Prince Harry this evening reminds the British people of the crucial role that a Royal Family can play in a modern democracy with a constitutional monarchy.
The Duke of Sussex has returned to the UK and tonight will attend the WellChild Awards, which celebrates inspirational stories and qualities of this country’s seriously ill children.
Not even the most ardent anti-Monarchist can have a problem with this. It’s an admirable function for a prince to perform, especially if one concedes a central point of anti-royal types: that the occupants of palaces owe us for maintaining their opulence.
And yet Harry’s attendance is striking precisely because this noble endeavour appears against a backdrop littered with his own idiocy.
That is not to say that attending WellChild is the only useful thing the Duke has undertaken; his Invictus Games can never be taken away from the former soldier. But noticing the good in a man does not mean that we do not see the bad.
What is most incongruous about Prince Harry’s attendance is that he’s behaving precisely as a Royal should. He’s reaching out to the people of this country with an act of kindness.
It is a unifying act, which appears out of place precisely because he has, in the past, sewn such unnecessary division and anger. Rather than assuming that such anger, which often comes from the Press, is the result of journalists’ cruelty, caprice, or even racism, he should consider whether it might have had anything to do with his unbecoming behaviour.
Was it, for example, becoming of a Royal to tell a Sky News reporter “Don’t behave like this” in response to a question? Or was it more becoming of someone not worthy of that station?
Are we expected to respect a man who lectures poorer people about climate change while taking private jets for engagements as trivial as visiting Elton John? We are, by the way, because Sir Elton paid to carbon offset the trip. But it doesn’t seem to occur to the Duke that ordinary people may not have the means to carbon offset their trips abroad. Do without your holiday, peasants, the planet is dying. Flying is only for the rich.
Should we revere, as we did Queen Elizabeth II, a man who writes the following sentence and publishes it in a book?
“There’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts.”
This is childish stuff, the sort we constantly hear from political pygmies on social media who genuinely believe there’s such a thing as “my truth” as opposed to the truth.
Perhaps the nadir of Harry’s musings came in his statement that the First Amendment to the American Constitution is “bonkers”. Such a statement betrays an inability to think seriously about the very building blocks of the nation in which he now resides.
It also betrays an ignorance of his country of birth. The Duke, alarmed by the Amendment’s protection of free speech, has clearly never read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, or John Milton’s Areopagitica.
If we are to have this Duke continue to represent our Royal Family, however unofficially, and if he wants our respect, let us demand from him conduct of the kind he displayed by attending the WellChild Awards, as opposed to that which has been the subject of countless column inches already.