Without a doubt, Harry and Meghan are an extremely tight couple. They have common aims and motivations which influence everything they do. All couples spark each other off in different ways, and Harry and Meghan’s interaction has been a fascinating combination of how a couple, wholly absorbed in each other and believing that restraint is a failing to be avoided as opposed to a virtue to be deployed as and when necessary, can access all that is positive and negative in both their personalities. Having done so, they then set in motion a train of consequences which have turned them from one of the most popular couples on earth into one of the most reviled in his homeland, all within the space of eighteen months.
Each of them has deep reservoirs of passion, self-indulgence, entitlement and aggression, which have brought them to this pass. While no one fears for Meghan’s survival, many of Harry’s loved ones are terrified as to what will happen to him should the limb that he has climbed on, with Meghan’s active cooperation, snap off. ‘The prospect is too dreadful to contemplate,’ a princess told me. ‘There are some words that one does not even want to think of, much less utter.’ The fear, that Harry could entirely lose the plot, maybe even damage himself irretrievably, but no matter what be utterly destroyed as a personality, is what is behind the latitude which has been granted the couple.
Both Harry and Meghan have been frank about being people who have experienced deep emotional pain. Although both have laid the blame at obvious doorsteps - his at his mother’s death, hers at her racial identity - their critics have some justification in maintaining that such suffering as they have endured is no excuse at this stage of their lives. Despite having lost his mother at nearly thirteen, Harry has had more advantages than most. Many other youngsters who have lost a parent do not ask for a free pass on the grounds of such a loss, so why, the reasoning goes, should a prince of the most eminent royal family in the world be accorded one? And Meghan’s anguish was born of the pain of someone used to instant gratification being forced to develop patience and exercise it the way less spoilt people have had to do since early childhood.
Of course, if Meghan is prone to self-dramatisation, her suffering would still be heart-felt. Recent studies have shown that there is little psychological difference between the effect of real and false memories, so someone who lies to himself and others about having suffered as a result of an incident he invented, ends up being almost as badly off emotionally as someone who actually lived through the experience. This is a lesson Meghan should have learnt, for she was effusive on her blog about how effective self-hypnosis was when she was telling herself that she was a booker. If she failed to understand that blaming her race for failures which had nothing to do with it would somehow spare her the consequences of a suffering she had never experienced, she has lived to experience pain which is really of her own creation. As there is the suspicion that Meghan used the pain of a prejudice she had never experienced to gain the admiration of people she sought to impress, in the process turning herself from spoilt woman of colour into a brave battler for human rights, such suffering as she now feels leaves her detractors cold, for they regard it as the just deserts of a self-promoting fantasist. Self-created or not, her pain is nevertheless genuine, as is Harry’s, which, even his critics concede, was anything but self-generated.
This shared bond of pain seems to have permitted Harry and Meghan to become caught up in mythological struggles, he against a murderous press who were never responsible for the death he seeks to lay at their doorstep, she against a racist and hostile world which is meant to have spurned her when her race was the one thing which never played a factor in the process. They are both trapped in a cauldron of pain, but they are laying blame fruitlessly when the solution to their problems lies in entirely different and more positive directions.
Pain or no pain, Meghan and Harry are a double act who protect themselves using any resource at their disposal. To date, their associates have thrown her father, his brother, his sister-in-law, even his ‘naysaying’ grandmother under the bus. Whether they are responsible for these veiled attacks, or they only benefit from them but do not actually set others up to launch them on their behalf, the fact that they do not dissociate themselves from the stories, while creaming in the benefits, leaves a mystery as to their level of knowledge and involvement. Responsible or not, they nevertheless hide behind a rich arsenal of aggressive supporters who do not flinch from attacking on their behalf, and the aim of each attack is always to preserve them while burying everyone else under a fusillade. This was also a game Diana played, and, as this is the absolute opposite of how the royals function, Harry and Meghan need to take responsibility and discourage their friends and associates from playing such a nasty, destructive game.
Quite how destructive it can be was driven home to me in the most forceful
