, overtly political and impetuous. He demanded that we drop the newspaper reviews from the programme as a show of contempt for the press. I remember telling the head of news at the time, James Harding, that it was a very good thing Prince Harry had a professional and dedicated team of advisers to rein him in. They stepped in, for instance, to suggest that he turn down my request for the Queen to do the programme’s racing tips.
The person who exercised the greatest duty of care towards Prince Harry was Jason Knauf, who later went to work for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and who was denounced by Markle in the Netflix programme as siding with the enemy. If Prince Harry had followed Knauf’s advice, he might have avoided the rift. Knauf, who has kept his counsel except when summoned by the courts to give an account of events, only once remarked sorrowfully to me that Meghan and Harry were driving themselves mad by spending their days scrolling social media. They may be obsessed by media coverage, but if they desire to control it they are doomed to be disappointed.
Prince Harry asks for transparency so that any information comes from his “own lips” rather than being crafted by public relations people.
Princess Diana also decided to “own her story” through Andrew Morton’s book and her later interview with Martin Bashir, believing, as Prince Harry now does, that the more the public knows, the more sympathetic they will be.
But with revelation come inadvertent truths and awkward questions. The press is a rough old beast but it can spot when something doesn’t add up. I was struck that the contents of Prince Harry’s book Spare and his related interviews confirmed much of the media speculation about the deterioration of his relationship with his brother. It was just worse than any of us imagined. I remember a similar phenomenon with the Andrew Morton book. The tabloids reported relentlessly on rifts within the royal marriage, while the royalist Daily Telegraph in particular wishfully protested that they were exaggerated.
The clues in recent years that something was rotten in the House of Windsor included the announcement of the two princes moving into separate residences and offices, and the discomfort of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as Markle appeared to recast her own role as big-stage Hollywood activism.
Absorbing Prince Harry’s accounts of slights and wrongs, we can spot, as he cannot, the other side of it. Indeed, it is worth comparing the Sussexes’ interviewers, Oprah Winfrey and Tom Bradby: Winfrey’s elaborate horror at the scale of Markle’s victimhood; Bradby’s more English puzzled ruefulness as he asked repeatedly: “What was that all about?” Why the torrent of grievance?
Clearly, Markle misunderstood what she was marrying into. The protocols of monarchy, including public silence and hierarchy, were ridiculous to her. At last in the US they have achieved top billing. Prince Harry’s royal memoir broke sales records on publication. The Sussexes know their market.
As for Prince Harry’s allegation that his stepmother was the arch-manipulator of the press, that is poignantly unfair. For many years she had a terrible time with the media. The press published sexual telephone conversations between her and the then Prince of Wales. She has almost no personal vanity and much loyalty and stoicism. She and Prince Charles had one wish, which was eventually to marry. The strategy of their press adviser Mark Bolland was to make the British people feel comfortable with that. Even Prince Harry says that he would not want to deny his father love.
The pain, drama and emotion of Prince Harry’s book will pass if he and Markle are prepared to enjoy their California enlightenment rather than sit in judgment, and if the principles of monarchy are allowed to reassert themselves.
He tries to separate his “family”, whom he is perhaps willing to forgive, from the “institution” of which they are all prisoners. The protocols must sometimes be infuriating. But it is the institution which matters.
If we strip the royal family of the symbolism of monarchy we would soon tire of them. Our constitutional monarchy exists by public consent; it needs and has to be reported on, but if we let too much daylight in, we lose the mystery and the appeal.
Prince Harry understood as an army officer that you serve King and Country, not family, not governments. He says that he and his brother took different paths after the terrible death of their mother. One led to therapy, the other to duty. Prince William has guarded Princess Diana’s legacy by looking to the future, beyond his mother’s phase of wounded destruction.
The institution is there for the long term. This, King Charles knows. He chooses to speak up for conservation, faith, the environment and Shakespeare. It is what lies beyond the present. I recently joined the board of the British Council, whose patron was Queen Elizabeth. It also speaks to peoples across the world through cultural influence. The coronation in May, with all its symbolism, will remind us of what is lasting.
Sarah Sands is a former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, the Evening Standard and BBC Radio 4’s Today programme
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