Harry is outlining the problems with the British press coverage exactly as I stated in my prior post. Constant (often false or distorted) press leaks by courtiers and other members of the royal family were the problem. The sad fact is that members of the royal family have a strategy for dealing with bad press: release something about another member to take the heat off and change the subject. This was covered extensively in the Netflix series as well as in Spare, and also has been covered in the press both before and after recent events. Harry was weary of having things that had been shared with a family member in confidence leaked to the press against his wishes or without his knowledge. His own father threw him under the bus more than once to make himself look better, and when Harry tried to talk to him about problems with the royal family and media coverage, his response was, "Darling boy, you can’t take on the media. The media will always be the media." Horrendous.
This is what he's talking about when he says his father and brother are trapped. He's sympathetic, but refuses to stay in the messy royal/tabloid relationship with them. He is unwilling to allow what happened to his mother happen to his wife, and I admire him for that.
https://archive.ph/ZxmEu (NYT)
It was all transactional. Sandy Henney, a former press secretary, said of Charles: “When I joined his office in ’93 he was going through some pretty virulent criticism — ‘Bad father, unloving husband.’ I think he was pretty hurt.” She said Bolland worked to change Charles’s image. Leaking to the media was reportedly one way to curry favor. “Brilliant manipulator,” Henney said of Bolland. “He got the result that he wanted.” (Bolland denied these accusations.)
Bolland was also accused of approving a News of the World article claiming a 16-year-old Harry had taken drugs, in exchange for praise for Charles for taking Harry to a rehab center, illustrated with what the tabloid said were photos of the visit. Harry writes that the seven-page tabloid spread left him sickened and horrified, and that the photos were from an earlier official visit he had made to the center. Bolland later admitted the sequence of events was distorted to make Charles look better. The coverage, after Diana’s death, spun the portrayal of Charles. “No more the unfaithful husband,” as Harry puts it in his memoir. “Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad.”
Harry, as the spare, was not as important as "the principals" and therefore was a convenient punching bag when need arose. The above is just one example of the willingness for the Firm to deal in outright lies to get the desired results. One benefit of leaving was not just getting away from the British press, but getting away from the royal PR offices. It wasn't privacy (as in disappearing from public life) so much as
wresting access and control of private information away from courtiers and other royal family members, and therefore also the British tabloids.
After their mother's death, Harry and William had promised one another they would never behave this way toward one another, would never kowtow to the press. When the Firm (in this case, William) was willing to put Harry's name to a press release he had never seen until it was published, that was the last straw.
https://archive.ph/48cL8 (Vogue)
According to Meghan and Harry, when the fraying thread between the Sussexes and the Firm was finally severed, it wasn’t just over the media, but his family’s inability to defend the couple from it. On the day of the so-called “Sandringham Summit,” the contentious January 2020 meeting in which Prince Harry convened with the queen, Prince Charles, and Prince William to hammer out an exit plan, The Times in London published a story saying that the princes “fell out” because Prince William was unfriendly to Meghan. The Palace swiftly released a joint statement from Prince William and Prince Harry—which Harry says he never actually signed off on—emphatically denying the story.
“I rang M and she burst into floods of tears,” Harry says somberly, “because within four hours, they were happy to lie to protect my brother, and yet for three years, they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.” (The “lie” he’s referring to, one can presume, is the inclusion of Harry’s name on a statement he didn’t know about, and not Prince William’s reported bullying.)
"Never complain, never explain" was the mantra of Queen Elizabeth, but this was not always followed. There have been occasional exceptions to defend Kate, to defend William, to defend Charles. Even when Harry begged for it, when it had gotten so bad that Meghan was getting death threats, there was no defense for her.
Harry and Meghan left because there was no way to have a healthy relationship, to raise their children in a safe and healthy environment, and for Meghan herself to remain safe and healthy if they stayed. Nowhere did they ever say that they wanted privacy completely away from any involvement with the public or the media in general. They wanted to get away from the royal pipeline to British media and they wanted to stop being used as convenient conversation changers for the other royals.
As mentioned in the press statement in my above post, the "privacy" meme was all about shutting them up. It didn't work, nor should it. They are free to be themselves as privately or publicly as they choose. For those who are tired of hearing about them: ignore them.
Also, they've known about the eviction for weeks. They were informed 24 hours after Spare dropped. They didn't say a word about it. The timing is obvious - it was a punishment. It's one of the few punishments Charles has left and it didn't work. The timing for the public to find out about it is also obvious. How embarrassing for Charles that none of the invited musical guests want to perform at his coronation. Subject change! 🙄
After reading Spare, I'd stopped paying any attention myself. If it hadn't been for this story, I wouldn't have known about Charles and his coronation woes, boo hoo, so in my case that kinda backfired on him. Oops.
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