Harry was not going to accept the role of court jester forever
uniform that, he later explained, he selected for the sandiness of the shirt: he thought it complemented his colouring. The trouble was that the shirt’s left sleeve was encircled by a bright red and white armband bearing a stark, black Nazi swastika.
If there was one incident in the youth of Prince Harry that would be taken to represent his wild, foolish and totally unjudged side, it was that Nazi costume. A sneaky fellow guest used their mobile phone to snap a photograph, and a few days later, there was Harry parading on the front page of a newspaper under the headline ‘Harry the Nazi’. He apologised, but there was public outrage. Many observers, however, missed the point: obviously the 20-yearold Harry wasn’t really a neoNazi, as one Labour MP alleged.
The lad was naughty, not a Nazi. Most clearly of all, we know that Harry chose his costume in conjunction with his elder brother — the future King William V, then 22, who had laughed all the way back to Highgrove with the younger sibling he was supposed to be mentoring — and then onwards to the party together.
But did a single commentator remark on Prince William’s role in the debacle? It was the function of the elder brother to be perfect in the public eye, whether he truly was or was not, and it was the function of the younger one to make the rest of us laugh or complain or feel disapproving — and at all events to make us feel thoroughly superior to the poor, clueless kid. This was the role — the cruel and imprisoning stereotype, a collective shrug of the shoulders — that all of us shaped for ‘dear old Harry’ over the years.
But in January 2005, following the ‘Colonials and Natives’ costume fiasco, the young prince began re- evaluating his elder brother’s involvement and the unfairness of William’s subsequent emergence smelling of roses. It made Harry feel resentful and even alienated.
Popular expectations — and the entire royal system — functionally condemned the ‘spare’ to an inferior role. Friends recall ‘no-speaks’ and quite a serious rift between the two brothers at this time — as there had been after the ‘Drugs Shame’ of 2002, when Harry had first started to realise the price of playing the monarchy’s institutional scapegoat. Every decent soap opera requires a glittering hero and a comical fall guy, and those were the opposing roles that popular culture had come to allot to William and Harry.
‘For the first time, their relationship really suffered and they barely spoke,’ said one former aide. ‘Harry resented the fact that William got away so lightly.’
Meghan was not the original factor in Prince Harry’s decision to get s hot of his family in January 2020. He already had very solid reasons to get shot of the rest of us and our smiling assumptions of the inferior — and actually rather demeaning — role that he should be grateful to play. Truly a ‘spare’ in more than one sense.
EXTRACTED from Battle Of Brothers: William, Harry And The Inside Story Of A Family In Tumult by Robert Lacey, to be published by William Collins on October 15 at €22. © 2020 Robert Lacey.