The Meghan Factor by Patrick Jephson

Author:Patrick Jephson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2018-05-09T15:43:37+00:00

Chapter Six

Harry—Handle with Care

“Conversations with my mother, father,

my grandparents, as I’ve grown up have obviously driven me towards wanting to try and make a difference as much as possible.”

—Prince Harry

Royal life can be lonely. It’s one of the ironies of a job that requires so much social contact that it also has the potential to be extraordinarily isolating. A large part of royal interaction, and especially that bit of it we see in public, is a kind of act. When I was at the palace we used to joke that nine-tenths of being royal was turning up at the right place at the right time in the right clothes with the right speech in your pocket and the right expression on your face. Not for nothing is the best advice any royal person might have is just to “smile and wave.” It goes alongside “never complain, never explain” as one of the two great commandments of royal behavior.

To make the job even more isolating, much of it seems to involve accepting credit for other people’s good deeds; how else can the royal patron of a great charity derive the essential job satisfaction and self-fulfillment that rank and file volunteers reasonably expect to receive from the simple dignity of their willingly-given labor?

This perhaps explains the ceaseless quest for “relevance” that has defined—and bedeviled—so much of Prince Charles’s life and which we can also see motivating many of his sons’ most reported and most commendable acts of public duty. There’s a catch though. After a long day toiling in the royal quarry, royal performers do have access to enviable amounts of privacy and leisure time if they so choose; but I noticed that they could only ever really share the unique experience of their inherited destiny (Prince Charles is famously quoted as calling it “a predicament”) with others who had also been assigned by fate to such a strange life, set apart from the rest of the human race.

Instead, in their day-to-day life both during and after working hours, their human companions tend to be either those on the royal payroll, from the most high-born courtiers to the reliably deferential junior domestics, or an assortment of hangers-on, many of them remarkable only for their talents as yes-men (and yes-women).

It’s largely true that, as a royal person, the only source of effective discipline you may encounter is likely to be from yourself. Likewise, the only source of credible and useful approval, criticism, encouragement, or guidance is likely to be someone else with true blue royal blood in their veins. But even then, given royalty’s intensified form of family politics and the tensions that can result, reliably honest and reassuring company can be very hard to find. How lucky, then, for William and Harry to discover that, from everything we can see, they each have in their brother a formidable ally, sparring partner, and confidant.

Siblings condemned to be motherless at an impressionable age can find in their brother or sister a lifelong soulmate, the only other person in the world who understands exactly how they are feeling.

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