bitchy | Platell: Paranoid Prince Harry is going to end up like his paranoid mother

The British media is really mad at Prince Harry. They’ve been mad since 2019, really. Which is when Harry first started suing them. The year before, 2018, was when Prince William and Kate really decided to sell out Harry and Meghan, and W&K have never stopped. Additionally, Harry’s father has always used both of his sons for his own image, and Charles clearly doesn’t give two sh-ts about Harry OR William. All of which to say, Harry’s spokesperson issuing a correction to the Sun’s curious weekend cover story has gone off like a bomb. Even more so because Harry clearly points to the Sun’s “sources” as attempting to “sabotage” his reconciliation efforts with his father, drawing direct lines to both Charles’s courtiers and William’s office. The reaction from the Windsors and the royalist media has been full of gaslighting, hastily rewritten narratives, lies and threats. Now the Daily Mail’s Amanda Platell is saying all of it pretty explicitly: they’re running the “Harry is paranoid, just like his dead mother” play.

What a terrible error of judgment Prince Harry has made. Just days after landing back in California after a triumphant UK trip during which he met his father for the first time in 19 months, the Prince has once again displayed the least attractive quality he inherited from his mother Princess Diana – her utter paranoia.

At least Diana had good reason, having been cruelly duped by the disgraced BBC journalist Martin Bashir who manipulated her into that infamous 1995 Panorama interview by feeding her lies, telling her that even her most trusted courtiers were traitors who were selling untruths about her to the media.

Now, nearly thirty years after his mother’s death, sources ‘close to Harry’ are making the same lurid accusations Diana made – just days after what should have been a game-changing meeting with his Pa. They say that the Palace’s ‘men in grey suits’ were working against Harry and ‘sabotaging his reconciliation with the King’.

As small glimpses of the meeting between Harry and his father began to emerge in the days afterwards, a source close to the Prince claimed he was infuriated with the briefings, stating rather pompously: ‘The relationship between the Duke and His Majesty The King is a matter for the two of them only’, before adding that ‘the men in grey suits should stay out of it’.

The vehement denials that followed surely must have stung Harry as Palace insiders began counter-briefing that Harry ‘would never be allowed to return as a half-in half-out working royal’, that there were ‘no plans now or in the foreseeable future for father and son to appear together in public’ and perhaps most painfully that ‘those inside Team Harry had mistaken a brief tea and a slice of cake for the Treaty of Versailles’. Others claimed that the meeting between father and son had been ‘distinctly formal’, with the duke allegedly describing it as ‘very official, like an official visit’ – a comment his spokesman vehemently denied.

Now, after the latest lurid accusations that ‘men in grey suits’ are sabotaging the Prince, the harsh reality is clear: the only thing sabotaging Harry is his own self-perceived victimhood, a role he continues unhealthily to wallow in – and unforgivably monetise through his memoir, Spare. How paranoid must Harry have felt then when it was reported that Buckingham Palace had been left ‘saddened and perplexed’, increasingly ‘bemused’ and ‘clearly not a little irritated’ by Harry’s ‘wild, conspiracy theories’.

Even more upsetting for Harry is that the latest comments have been met with ‘disappointment’ by friends of King Charles, with a royal source adding: ‘The reality is that senior aides have been working behind the scenes to improve what is a delicate but important private family relationship.’ At which point, we should point out that in refined royal circles, the word ‘disappointment’ is equivalent to a nuclear warhead going off.

Harry’s obsession with conspiracy theories has horrible echoes of his mother’s bitter and collapsing marriage to Charles – and her completely out-of-kilter state of mind back then….it’s the paranoia that Harry shares with his late mother that is most troubling. For it was not only Diana’s least attractive characteristic, but the one that led to much unhappiness…. Diana never did stop manipulating the media or blaming the men in grey suits for her unhappiness. She was so paranoid that she cancelled her official Scotland Yard protection detail, believing they were loyal not to her but the palace. And look how that ended.

[From The Daily Mail]

That last sentence is the explicit threat to Harry: if you continue to correctly call out the people harming you, you’re going to wind up like your paranoid mother. Diana was “paranoid” and she had every reason to be paranoid, because people were actively harming her and plotting against her because they saw her as an existential threat to the monarchy. They still mock Diana years after her death – “Diana was so paranoid, she thought she would die in a car crash organized by her ex-husband and the institution which protects him!” And look at that. The “paranoid Harry” talking point doesn’t even hold up because Platell explicitly details that the courtiers WERE BRIEFING AGAINST HARRY after he met with his father! Jesus.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.