We can all agree that it’s nice that Prince Harry is talking to his dad again. The King and his youngest son enjoyed tea together last Wednesday at Clarence House, a thawing of relations that led a happy Harry to tell the BBC that there is “no point fighting any more – life is precious”.
Whatever the optics of finding yourself estranged from your father for 19 months as he undergoes weekly cancer treatments, this, at the very least, is a heartwarming story of a lad and his dad making up at a time when nobody in this country seems particularly interested in getting along.
So why go and spoil it? Clearly in a good mood, Harry went and gave an interview to The Guardian in which he absolved himself of any wrongdoing in the family fall-out. “I don’t believe that I aired my dirty laundry in public … My conscience is clear,” he said of Spare, the tell-all memoir that most sensible people agree drove a pretty sizeable wedge between father and son.
Your conscience is clear? It shouldn’t be. Having had a daughter myself a year ago, I couldn’t help but think of all the moments the King must have missed with his grandchildren: tottering first steps, first words, food being flung laughingly across a California kitchen, storytime with grandad. Lilibet, Harry’s youngest, is now four. You don’t get those moments back.
I find it so desperately sad that Harry appears to have lost sight of what passes for a fresh start in the first place. Perhaps he feels that all that has transpired was for the best. You wouldn’t bet against it.
“I know that [speaking out] annoys some people and it goes against the narrative,” Harry said this week. “The book? It was a series of corrections to stories already out there. One point of view had been put out and it needed to be corrected.”
To which you say, well, up to a very narrow point. If we reduce family life to a series of competing views, what room is there for anything other than discord? In the bunfight to be right, it’s the little acts of love that go missing.
The irony, as ever, is that Harry is, like his mother, prodigiously gifted at doing good.
In the last week, he has been charming wounded troops in Ukraine on a surprise visit, cheering sick children at a London hospital, and laying a wreath on the tombstone of his beloved grandmother, Elizabeth II.
Perhaps he has had time recently to reflect. The late Queen’s unofficial motto was “never complain, never explain”.
If life gives you castles and power and unimaginable wealth, it is perhaps best to focus on deeds, not words.
Harry has tried to explain himself at length, in podcasts, in print. It so often sounds an awful lot like complaining to me.
Life is precious. It’s also short. As the Prince himself says, over the coming year, “the focus really has to be on my dad”. Saying it is a first step. The next, frankly, is showing it.
