The great wall of his marriage has come to separate Prince Harry from his former friends who are now an ocean and a lifestyle away, according to a royal expert.
Tom Quinn, the author of numerous books on the British royal family, told the U.K.’s Mirror that the biggest barrier to Harry staying in contact with former friends is Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
Harry “is increasingly bored and looking back across the Atlantic where most of his army and school friends still live and whom he never sees because they won’t visit him in the States because they find Meghan difficult,” he said.
In May, Quinn said a vast gulf separated the California-based prince from his Britain-based friends, according to the Mirror.
“Harry has a few friends from the army and from his days at school, but they are a part of the old pre-Meghan world that Harry hates to revisit, so he will indeed spend a great deal of his time in the UK alone,” the royal expert said.
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“His military friends feel he has betrayed them by writing about his military service in such an un-military way and his old Etonian friends don’t like the new ‘woke’ Harry. Conservative with both a small and a big C, they see the new Harry as a tree-hugger with whom they have nothing in common,” Quinn said.
Many of the prince’s former friends “don’t like Meghan,” he said.
Quinn said she is blamed for turning him into what they call “Harry the Hippy.”
“The truth is that Harry has reinvented himself in a way that just doesn’t work for his family or for friends from the past when he was a very different character,” he said.
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The royal expert said all is not paradise in the Montecito mansion where Harry and Meghan live.
“There is a growing rift between Harry and Meghan caused by Meghan’s increasing concern that her life is not going in the direction she had planned – she loves media attention and hates the fact that surveys suggest she and Harry are no longer of much interest to the American public,” Quinn told the Mirror.
The frigid reception of her lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, made this worse, he said.
“With news that the couple’s Netflix contract may be under threat, along with the mockery that greeted the launch of her online brand, Meghan feels very much under siege,” Quinn said.
Prince Harry finding himself in ‘strange unfamiliar world which grows increasingly unfriendly’ https://t.co/jwTUS2lDNl pic.twitter.com/uCV2HZIF4t
— Mirror Royal (@MirrorRoyal) July 5, 2024
He said Meghan was “in tears when the brand launched and her new jam was widely mocked for being expensive and nothing special.”
“She has reached the point now where she thinks that anything and everything she does will be unfairly criticized. Like her husband, she feels that people are unfairly picking on her — she cannot understand why people don’t admire her work,” the royal expert said.
“She is especially sensitive about any criticism of her luxurious lifestyle in the U.S. — from her point of view this is something to be admired not criticized,” Quinn said.
