It’s no surprise Prince Harry is so mixed up, he was born into a dysfunctional family
Children who witness the slow, bitter disintegration of their parents’ marriage carry the scars for life. Prince Harry again paraded his own hurt at the High Court last week.
So needy, so angry, so petulant and entitled, so deluded and vengeful.
The Duke of Sussex was giving evidence in his lawsuit against Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. He and some disgruntled celebs accuse them of unlawful information gathering – hacking and bugging phones and blagging sensitive personal details.
It is the latest chapter in a personal crusade to discredit newspapers he blames for the death of his mother, Princess Diana, and the so-called misery of his wife, Meghan Markle. And to make the proprietors pay.
Associated Newspapers denies the allegations and maintains the stories the papers printed were obtained by legitimate journalism.
Now, I don’t want to sound like Sigmund Freud, but Harry’s obsessive rage can be traced back to childhood. It is little wonder he is so messed up. You can’t choose your family and he was born into the most dysfunctional dynasty since the Borgias.
His father, the future King Charles, was growing into his role as Prince of Wales. He had notions of modernising the monarchy when his turn came. In the meantime, he would redefine his constitutional duty and champion the causes he believed in.
He had married, in July 1981, to a statuesque beauty, Lady Diana Spencer, whose aristocratic pedigree was arguably better than his. She was 13 years younger than him and together they had two sons, William in June 1982, and Harry in September 1984.
Diana and Prince Andrew’s wife Sarah Ferguson, a commoner, were seen as the next gen Royals, casting off fusty convention, determined to make the most of their gilded lives.
After the Queen Mother, aloof but admired for her wartime steadfastness and empathy with the people, and the Queen, remote and regal and driven by duty, the new mood was catnip to Fleet Street.
The young Royals played up to it. Remember how Diana and Fergie got into trouble at Royal Ascot in 1987? The pair came across a friend of Fergie and poked her in the bottom with their brollies.
Of course, the cameras caught their cheeky escapade and they received a ticking off. But it was impossible to imagine the Duchess of Kent, say, or even the more free-spirited Princess Margaret getting involved in such high jinks in public.
Some newspapers, particularly the Express, the Mail and the Sun, latched on to the new, relaxed Royal circus with glee. They saw it for what it was – a soap opera. And it sold and sold and sold.
But all was not well in the House of Windsor. Despite having a wife who was not only beautiful but also a fashion icon, Charles was still sleeping with his long-time lover, Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana too was pursuing affairs. The fairytale romance was fraying.
Gossip seeped from the Royal Household, rumours spread. Were they to be believed? That was the judgement that Fleet Street editors had to make.
One who had difficulty with the whole folly was the Daily Telegraph’s Max Hastings. He writes in his memoir, Editor, that he saw no reason to change the Telegraph’s “traditionally loyal, even deferential, coverage of the monarchy and the Royal Family.”
His paper at first paid no attention to the rumours of a rift between Charles and Diana. Hastings admits that some of the younger staff were eager to take up the story but he refused to change policy.
Veronica Wadley, his deputy, told him: “Max, you can’t pretend this isn’t happening. Everybody knows the Waleses are scarcely on speaking terms. You’ve got to start treating this as a story.”
He replied: “This is all still tittle-tattle. Our readers won’t thank us for joining a stampede to break up the great fairytale romance.”
Fleet Street believed that the loyalist Telegraph must have an inside track at the Palace. Yet, he says, “I neither knew, nor wanted to know royal secrets”.
Hastings quotes Mail editor David English, who told him: “I hate to say this, but the most reliable source of Royal gossip is The Sun, because News International have got so many Palace lackeys on their payroll.”
Hastings’s opinion on the Royal marriage rift remained unchanged even when a friend who was “close to the Prince of Wales” came to see him.
He urged Hastings: “The truth has got to be told about that woman. Diana is a monster. She lies about the Prince, she lies about herself, she is briefing journalists against her husband, she is going to bring down the monarchy if she goes on like this. You have got to expose her in your newspaper.”
Hastings declined to do so and a couple of weeks later, the Daily Mail splashed on it.
Then came Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story, serialised in the Sunday Times in 1992. It was just as Diana had told him but Hastings did not believe it and told his staff the paper would “simply ignore” the tale.
There were also revelations in the Sun of a recorded telephone conversation between Diana and her lover James Gilbey, heir to Gilbey’s gin – the so-called “Squidgygate” affair.
The most significant of Diana’s dalliances was with James Hewitt. The affair began in 1987, when Harry was aged three, but the rumour circulated that Hewitt was actually Harry’s father, based on nothing more than the fact that they were both ginger.
Imagine living with that, your very paternity being called into question. Harry has admitted he believed the rumour for years but did not address any of this publicly until his book Spare came out.
In it he writes that the gossip was partly driven by sadism. “Tabloid readers loved the idea that Prince Charles’s youngest son was not Prince Charles’s son. They never got tired of that ‘joke’, for some reason.”
Diana was killed in 1997 alongside her lover Dodi Fayed, son of the rapist Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed, when their car crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris as their drink- and drug-addled chauffeur Henri Paul tried to escape pursuing paparazzi. She was 36 and her younger son, Harry, just 12.
It was no way to bring up a child but Harry reveres his mother’s memory and seems to have forgiven his father for his hellish boyhood.
However, he hasn’t forgiven the Press. He told the court that he had not complained about 14 newspaper articles at the centre of his case when they were published because it was “pretty convincing” that the information had come from his friends.
He added: “I would not have been able to complain about them, anyway because of the institution I was in. Never complain, never explain.”
Despite this, Harry insisted: “My social circles were not leaky. I want to make that absolutely clear.”
He spoke of having to “maintain some kind of relationship” with journalists at official events while he was still a working Royal.
Harry’s bitterness came out as he added: “These were people we were forced to work with. Forced to perform for, knowing what they are and knowing full well the kind of stories they have written about me and commercialised my private life.
“I am not friends with any of these journalists and never have been.”
But while he railed against journalists and their employers, he seems to have provided little proof of his assertion that they bugged his calls.
The trial continues.
*****
The sign on the wall said: “No alcoholic beverages may be drunk on the premises”. It was a doctors’ waiting room.
A whiteboard next to that sign huffily informed us that last week five patients had missed appointments with doctors and 13 with nurses.
I had been referred for a specialist eye test and the nearest surgery that did it was in a neighbouring borough.
Different postcode. Different world. Practically the Third World.
I arrived early and an elderly black man was monopolising one of only two reception points with an arcane query that took 20 minutes not to be solved.
I checked in and took a seat as far as possible from a Chinese looking man with an alarming rash covering one side of his face.
On the bus ride there, I had noticed a big mosque just off the High Street, a couple of blocks from the surgery. That might explain why some of the doctors and ancillary staff wore hijabs.
I was called early for my test, which was carried out by a woman technician, again in a headscarf. She was friendly and efficient and I was on my way again in 20 minutes or so.
Making for the bus home, I passed a big Polish deli; then what looked like a repurposed pub where they made “Damascene sweets”; and soon after, an Ethiopian restaurant.
This used to be a working class suburb of London. Now it looks poverty stricken and could be Somalia with a different climate.
It is unrecognisable as the Britain I grew up in. Do something, Starmer. Before it’s too late.
And if that isn’t whistling in the wind, I don’t know what is.
*****
For years a member of the World’s Greatest Lunch Club (WGLC) was teased mercilessly for his odd habit of adding a drop of lemonade to the red wine he drank with his food.
Jokes about the Secret Lemonade Drinker would start as soon as the waiter brought him his little bottle of Schweppes. He took it all in good part.
But it seems the joke was on the rest of us. The Times carried a story from France last week that revealed him to be a visionary, a trend-setter, a man ahead of his time.
The paper reported that a respected Bordeaux chateau has begun to make a fizzy cocktail based on the estate’s red wine. It contains natural flavourings, sugar and carbonated water.
The drink, a “red spritz” called Folie Rouge, is aimed at younger drinkers. It was inspired by the grandchildren of the dynasty’s patriarch, who put tonic water into his wine aperitif.
He thought it was sacrilege but now, with a 40 per cent slump in red wine drinking in France, it could mean economic survival.
So, respect. The WGLC doffs its cap to the Pioneer of Pop.
*****
Do you think it is possible that Angela Rayner let it be known she supported Andy Burnham standing as an MP in order to scupper his chances of taking the Labour leadership from Keir Starmer?
She would have known he faced a certain rebuff from Starmer’s allies on the National Executive Committee and his chances of mounting a challenge after that were bleak.
That would leave Rayner, who covets Starmer’s job, and Wes Streeting, whose star is waning, as front runners to wrest power from the Prime Minister when the time comes.
Or am I being too cynical? Well, it is the Labour Party.
*****
My latest grandson, who is six, has taken up chess in an after-school club. He’s pretty good, I’m told.
We promised to play a match when he came over (though we’ll have to learn the rules first). His mother messaged us to say: “Try to get him to say he ‘takes’ the pieces, instead of ‘kills’ them.”
But he’s right, isn’t he? They say chess is war on a board, a mental battlefield where only the ruthless survive.
RICHARD DISMORE
28 January 2026
