Anyone involved in a lawsuit knows how punishingly expensive it is. And most accept, if reluctantly, an unfavourable verdict. But a very rich, very famous prince can afford to lose a case in the Court of Appeal and then immediately secure an interview with the BBC.
Prince Harry had been appealing against a ruling that he should be entitled only to a cheaper, “bespoke” level of security while visiting the UK compared to that of the rest of the Royal Family. In 2023 he also lost a legal attempt to pay for his own security.
At the hearing at the Court of Appeal last month, Prince Harry’s lawyers said that he had been “singled out for different, unjustified and inferior treatment”, and that his life and the lives of his family were at stake.
“I’m devastated,” he said in the interview, which went out on Friday. “Not so much as devastated with the loss that I am about the people behind the decision, feeling as though this is okay. Is it a win for them?”
He went on: “I’m sure there are some people out there, probably most likely the people that wish me harm, [who] consider this a huge win.” It was, he said, a “good old fashioned establishment stitch up”. In a separate statement he added, apparently in reference to the death of his mother Princess Diana, that “some people want history to repeat itself”.
Prince Harry is a sad, spoilt soul who appears to be unable to deal with any kind of disagreement. Anyone else who loses a Court of Appeal case would have to go quietly and nurse their wounds. Only because Prince Harry is so indulged and famous does he have the platform to go to the press.
square ALISON PHILLIPS
Prince Harry has made stupid mistakes – but we owe him security
Read MorePrince Harry talked at length in his interview about devoting himself to public service; that he had “given 35 years of service to this country, two tours of Afghanistan”. You can see there is a deep yearning in him to do some good, realised in his admirable work for the Invictus Games.
And he stressed a desire to return to Britain, but said that he “can’t see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the UK at this point”
“I love my country, I always have done,” he said, “despite what some people in that country have done… and I think that it’s really quite sad that I won’t be able to show my children my homeland.”
But you can’t have it both ways. You cannot jet off to California to make millions and then, at the same time, claim to be devoted to all the Brits that you have conspicuously left behind.
A royal life is a topsy-turvy one. Prince Harry loathes the press after his mother was hounded to death in the most harrowing of fates. And yet he depends on the press at the same time, to give oxygen to his projects.
Prince Harry has been dealt a cruel hand in life, with the tragedy of his mother’s appalling, premature death. And clearly, he does face security risks: in 2020 Al-Qaeda called for him to be killed and he said that he and his family faced “well-documented neo-Nazi and extremist threats”.
But he pulled the plug on his working royal status – and still expects the same treatment. You can’t have both. As he said in his interview, he can’t privately pay for quite the same levels of official royal protection he once enjoyed. But he chose to say goodbye to official royal life and everything that went with it.
The storm is so intense that he has also thrown aside the ancient conventions of the Royal Family and the upper classes: be as gossipy and revealing as possible in private, but don’t wash your dirty linen in public.
And so, in his befuddled pique at the Court of Appeal disagreeing with him, he lashes out at his family and, particularly, his father. “There is a lot of control and ability in my father’s hands,” Prince Harry said.
“Ultimately, this whole thing could be resolved through him. Not necessarily by intervening, but by stepping aside, allowing the experts to do what is necessary.”
Yet as Prince Harry becomes less and less important in the constitutional order of things, he appears to become conspicuous by his irrelevance.
It’s a Shakespearean tragedy – if Shakespeare had ever come across a second son who was blessed with millions and cruelly deprived of his mother.
Harry Mount is a barrister and author of How England Made the English
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