Prince Harry, formerly a British Army Apache gunship pilot and combat veteran, continued his subsequently tragic descent into whining ignominy on Friday.
Harry told the BBC, “I can’t see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the [United Kingdom] at this point.” Harry insisted “I love my country,” then added the whimsical epitaph, “… despite what some people in that country have done.” Harry then significantly escalated his feud with his British Royal Family.
First, some context. This interview follows a ruling on Friday by the U.K. Court of Appeals (the country’s second highest court) that Harry, his wife Meghan Markle, and their two children are not entitled to standing protection by the British equivalent of the U.S. Secret Service (the Metropolitan Police’s Protection Command) on U.K. visits. The court ruled that a government protection committee lawfully ruled that Harry is not entitled to standing protection as a non-serving member of the Royal Family. Harry and his family will instead receive government protection only when on Royal or British government business, or if a new threat assessment finds they require protection. This concerns Harry because, unlike in his new home of Los Angeles, private security officers in the U.K. are not allowed to carry firearms.
Harry is obviously upset with the decision. Still, his interview response to it only underlines his arrogant disdain for introspection. Rather than defend his argument while respecting the court’s ruling, Harry complains that he has suffered an “establishment stitch up.” Here we see yet another example of Harry’s increasingly deep unseriousness.
As South Park so memorably recognized, Harry and his wife both demand extraordinary privacy and extraordinary attention. Harry both testifies to his love of country, and simultaneously spreads sustaining and very public scorn against its defining institution. Harry tells the BBC he blames his father, King Charles III, for his family’s insecurity. Then, without a whiff of sense as to his own hypocrisy, he adds “I would love reconciliation with my family. There’s no point in continuing to fight anymore.” Adding the icing on the breach of Royal protocol cake, Harry then played to the King’s Cancer diagnosis by pondering, “I don’t know how long my father has left, he won’t speak to me because of this security stuff.”
Harry is well aware that the causal factor behind his breach with the Royal family is his choice to leave Royal service and then write a book attacking his brother, father, and other Royals. But this history notwithstanding, Harry knows without a shadow of a doubt that directly criticizing the King and then questioning when he will die is to skateboard on the third rail of Royal protocol.
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Harry’s so ardent expression of his opinions is striking both for the hypocrisy of its content, but also for the fact that it comes from someone who otherwise regards the First Amendment’s protection of controversial speech as “bonkers.”
But that’s Harry’s approach to the world, bonkers, through and through.