"The Sussexes have failed to learn from the mistakes, or the strengths, of the late princess - Did Meghan see a Diana-shaped hole in the monarchy and try to fill it?
There was a sense of déjà vu, don’t you think, about Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey? At least for those of us who can remember Diana, Princess of Wales, baring her soul to Martin Bashir in 1995. For a man who says that he fears that history is repeating itself in respect of his mother and his wife, Prince Harry went out of his way to make the same mistakes as Diana. She regretted (though never repudiated) her Panorama interview, but here we are with Oprah, Harry and Meghan: the same again, only more so.
Indeed, Harry observed in the interview that his mother would be “angry and sad” that he felt he had to leave the Royal family, but he “felt her presence” and observed that “she saw it coming”. Actually, I’m not sure that she could have foreseen quite how completely her son would be dominated by an American wife who has, remarkably, tried to replicate the Diana story. That is to say: neglect by the Royal family, cruelty on the part of the Prince of Wales and cold shouldering by the Palace establishment. There was, in fact, something uncanny about the way in which Meghan presented herself in the same light as her husband’s mother, though Diana never quite got around to comparing herself with the Little Mermaid.
Actually, a useful preparation for the Oprah interview would have been a viewing of the brilliant documentary, Diana: In Her Own Words, on Netflix, in which the princess speaks of her experiences in a series of secret tape recordings made in 1991 to help the journalist Andrew Morton write her biography.
It makes you wonder: did Meghan see a Diana-shaped hole in the monarchy and try to fill it? Is that what Prince Harry wanted? His elder brother plainly recognised that he needed emotional stability – and Kate, with her solid middle-class family, provided it – but Harry sought out a woman as emotionally needy as his mother. Does he see himself as “saving” his wife because he was not able to protect his mother?
Harry does seem to replicate his mother in his impulsiveness – evident in the whole Megxit drama – and his willingness to act first and rationalise his actions later. At 36, he is now the same age as she was when she died. Like Diana, he has problems with Prince Charles (though it is a little rich for this extravagant pair to complain about him cutting off financial support). Like her, he has an easy, popular touch. Like her, he wants to be outside the Royal family but remain somehow royal, and to create his own idea of public service. It’s possible, in fact, that Prince Harry was already primed to replicate his mother’s divorce from the Royal family, but as he admitted to Oprah, it is unlikely to have happened without his wife.
For her part, Meghan is now creating herself in Diana’s image of the emotionally fragile outsider – except with an added race component – and selling her reverse fairy tale, in which she “rescues” her prince from his family, to the US audience at which the Oprah interview was squarely directed. Certainly, the couple want to be free of the constraints of royalty, but like Diana, they do not want to be ignored.
However – how to put this? – what came across from Diana’s account of herself (admittedly when she was at a low ebb), is that she was truthful in saying how badly, or insensitively, she was treated. Her aloneness prior to her wedding, her husband’s undemonstrativeness, brusqueness and infidelity, her steep learning curve in the position in which she found herself so soon after her 20th birthday, her self-harm and emotional fragility; all that rang true because it was true.
Much of her daughter-in-law’s account of her victim status to Oprah does not. We may feel sympathy for her assertion that she felt suicidal, but many of Meghan’s crises appear to have happened mostly inside her own head. What’s evident is that there was a curious clash of her expectations about royal life with the reality for which she seemed almost wilfully unprepared.
Granted, no one can possibly be prepared for the avalanche of publicity that greets a beautiful and photogenic woman marrying into the Royal family, and social media amplifies every criticism to a level unimaginable in Diana’s day, but it doesn’t quite wash that Meghan was not offered support had she been willing to take it, or that the Royal family had learnt nothing from the experience with Diana.
What was evident even on the outside, was that the Queen did her best to make her grandson’s wife welcome, as did other members of the family. Alas, no one appears to have pointed out to Meghan the difference between marrying the heir and marrying the spare. It was not Diana’s role she was inheriting, it was Fergie’s.
But the great difference between Diana and her son and his wife – apart from the obvious, that as an earl’s daughter, she talked the same language as the Royal family – is that Diana ultimately had the good of that family at heart. That remark about Charles and William being trapped inside the institution is that of a man who doesn’t really mind what damage he causes it.
What would Diana have made of her son’s wife? She may not have been academic but she was intelligent and shrewd, with an intuitive understanding of people. I fancy she would have taken the measure of Meghan at a hundred paces; certainly she would have recognised a ruthlessness and manipulativeness that escaped her son. In Diana, Meghan would have met her match.
There’s another parallel between Diana and Harry. After the Panorama interview, the nation was divided between Team Di and Team Charles – and I should say that on the grounds of his affair with Camilla, I found myself on Diana’s side. It was a cultural divide, between those like Nicholas Soames, a friend of Charles, who more or less thought Diana unhinged, and those on the princess’s side who saw her as an inspiring woman who had taken her life into her own hands, on her own terms.
Now it has happened again… the country split between those who think Harry and Meghan are narcissistic, self-regarding, extravagant and ungrateful, and those who feel that they are victims of racism and snobbery and deserve praise for their emotional literacy and frankness. As a friend observed, the couple are like a national Sorting Hat, dividing everyone by house and by temperament. There’s a strong generational element, and maybe a racial element, too. Inevitably the divide has a political component… liberal papers are inclined to take a lenient view of the couple. It’s not quite the national unity the Queen might have hoped for.
After Diana’s bombshell interview, things were never quite the same. And this will be true now. No family, no relationship, is improved by sharing grievances with several million others; after this, the distance between the Sussexes and Harry’s family may be greater than the physical space of the Atlantic Ocean. Prince Harry is his mother’s son all right, but has not learnt either from her mistakes or from her strengths."
I agree with this almost entirely. Spot on analysis from the DT. CK? Caller? TW?
Sorry no link . . . . DT