Prince Harry is so down to earth that he has to stop to take a leak, just like any normal human being; he thinks his young son Archie is ‘HYSTERICAL’ with ‘the most AMAZING personality’; and he prefers The Crown on Netflix to reading about himself and Meghan in the newspapers because at least the TV series doesn’t ‘pretend to be news.’
These are just a few of the amazing things we learned from James Corden’s cringe-inducing Late Late Show special – ‘An Afternoon with Prince Harry & James Corden.’ But maybe the main thing we learned was this: in their new LA home, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, are just as hell-bent on killing the Royal brand as they were when they lived in England.
‘I’m going for a wee,’ declared Harry at one point in a heavily staged scene where he and Corden just happened to be driving past the mansion in the title sequence of Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and Corden thought it would make a good home for a ‘real prince.’
Yes, mildly amusing if you’ve got nothing better to do and you can still stand the sight of James Corden’s grinning mug. But talk about Lèse-majesté…
Lèse-majesté is that ancient offence against the reigning sovereign — dating back to at least Roman times — which even today in some countries carries a prison sentence. In Thailand, for example, it can land you 43 years behind bars. I wonder whether the Queen thinks it might be suitable for her once-favourite grandson.
One bit that might have stuck in Her Majesty’s craw was the bit where Harry vouchsafed that she had given young Archie a waffle maker for Christmas.
This provided the cue for a wild display of excitement and hammy disbelief from Corden.
“I can’t get my head round the Queen sending a waffle maker!” he declared, in the kind of tone any normal person would have spared for something genuinely unexpected, like, “I can’t believe that the Queen took private banjo lessons so she could recreate the backwoods-kid-on-a-bridge scene from the movie Deliverance.” Unfortunately, no such revelation was forthcoming: poor Corden never really got his scoop so he had to pretend he’d got a scoop instead using the medium of bad acting.
Even so, while the revelation may have seemed dull and innocuous to the point of unutterable tedium, it broke the most basic rule of Royal Family behaviour: what the Queen does in Buckingham Palace — or Windsor Castle, or Balmoral Castle, or Sandringham, or anywhere else for that matter — stays in Buckingham Palace.
The Royal Family is about dignity, mystique and discretion — which is how it has survived reasonably well into the 21st century, and also why ‘Princess’ Meghan was so incapable of fitting in with it.
The narrative being promoted by Meghan, friends of Meghan, the leftist MSM and everyone else who hates the Royal Family and British traditions generally, is that the Royal couple were driven out of Britain because of snobbery and racism.
This just isn’t true. The British tabloid press and the British public initially adored the idea that a glamorous star from Suits was marrying into the Royal Family and got terribly excited by the novelty of their Royal Wedding in the chapel of Windsor Castle. They only started going off Meghan when they realised she was a pushy, ungrateful, entitled, gag-inducingly PC Hollywood gold-digger who’d just gone and hitched herself up to Britain’s favourite, cheeky-chappie warrior prince and turned him into an emasculated, humourless husk of his former self.
In his Corden interview, Harry dutifully intoned the official Meghan narrative – that they didn’t leave the Royal Family, the Royal Family left them.
As he put it, using the best PR gobbledegook money can buy:
It was never walking away. It was stepping back and stepping down.
He also managed to shoehorn in some of the wheedling self-pity that you certainly never hear from the Queen (which is why she remains so well-respected).
The tabloid media was ‘destroying’ his ‘mental health’ he claimed. And he’d said to himself: ‘This is toxic.’
Nah, mate. Toxic is being born with a massive silver spoon in your mouth — and the concomitant privilege of serving your country in return — only to keep all the bits you like (the fame and the money) and chucking away all the bits you find inconvenient (your family, your responsibilities). And then having the cheek to ask everyone to feel sorry for you in your new millionaire Hollywood lifestyle…