In his Mail column on Monday, psychiatrist Dr Max Pemberton suggested there was one uncomfortable question Prince Harry might need to confront: why, if he sees himself as compassionate and decent, does he still appear so consumed by a desire for payback?
Dr Pemberton’s wider point was that, almost 30 years after the death of Princess Diana and after considerable time spent in therapy, Harry still seems, in his view, trapped by his past — much like patients who become so fixed on their trauma that recovery, peace and forward momentum remain out of reach.
That observation, while prompting sympathy for Harry, also raises an obvious comparison: why has Prince William not appeared similarly burdened by unresolved grief? Why has he not emerged as a resentful, furious figure, railing against the unfairness that shaped his childhood?
The answer, to me, feels strikingly simple: William has Kate.
William found love with, and later married, a woman rooted in a warm Home Counties upbringing — a household associated with close family bonds, Sunday lunches, affection and stability. In many ways, the Middleton family offered something quietly restorative.
Think back to the early years of William and Kate’s marriage, when he reportedly preferred spending Christmas with the Middletons, drawn to the easygoing, cheerful atmosphere of their family home rather than the more formal customs and expectations of the royal gathering at Sandringham.
Prince Harry, by contrast, does not appear to have the same kind of wider family network around him. He married Meghan Markle, the former television actress, who is estranged from her half-siblings and her father, Thomas Markle — a grandfather whom Harry and the couple’s children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, have not met, despite his public appeals for contact.
That estrangement is all the more striking given that Thomas Markle played a central role in raising Meghan for part of her childhood, during a period when her mother, Doria Ragland, was absent from daily family life while pursuing her own path.
Harry and Meghan during their Netflix series, one of many incidents when Harry has aired various slurs about the Royal Family
Unlike his brother, William has Kate, a young woman from a happy Home Counties family bursting with love, writes Amanda Platell
In short, William didn’t marry a narcissistic woman from a broken home whose version of extended family support seems to consist of hosting casual friend on her With Love, Meghan runny-jam and flower-petal Netflix series.
Of course, Harry and Meghan enjoy their own close family unit with their two children. But William appears to have entered a different dimension, with Kate, despite her cancer ordeal, always by his side.
The success they have made in building a happy and stable home life was on display for all to see in the Royal Box at Wimbledon at the weekend, where William, Kate, George and Charlotte enjoyed the men’s final together.
And we can be fairly certain that Louis, too young at eight to sit through a four-hour match, was being looked after by his beloved grandparents Carole and Michael Middleton.
Contrary to the William and Kate approach, Harry and Meghan have jealously guarded their children’s identities. Apart from a brief glimpse of Archie as a baby in their Netflix series, not a single picture of their children’s faces has ever appeared on film or in print.
Clearly, the Prince and Princess of Wales, as the future King and Queen, feel a duty to show off their family to their future subjects. But Harry’s scrupulous avoidance of showing his children’s faces borders on the obsessive.
The united front the Waleses presented at Wimbledon, meanwhile, represents a remarkable turnaround for Kate who, when she began her relationship with William, was mocked by his posh, entitled friends, who viewed her and her sister Pippa as hideous social climbers and dubbed them ‘the wisteria sisters’.
While Harry and Meghan’s photos of their family life never show the faces of Archie and Lilibet…
… the success William and Kate have made in building a happy and stable home life was on display for all to see in the Royal Box at Wimbledon at the weekend, where they enjoyed the men’s final with George and Charlotte
Success is the best revenge, of course, and Carole and Michael went on to make the family millions with their Party Pieces business.
But as they plough their, admittedly, very different furrows, how is it, asks the wise Dr Max, that two once inseparable brothers – William and Harry – have grown so far apart? How is one happy in his own skin championing good causes and the other so full of bitterness?
It is reported that the brothers had no contact during the Sussexes’ recent brief visit to the UK. Neither have Kate and Meghan been in touch with each other.
Insiders say hell will freeze over before William agrees to meet Harry, so furious is he about the many and various slurs Harry has aired about the Royal Family in, first, the couple’s now notorious Oprah Winfrey interview, then their Netflix series and finally – perhaps most damagingly of all – in Harry’s scurrilous best-selling memoir, Spare.
William is said to be determined never to introduce his children to them.
Dr Max observes that people who obsess over the trauma sparked by their grief all too often seek to relive it ‘in exquisite detail, fluent, articulate, but entirely unhealed’ and find it impossible to move on.
They often then go on to try to blame someone else for their unhappiness rather than accepting, in Harry’s case that: ‘Your mother should not have died and you were only 12.’
No, he should not, as a young boy poleaxed by grief, have been forced to walk stoically behind his mother’s coffin for two long miles as the funeral cortege made its way from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey. That said, William, albeit three years older, did the same.
In Meghan Markle’s words in her 2019 ITV documentary before she and Harry flounced off to California, ‘It’s not enough to just survive, you have to thrive.’
Well, who’s thriving now? A bitter, defeated, unhappy and vengeful Prince Harry, or a contented Prince William with Catherine the Great and his kids by his side?
