Mark Twain meet Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, and Harry meet Mark Twain.
See, Twain famously wrote that “history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme” and yesterday, Harry proved him proper.
Way again within the aughties, a staple of tabloid mags and papers the world over was protection of Harry eternally making his manner out and in of famed SWI haunts, surrounded by a safety element and with snappers jostling.
And in an odd recreation of that actual tableau, on Monday UK time, once more, we had Harry making his manner right into a famed SW1 venue, surrounded by a safety element and with snappers jostling.
But this time, it was not a bevy of Treasure Chest cocktails and a membership stuffed with braying Pandoras and Hughs ready for him, however the British High Court.
In a plot twist nobody noticed coming, the duke managed to shock the press by flying in on the very, very quiet (business no much less) to look at the primary day of proceedings within the case that he and 6 different well-known names have introduced towards the Daily Mail’s father or mother firm. They have alleged that the Mail “habitually utilised unlawful information gathering” whereas the writer is denying the claims.
The duke deserved factors aplenty for wanting so bushy eyed after coming in on the crimson eye however in relation to subtly? Ha.
Harry’s journey to London has ‘stunt’ written throughout it.
You see, Monday’s courtroom outing was solely a preliminary listening to and Harry was not there to offer proof. Remote entry was reportedly offered which means that Aitch might have watched issues on-line from the consolation of his Montecito meditation yurt.
Which begs the query: Why go to the expense and energy of flying midway internationally again to a metropolis that he has mentioned “triggers’’ him just to be a spectator? And why did Harry use the Court’s front entrance while Sir Elton John and actress Sadie Frost, also claimants in the case, used the side entrance?
What it looks like is that Harry, in making that short walk from people mover he arrived in and up to the Court’s doors, was there to make a point – or perhaps even points plural.
First off the bat. Him turning up in person in the UK, only the fifth time he has done so in over three years, was a sure-fire way to ensure that the court case got serious publicity.
If he had stayed back in California, twiddling with his ubiquitous bracelets and Googling whether you can drink too much green juice, it seems unlikely that the legal matter would have been quite so energetically covered.
That axe that the 38-year-old relentlessly, predictably grinds about Fleet Street? It’s clearly going nowhere and what better way to hold their feet to the fire than to stage a publicity coup such as this?
However, there is another possibility.
Right now, if more than one million French people had not decided to take to their boulevards to burn things in protest over President Emanuel Macron’s unilateral raising of the retirement age, then Charles and Camilla would be in Paris for their first overseas state. Before all those Frenchies and their fug of cigarette smoke and righteous indignation got in the way of things, the King and Queen should by rights this week be enjoying an official banquet at Versailles and then wondering which courtier packed the Quickeze.
It might sound all very ennuyeux (or as we would say in English, dull as dishwater), this trip was not only diplomatically freighted given how things stand post-Brexit, but also a historic milestone for the King.
All of this Harry may have been aware of when he made the decision to return to the UK, meaning he possibly booked his tickets knowing that he would be making a splash in London while his father was trying his hand at regal statesmanship for the first time.
And what would have happened in this scenario? The limelight, the attention, the juiciest real estate on newspaper front pages? It all would unquestionably have gone to the duke’s trip.
There’s really no competition when it comes to what people would prefer to read about: A septuagenarian doing some diplomatic gladhanding and bigging up British pork exports or the latest twist in the never-ending Sussex psychodrama.
If this had come to pass, it would not be the first time that the Sussexes’ have upstaged, inadvertently or otherwise, more senior members of the royal family.
In October 2019, their TV special about their tour of Southern Africa and its unexpected personal revelations blew William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Waleses’ trip to Pakistan out of the water. In March 2020, “Meghan insisted photos of her at a theatre appeared” on the identical day that Camilla was giving a significant speech about home violence, the Mirror reported on the time. It has been claimed that the Sussexes advised the Windsors that she was pregnant in the course of the wedding ceremony of Princess Eugenie in 2018.
Perhaps most curiously for us right here, in 2016, Harry put out that well-known, unprecedented assertion of his decrying the “sexism and racism” then girlfriend Meghan was being subjected to on-line whereas Charles was on an official tour of Oman, thus torpedoing his father coverage-wise. Why not simply wait a couple of days till his Pa was again?
Despite the cancellation of his French journey, it has been reported that Charles is “too busy” to see Harry. Which doesn’t imply he has not keenly clocked his son’s resolution to return throughout what was meant to be a momentous week for him. The Telegraph’s royal editor Victoria Ward has reported: “It will not have gone unnoticed at Buckingham Palace that the Duke’s appearance may have overshadowed the beginning of the tour, had it gone ahead.”
How lengthy will Harry keep in London? How many chip butties with further HP sauce would possibly he attempt to sneak in throughout that point? (Carbs on carbs? I feel that’s a legal offence in California.) No one is aware of.
But what appears clear is that Harry shouldn’t be finished, not by an extended shot, in relation to his expressing his anger in the direction of the British press nor his wholesale unwillingness to in any manner play the Palace sport.
It’s humorous, isn’t it? Meghan could be the one with the leisure background however the duke clearly has fairly the showman – if not the stunt man – in him too.
Daniela Elser is a author and a royal commentator with greater than 15 years’ expertise working with various Australia’s main media titles.
Source: www.news.com.au
