AMANDA PLATELL: It’s a harsh fact to face, but is Harry’s inability to overcome his childhood trauma over Diana’s death rooted in his marriage to Meghan?
The Mail’s psychiatrist Dr Max Pemberton wrote in his column on Monday: ‘The one question I think Prince Harry should ask himself… is why a man who portrays himself to be so kind is still so full of vengeance.’
His conclusion was that nearly three decades on from his mother’s death, and despite years of therapy, Harry remained, like many of his patients, ‘obsessed with their trauma to the extent that they are unable to heal or move on with their lives’.
Which, sad as I feel for Harry, made me think: why hasn’t William suffered in the same way with unresolved grief? Why isn’t he a bitter and angry man raging like a child against the injustice of the world?
And clear as a bell, a simple answer came to me: Because he has Kate.
William fell in love with and married a young woman from a happy Home Counties family reared on wholesome home-cooked Sunday roasts and bursting with love. A family, dare I say it, full of healing.
Remember those early days of their marriage when he chose to spend Christmas with the Middletons because ‘he loved the informal, fun, relaxed atmosphere of their family home’ compared with the strictures and traditions of the royal estate in Sandringham?
Harry on the other hand does not have the support of an extended family. He married a TV actress who refuses to speak to her siblings or her father – a man Harry and their children Archie and Lilibet have never even met despite Thomas Markle’s repeated entreaties for them to do so.
And despite the fact Thomas raised Meghan alone for years when her adored mother abandoned her and went off ‘finding herself’.
Harry and Meghan during their Netflix series, one of many incidents when Harry has aired various slurs about the Royal Family
Unlike his brother, William has Kate, a young woman from a happy Home Counties family bursting with love, writes Amanda Platell
In short, William didn’t marry a narcissistic woman from a broken home whose version of extended family support seems to consist of hosting casual friend on her With Love, Meghan runny-jam and flower-petal Netflix series.
Of course, Harry and Meghan enjoy their own close family unit with their two children. But William appears to have entered a different dimension, with Kate, despite her cancer ordeal, always by his side.
The success they have made in building a happy and stable home life was on display for all to see in the Royal Box at Wimbledon at the weekend, where William, Kate, George and Charlotte enjoyed the men’s final together.
And we can be fairly certain that Louis, too young at eight to sit through a four-hour match, was being looked after by his beloved grandparents Carole and Michael Middleton.
Contrary to the William and Kate approach, Harry and Meghan have jealously guarded their children’s identities. Apart from a brief glimpse of Archie as a baby in their Netflix series, not a single picture of their children’s faces has ever appeared on film or in print.
Clearly, the Prince and Princess of Wales, as the future King and Queen, feel a duty to show off their family to their future subjects. But Harry’s scrupulous avoidance of showing his children’s faces borders on the obsessive.
The united front the Waleses presented at Wimbledon, meanwhile, represents a remarkable turnaround for Kate who, when she began her relationship with William, was mocked by his posh, entitled friends, who viewed her and her sister Pippa as hideous social climbers and dubbed them ‘the wisteria sisters’.
While Harry and Meghan’s photos of their family life never show the faces of Archie and Lilibet…
… the success William and Kate have made in building a happy and stable home life was on display for all to see in the Royal Box at Wimbledon at the weekend, where they enjoyed the men’s final with George and Charlotte
Success is the best revenge, of course, and Carole and Michael went on to make the family millions with their Party Pieces business.
But as they plough their, admittedly, very different furrows, how is it, asks the wise Dr Max, that two once inseparable brothers – William and Harry – have grown so far apart? How is one happy in his own skin championing good causes and the other so full of bitterness?
It is reported that the brothers had no contact during the Sussexes’ recent brief visit to the UK. Neither have Kate and Meghan been in touch with each other.
Insiders say hell will freeze over before William agrees to meet Harry, so furious is he about the many and various slurs Harry has aired about the Royal Family in, first, the couple’s now notorious Oprah Winfrey interview, then their Netflix series and finally – perhaps most damagingly of all – in Harry’s scurrilous best-selling memoir, Spare.
William is said to be determined never to introduce his children to them.
Dr Max observes that people who obsess over the trauma sparked by their grief all too often seek to relive it ‘in exquisite detail, fluent, articulate, but entirely unhealed’ and find it impossible to move on.
They often then go on to try to blame someone else for their unhappiness rather than accepting, in Harry’s case that: ‘Your mother should not have died and you were only 12.’
No, he should not, as a young boy poleaxed by grief, have been forced to walk stoically behind his mother’s coffin for two long miles as the funeral cortege made its way from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey. That said, William, albeit three years older, did the same.
In Meghan Markle’s words in her 2019 ITV documentary before she and Harry flounced off to California, ‘It’s not enough to just survive, you have to thrive.’
Well, who’s thriving now? A bitter, defeated, unhappy and vengeful Prince Harry, or a contented Prince William with Catherine the Great and his kids by his side?
