Do you remember the Duke of Edinburgh awards? Some of you may even have one somewhere. An award for map-reading, orienteering or otherwise managing to find your way around in the age before Google Maps and Uber. It was – and still is – a useful scheme, set up by a man who accepted his position as second fiddle, performed the role impeccably for decades and set up the awards to help millions of other people find their way.
It was on my mind as I was reading the latest revelations from Montecito, California. For the memoirs of Harry Sussex are even worse than expected. If I was the head of Netflix, I would be hopping with rage that Harry had kept all his most snore-a-thon stories for Netflix only to deliver the real juice in his memoir.
All of the royals could moan about their lot and make fake appeals to public pity. But they don’t
Bill Clinton’s publishers famously coughed up $15 million for his memoirs and he duly delivered a terrific manuscript filled with the inside scoop on budgetary constraints, Northern Ireland, the problems of Africa and more. By all accounts, the publishers pointed out to Bill that they hadn’t coughed up 15 big ones to not get even a paragraph about Monica Lewinsky. Clinton duly obliged, inserted a couple of careful paragraphs and earned out his considerable advance.
When I heard that Harry had signed a four-book deal for $40 million, I imagined that the scenario would be the same. He would send in a few hundred pages of exquisitely ghosted prose about the need for self-knowledge, of being the light within, and moving forwards, not backwards, in this life, only for the publishers to say – ahem – all very nice your Duke-ness, but we paid you to spill the dirt on your family. And so he did.
What the two memoirs also have in common is that they both smell distinctly of BS. On the matter of Ms Lewinsky, Clinton tried to be cutesy. In the key passage in My Life he even claimed that after having to reveal the true nature of his relationship with Lewinsky to Hillary, he spent at least two months sleeping on the couch. Yes, two months. Because the Clintons are just like everyone else, you see. Until you recall that the White House is a pretty big house and it was probably not beyond the ability of the President’s staff to rustle up a spare bedroom in the place.
In Spare, Harry’s account of his long journey of self-discovery towards the fact that he is the younger of two brothers, he recalls the awe that he and Meghan felt when they visited Prince William and Kate in their apartment at Kensington Palace. At the time both couples had residences there, but when Harry and Meghan visit his brother’s apartment he practically whistles with envy. ‘The wallpaper, the ceiling trim, the walnut bookshelves filled with volumes of peaceful colours [who talks about books in this way?], priceless works of art. Magnificent.’ Clearly Harry had never seen the inside of a palace before. Yet it brings regret and envy. ‘We congratulated them [William and Kate] on the renovation… while feeling embarrassed by our Ikea lamps and the second-hand sofa we’d recently bought on sale with Meg’s credit card on sofa.com.’
As with the Clinton story, I call BS, though I appreciate the cack-handed effort. The effort to look like they were scrimping and saving and had to buy things from Ikea or snap up second hand bargains while everyone else in the palace was living like princes. Is there anything anyone has ever heard about Meghan Markle that would suggest this was a remotely plausible scenario?
Which brings me back to the Duke of Edinburgh. Because of course everybody in the royal family, and everyone associated with them, could do what Harry has done. They could all moan about their lot and make fake and not very plausible appeals to public pity. But they don’t. They get on with things. And most crucially, the best among them – such as the late Duke – decide to do something to improve the lives of other people.
And there are essentially only two ways to do that. One is to try to motivate them with your words, the other is to motivate them by your actions. The Duke of Edinburgh essentially relied on the latter. He gave plenty of speeches about the purpose of the awards, but the aim was essentially to help young people to get something done.
Harry could easily have done something similar. The best thing he ever did was to set up the Invictus Games, but he could have done so much more. One of the great challenges in our country is the demotivation, listlessness and even purposelessness of young people – young men in particular. Prince Harry was himself a lost young man for a while, listlessly hanging out with other dull Sloanes. But in the end he found his purpose and turned his life around by joining the army. For a time he was a national hero. Everyone loved him. He was serving his country, killing some bad guys, looked good and seemed, like many lost young men who enlist, to have found discipline, order and purpose in his life.
Then as swiftly as it came it went. Taken – one might accurately say – by someone who likes to talk about personal improvement while doing absolutely nothing. When one US magazine interviewed Meghan Markle around the time of her engagement to Harry, Markle and her PR people said that they wanted the profile to concentrate on her work as a humanitarian and philanthropist. The only problem was that, as the magazine’s researchers discovered, there was no great track record. Meghan may have wanted to be known as these things, but she was not these things. Because she had done virtually nothing. She had just talked about them.
Harry – who could have set up some meaningful scheme to actually help young people – will instead spend his days trotting out not just sub-Obama-isms, but sub-Michelle-Obama-isms. So it will continue, until Meghan tires of him.
Royal example / If only Harry took after his grandfather
Do you remember the Duke of Edinburgh awards? Some of you may even have one somewhere. An award for map-reading, orienteering or otherwise managing to find your way around in the age before Google Maps and Uber. It was – and still is – a useful scheme, set up by a man who accepted his position as second fiddle, performed the role impeccably for decades and set up the awards to help millions of other people find their way.
It was on my mind as I was reading the latest revelations from Montecito, California. For the memoirs of Harry Sussex are even worse than expected. If I was the head of Netflix, I would be hopping with rage that Harry had kept all his most snore-a-thon stories for Netflix only to deliver the real juice in his memoir.
All of the royals could moan about their lot and make fake appeals to public pity. But they don’t
Bill Clinton’s publishers famously coughed up $15 million for his memoirs and he duly delivered a terrific manuscript filled with the inside scoop on budgetary constraints, Northern Ireland, the problems of Africa and more. By all accounts, the publishers pointed out to Bill that they hadn’t coughed up 15 big ones to not get even a paragraph about Monica Lewinsky. Clinton duly obliged, inserted a couple of careful paragraphs and earned out his considerable advance.
When I heard that Harry had signed a four-book deal for $40 million, I imagined that the scenario would be the same. He would send in a few........
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