Do Harry and Meghan realise hardly anyone supports them?

[Spck]

So everywhere there seems to be complete negativity towards the Netflix documentary and the autobiography coming out. They seem to be universally slated as whingers.
so how much do you think this feeds back to them? It must be v easy to live in a bubble with close supporters telling them they are doing a grand job. But how much reality do you think gets through of how badly they are coming across,

Edith - but what I have never understood is why the paps were worth driving at 100 mph through a tunnel to get away from. They didn’t pose any actual threat - they weren’t armed. It seems an over the top response to being photographed. And if you were frightened surely you’d put your seatbelt on, and not decline the protection that had been offered to you.

No-one knows why (either dead or unable to recall owing to serious head injury)

So we don't know why, simply that they did

And that the legal Inquest verdict, which had reams of evidence (all published and still available online) and days of testimony, found that the conduct of the following vehicles was one of the relevant causes

They are not quoting Harry's own book though. They are summarising the Spanish version, based on gunfire word for word translation, which is literal rather than literary, then publishing the most head grabbing headlines out of sequence and context.

Blaming Meghan misses the heart of Harry's struggle, which anyone with imagination and empathy can tell has been the issue for all the spares, Margaret, Andrew, Harry, and even the Queen's father, the spare who became the king, but resented it all his life. It's the horrible notion that you are valued mostly as a replacement if the worst happens to the heir, but you are diminishing in importance as other spares are born. It's a horrible life, and to different degrees, Margaret, Andrew and Harry had their lives blighted by it. You are not free to fully live your life, you are not allowed to outshine the heir so there is a limit to how public you can be, but at the same time, you become less important to the institution as time goes on. So you give up a lot for very little in the end.

The memoir headlines are not actually quoting the book. Just a couple of examples. It is not made clear that the please don't marry Camilla thing is what he said aged 12, when he met her within a year of their mother's death. It was not said by a grown up Harry but has been spun to make it seem that way. He also then says he and William became happy for his father when he saw that Camilla made him happy. That is not headline news though.

The memoir also has a tight narrative thread that is not reflected in the bits headlined. I already pointed out the clumsy mistranslation of the title of part one, Desde la noche que me envuelve, which should be the literary Out of The Night That Covers Me, and not the literal Since the night that surrounds me as the papers are saying.

That's because a basic rule of translation is that you don't retranslate already famous texts like poems. It is clear that the literary device and narrative arch that Harry is using is to follow Henley's Invictus, the poem that inspired the name of Harry's games for veterans. It is a narrative device that chimes in with Moehringer's narrative style. Anyone who has read Moehringer's other books could have predicted that this is very clearly a redemption story, which you miss if you take bits out of sequence, just like with The Tender Bar, his own memoir and Agassi's Open.

On the bright side, the publicity has shot up sales, and it will mean more people buying the book to actually read his words, and not the interpretation of them by those, like the DM who have reason to trash him to the point of calling the Taliban to ask for a comment.

The thing is, @MrsMaxDeWinter, that it was always entirely predictable that the Press all over the world would take chunks out of the book that they deemed the most sensational and publish those out of context, because that is what they always do. I'm perfectly sure that Harry was advised of that. But knowing that, he chose to include inconsequential stuff that would put other members of the RF in a bad light, e.g. him and William asking Charles not to marry Camilla - if he believes that his father was right to remarry, why include what he said as a grieving 12 year old, if not because he wanted a different narrative?

A reminder that Diana refused Royal protection post divorce as she thought they were spying on her . There is no way she would have been allowed into a car with a drunk driver if she had.
In his book Harry talks about being driven through the tunnel at 65mph ( speed of car) and not understanding how it could have happened.
It was utterly tragic and has clearly affected Harry badly but he is a middle aged man with a family and somehow needs to move on . As William has .

Those people saying that the excerpts are misquoted/ mistranslated/ not in context , what will be the excuse when the actual book is released and it turns out he did say this shit ?
Absolutely no one has yet contradicted anything .

So because some of the press would misquote him he should not publish?

There is absolutely nothing odd about a 12 year old child who has lost his mother not wanting his father to marry the mistress in that marriage. The point about who they came to accept her as making his father happy would be meaningless without the former information.

I think people in the UK completely overestimate the global interest in one of the worlds last imperial families. The Queen was of a different age and retained global recognition. The younger royals are just rich celebs, part of a circuit of privilege and wealth around the world - no more, no less.

It is part of the human condition that we desire to carry on our lineages but we cannot produce a brood of children in one go like a cat produces a litter of kittens. Therefore, we usually have to stagger reproduction if we want several children which creates age gaps and roles defined by order of birth.
Perhaps it is part of the current insanity that it offends people to the extent that they have to have global tantrums about it meaning that the only obvious solution would be a compulsory one-child policy which even China has shelved.

Well.... in case anyone wants to know... here is the actual part of the Army/Taliban bit that Harry has spoken of.

Exactly that. The silence from Montecito is almost as deafening as that from Buckingham Palace.

And let's not forget how Harry was praised for killing Taliban back in 2013 by the very media who are annihilating him now.

Hero Prince. Swasbuckling Royal. Action Man. all in the headlines.

(please note, I think he should not have put a number on it)

1st pic was back then. 2nd pic is now.

I think it's natural for him to talk about not wanting his mother replaced, that is how he felt at the time as a child. Camilla was such a big part of the marriage between his parents that talking about his feelings then is justified.

No, pretty obviously what I am saying is that he and his supporters shouldn't complain about being misquoted or things being quoted out of context, because he must have known that would happen.

Of course there is nothing odd about a 12 year old not wanting his recently bereaved parent to remarry. We could work it out for ourselves, after alll. Given that that wasn't his opinion by the time his father actually did remarry, why go into so much detail about it and bring William into it? Simply saying that by the time of their marriage he had accepted that Camilla made his father happy would be more than enough and is far from meaningless; mentioning that that wasn't his opinion as a child and that he told his father so doesn't give the issue any more meaning at all, it just muddies the waters.

Oh wow, I was just doing a follow up post on this very subject thank you @Roussette

I am coming round to your way of thinking that revealing the number was misjudged, but, I have now read the full context of the quote and it is clear it was not boastful or triumphalist as reported in the press. Quite the opposite actually.

As you say, Harry was on many front pages years ago being hailed for killing a top Taliban commander so the reaction is hypocritical.

More importantly, it is all wildly out of context as it comes in the context of two pages where he thoughtfully reflects on the cost of war, on his training, and how he "otherised" the enemy, seeing them as chess pieces rather human in order to do the job he was there to do.

He reflects that it is hard to kill a person if you see them as a person. He reflects on his training, on all military training actually, which is to see people as targets for operations, not as people with families etc. He also reflects on how that made him feel, having to depersonalise targets to be able to do the job. It is actually a powerful couple of pages about the cost of war.

And he talks about how troubled he was about the cost of war on civilians.

Thing is @Roussette, he didn’t have a family ten years ago. By resurrecting this and going into such graphic detail he’s considerably enlarged the target on his own back and increased the danger to his family. Just months before one of the biggest public events this country has seen in living memory when London will be crammed with military personnel. Even you must admit it’s not very clever.

Totally. I would love to say more here but in the interests of privacy (for me) I am wording it carefully.

This has happened in our family. A tragic death. The surviving spouse immediately moving on with someone they had been seeing. We are now decades on and the children tolerate this person, but aren't friendly. They accept the person for the sake of their surviving parent, but it's not happy families. I was close to one of the kids and know how they felt back then and it's never really gone away. No different to Harry I suspect.

He will be polite to Camilla for the sake of the cameras on them and the sake of his father. But there will be resentment even now I think.

Yes, I think enough of that has been quoted extensively enough for people to have got it.

It's not dissimilar to the one from 2013 - except in the former one (which would have been under official guidance) he mentions neither number killed nor chess pieces.

I think, perhaps, he doesn't realise how much very useful reputation management was being done for his benefit. I wonder if he's realising it now?

I have said about ten times now, he should not have numbered the Taliban. He could have talked about it in more general terms.

I don't know how many times I have to repeat this!

That's been quoted several times now over the last few days. It's obvious Harry is reflecting on his service. However to quote the number of Taliban fighters he personally killed was not only monumentally stupid, but very dangerous too.

Just taking this back to the title of the thread, is it possible to say (based on everything written and shown during the past few years) that two things can be true at once?

1. they were unhappy, felt unfairly treated by the royal family and the media was awful with racist elements.

2. the Netflix series and especially the book do them no favours. I cannot for the life of me see why Prince Harry would write about his genitalia (frostbitten or circumcised). The rest of it appears open to interpretation but some parts seems unfortunate.

I hope this is the last and they can focus on living a great life with their children.

But have you read it all ? Just wondering

Personally I prefer to see his gaffe in context.

Yes, we know you think he shouldn't have quoted the number. But he did.

The Taliban will hardly care about the nuanced context tho will they? They will see "I killed 25 Taliban" Harry must have known that would be the headline.

In which case why are you making comparisons with the press coverage of a decade ago? I see you’re choosing to completely ignore the heightened security threat his stupidity has created.

I think this would have been a good passage but for the paragraph about how many he killed and the chess pieces thing. It's not done in a gloating/taunting way at all but you still don't tell the world how many you killed in a war, surely, even without the obvious security issues.

I'm very supportive of Harry and Meghan but this has shocked me tbh. For the rest of the leaks though I think it's better to wait to read it properly before judging.

It has made me think he's probably more mentally fragile and resentful than I'd realised but that isn't surprising given his upbringing. And families are complicated even without all the protocol and strict hierarchy, different households jostling for favour in the press etc.