Accounts of the psychology of the Duke of Sussex tend to focus on the trauma of following his mother’s coffin along the Mall in 1997. Less attention is paid to the effect of the lurid details of his parents’ horrific marriage that were aired so publicly when he was at prep school in London.
The scandalous leaked phone conversations between Diana and her lover James Gilbey, and Charles and Camilla, no doubt infect Harry’s earliest memories – his formative understanding of the shameless instinct of the tabloid press. The tit-for-tat TV interviews that followed, with Jonathan Dimbleby and with Martin Bashir, meanwhile, gave him profoundly troubling insights into the management and confession of family secrets and lies.
Thirty years on, it seems that we are discovering the full effects of that complex trauma on King Charles’s younger son. Encouraged and emboldened by his wife, Harry appears to have become besotted by truth-telling. The whole world has become his psychologist’s couch. The leaked extracts from his memoir, Spare, and the trails for tonight’s TV interviews, suggest a pathological appetite for coming clean. More shocking in some ways than his accounts of fraternal scuffles are the details of his grim first sexual experience and his brutal and ill-advised tallying of lives taken in combat in Afghanistan. Money doesn’t begin to explain his motivation. What we are seeing and hearing is the purgative thrill of confession after a lifetime of imposed secrecy and reticence.
Despite his direct denials, it is hard to imagine that in this he does not, consciously or otherwise, seek to destroy the institution into which he was born. When he and the Duchess of Sussex first decided to step away from royal duties and make a different life for themselves and their children in California, they were at pains to emphasise their continuing devotion and loyalty to the Queen and thereby to the constitutional monarchy itself. Those sentiments no longer appear part of the narrative. The prince has been going through the motions of expressing a desire to rebuild a relationship with his father and brother – good luck with that – but there is, pointedly, no deference toward their roles as king and heir. When he suggests that “a lot can happen” between now and the coronation of King Charles III in May, it is hard to imagine that he is deluded enough to think much of it will be positive.
Can the monarchy, with its chronic allergies to transparency, survive this attack from the inside? Already the voices that work so hard to protect it in the media and the wider public are vicious and unwavering in their condemnation of the perceived betrayal. Harry and Meghan might believe that they have little left to lose in terms of the opinion and vitriol and bigotry ranged against them, but you fear that they haven’t seen anything yet. No doubt, they imagine themselves to be continuing Diana’s mission to shed light on the dysfunctional and the archaic and the indefensible, but her example should inform them that this is an unequal conflict and one that will probably last a lifetime.
This week will bring further allegations and revelations. However, the scene from Harry’s memoir that would make the opening act of a Shakespearean drama – or a future episode of The Crown – is already set in stone. It is that moment, at his own father’s wake, when Charles was allegedly forced to come between his warring sons, with a despairing plea: “Please boys, don’t make my final years a misery.” Whatever happens next, that line already feels like the epitaph to the old king’s reign.
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