What a grave error of judgment Prince Harry has made. Mere days after returning to California following a successful UK visit where he met his father for the first time in 19 months, Harry has exhibited the least appealing trait he inherited from his mother, Princess Diana—her intense paranoia.

Diana, however, had her reasons, having been deceitfully manipulated by disgraced BBC journalist Martin Bashir, who lured her into the infamous 1995 Panorama interview by feeding her falsehoods and convincing her that even her most trusted advisers were betraying her, selling lies to the media.

Nearly thirty years following his mother’s passing, sources ‘close to Harry’ are echoing the same outrageous accusations Diana made—only days after what should have been a pivotal meeting with his father. They claim that the Palace’s ‘men in grey suits’ were conspiring against Harry and ‘undermining his reconciliation with the King’.

As tidbits from the meeting between Harry and his father started to emerge in the subsequent days, a person close to the Prince expressed his frustration with the disclosures, stating with an air of superiority: ‘The relationship between the Duke and His Majesty The King is a matter solely for them’, before adding that ‘the men in grey suits should stay out of it’.

Our Harry never misses a chance to remind us of his title, Duke, as the King’s second son. Nor does his team waste an opportunity to brief, almost immediately following Harry’s 50-minute tea with his father, that it signaled a ‘thawing of their relationship’ and the ‘reintegration’ of his family ‘back into the royal fold’.

The adamant denials that ensued must have surely wounded Harry as Palace insiders began leaking that Harry ‘would never be permitted to return as a partially involved working royal’, that there were ‘no plans now or in the foreseeable future for father and son to appear together publicly’, and perhaps most cuttingly, that ‘those inside Team Harry had mistaken a short tea and a piece 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. I can tell you as a former newspaper editor that Diana often called or met up incognito with her favourite journalists to make sure they reported her side of the story.

It was through a tip-off from Diana’s camp that the newspaper I then edited published the first ever pictures of Diana with her then lover, the Muslim heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, after her divorce. Diana let it be known she hoped to marry Khan, even releasing pictures of herself meeting his family in Pakistan. The Princess was a master media manipulator.

So perhaps that’s another thing Harry thinks he has inherited from his mother: an ability to control the media narrative. Although, compared to Diana, he is a clumsy amateur.

But 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.

After her Panorama interview with Bashir aired in 1995, she and Charles divorced barely one year later. She was ignominiously stripped of her HRH title, devoid of any Royal status and essentially abandoned as a mere private citizen.

To her credit, Diana then gave up playing the victim and forged a new role for herself, championing the removal of land mines in Angola and focusing on her most cherished charities, as well spending time with her beloved boys.

Yet 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.