Prince Harry and the cult of ‘openness’

Our culture of narcissism has destroyed the private sphere.

Minerva97, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

First there was the Oprah interview, then the six-hour long Netflix snooze-fest. Just when we thought we’d reached peak Prince Harry, that there was nothing about the man we did not know, up he pops with more revelations. Prince William allegedly shoved him, broke his necklace and sent him crashing into a dog’s bowl. Following a trip to the North Pole, he suffered a ‘frostbitten penis’. He lost his virginity in a field behind a pub with an older woman who treated him like a stallion. He killed 25 people while on tour with the army in Afghanistan. Drug-taking, messages from his dead mother, pet names for family members – all is hilariously and tragically divulged in his soon to be released memoir, Spare.

But what does Harry’s verbal incontinence actually reveal? We see a man so spoiled, so unaware of his own privilege, that he is eaten up with petty grievances. He complains about his stepmother turning his old bedroom at Clarence House into a dressing room – when he was 28 years old and in possession of an entire house of his own. We see a man so dim he sees no contradiction between expressing hope for a reconciliation with his family, at the very same time as bitching about them on the world stage. A man so lacking in self-awareness he sees no hypocrisy in complaining about the press intruding on his privacy, in the exact same breath as he tells tales about his brother and sister-in-law. A man so self-absorbed he has no notion of duty, service or respect – either to brotherly bonds, the royal family or the ‘code of silence’ among soldiers.

Why would anyone expose themselves to the world in this way? A common explanation is that Harry is doing this for the money – that in order to fund his Montecito lifestyle he must sell his soul to Netflix and Penguin books. But the many interviews and hours of Netflix footage show no sign of a man held hostage, with personal details being cajoled out of him against his will. Another explanation is that Meghan puts him up to it – but as Fraser Myers wrote on spiked earlier this week, ‘Harry doesn’t need Meghan by his side to be insufferable’. The truth is, Harry needs no coaxing to spill it all.