Well, here’s a surprise: Apparently, torpedoing your familial relations, both in public and in private, is not necessarily a road to happiness.
Such are the lessons apparently being learned by the Duke of Sussex if a U.K. Daily Mail report is to be believed. Prince Harry, who’s recently shed yet another major staff member (that makes almost 20 since his marriage to Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, in 2018), apparently isn’t terribly happy with life in California despite it giving him the opportunity to trash his family in an Oprah interview, trash his family in a tell-all book, trash his family in other media … well, you get the point.
The source, identified as “one of Harry’s oldest pals” by the Daily Mail, said that the “Duke is hiding anger and frustration beneath the surface as he would rather be in Britain with his friends and family.”
Which makes one (and only one) of them that feels that way, I suppose.
“He’s an angry boy. Things haven’t turned out how he wanted,” said the friend, who said he gets “the odd WhatsApp from” Harry every now and then.
The unnamed friend added: “I think he misses being over here [in Britain] desperately and wants to be admired more. Anyone who knows him feels he’d rather be top of the pops here with everyone loving him, as they do with William and Kate.”
Another source who’s known Harry since he was a teen told the publication that “the Duke is no doubt missing his former life of pubbing and enjoying the English countryside with friends.”
“He has ended up isolated from his family and most of his old mates, in an environment where your friendships are not like the ones you forged as a young man,” the source added.
“He used to love a night out in the pub and hanging out in the country with friends.”
Do you follow the royal family?
Far be it from me to give total credence to the coterie of modernized Evelyn Waugh caricatures that provide the Daily Mail with its royal scoops, but the general gist of it certainly doesn’t sound inaccurate.
Since decamping from Merrie England to sunny California to pursue life as a working royal (although his idea of “work” might not look anything like yours), it’s been pretty evident that Harry has become the poster child for the failings of modern therapy culture.
He’ll blather to any famous talk show host, podcaster, autobiographical ghost writer, or limo driver willing to listen about how his family and those around him scarred him badly. His mother died tragically, his father was cold, his brother petty, his family old-fashioned and secretly racist, the press incessant.
He’s gotten virtually everything handed to him with little exchanged for it. All he had to is abandon the few things that British royals still stand for — namely, the concepts of responsibility and service to the nation — without abdicating the title.
He was paid obscene amounts of money to do what looks, to the lay outside observer, like it involves practically zero effort. He was allowed to do all this, furthermore, while engaging in a public primal scream session in which he repeatedly described to all the world the woes of being the most put-upon spoiled brat known to man.
And he looks thoroughly miserable doing it.
Moreover, he and his wife don’t seem to be doing themselves any favors back with the rest of the Windsors who still inhabit Albion. The Sussexes just returned from Colombia — a notoriously violent country that they visited just after calling Britain “too dangerous,” something a royal commentator the Daily Mail talked to said was “disastrous optics.”
“This is absurd, the fact that Harry is involved in a battle with the Home Office over levels of security which he may win, does not alter the fact that he reportedly preferred a hotel to Buckingham Palace when he was last in Britain. It doesn’t make any sense,” said Richard Fitzwilliams.
Yes, well, so many things about Harry and Meghan’s lives don’t add up, specifically the life of the former. Apparently, he pines for the U.K. now, despite the fact he’s managed to tactically nuke all bridges back there over his past four years in California. And he hasn’t done too well with the Californians, either.
As the noted philosopher Sheryl Crow once said: “If it makes you happy / it can’t be that bad / If it makes you happy / then why the hell are you so sad?” I believe she meant that rhetorically. Yet, every time I see the Duke of Sussex, I see a man who was brought into this world and raised without the appropriate mental faculties to suss out the answer to that question at any given moment. One can only hope his titles and money manage to somehow compensate for that.
