Prince Harry - sounds articulate and quite intelligent

[pigalow27]

There seems to be an accepted view that Prince Harry is very dim and unintelligent but he seems to be to be really quite articulate and have a wide vocabulary (antagonist, complicit.) I've thought this before when he made a speech at the Invictus games but assumed it was written for him and he was reading it but the answers to the questions in the interview couldn't all possibly have been learnt,

@Eyerollcentral I disagree. I got a first in Greats at Oxford and I'm pretty thick, tbh, especially with numbers.

I also think that trauma can cause a person to respond defensively - nothing to do with intelligence per se.

I have to say that the interviews and what I've read of the book so far have softened my view of Harry. I think he's quite a thoguhtful person. He certainly comes off much better when Meghan isn't speaking for him or over him. Of the pair of them he is by far the more sympathetic character.

He sounds like he is regurgitating everything said to him by therapists, yoga instructors, lifestyle gurus and so on.

He had a very good education and so is articulate, he’s not intelligent though. He could only do two A Levels which is very unusual, most people from your average State School can manage four AS Levels, and even then he got a D in Geography.

Right, course you are thick as mince with a first from Oxford… I went to a prestigious university and to be honest with you everyone I knew who got a first was extremely intelligent, and I say that being fairly bright myself. You must have worked extremely hard to achieve what you did.
Harry is defensive because he wants everyone to agree with him at all times. From what I have seen a more fitting title would have been Spoilt.

But did it include how to write nice thank you letters and invites? I can image Maths was not Diana's strong point. I suspect Harry gets that from her.

I have been reading a few snippets from his book, it's astoundingly badly written.

There can't have been a ghost writer, it's like Mills and Boon. He's not intelligent.

He did not write it. There was a ghostwriter.

I think the writer has designed it in such a way to make him look like the prat he is. Seemingly it’s reflective of his natural speech pattern, which is very fast and he rambles a lot. That why it’s written in such a way

Well if it was deliberately written like that then the ghostwriter is a genius. I wouldn't want to put my name to it.

You are completely correct. Although there are rumours he was pushed off the project before it was completed. But a good ghost writer is employed to provide a manuscript which feels and sounds like the subject.

@Eyerollcentral

ah

Ingrid Seward had said he is naturally a very intense/fast talker and why she thought it was written this way.

Wasn’t the ghost writer liking tweets slagging him off? I remember seeing screenshots on Twitter a few days ago!

I so need evidence of this.

Yes it should sound natural. I wonder in a super boring way if the advent of audiobooks feeds in to this too as obvs he has read the audio version and so needs to sound even more so like he would say it.

Agreed. He actually seems very savvy - in a good way - in his ability to see how the institutions around him work. He's called them out.

I've said this before, but the RF made a very poor decision in choosing someone who lacked intelligence and emotional stability to be the Brood Mare. Like, why would you do that? Did Mountbatten think that intelligence and emotional stability are largely divorced from genes?

Sexism and class privilege in toxic partnership: the result of believing for centuries (a) that women were only worthwhile for their looks and breeding potential and (b) that intelligence, especially in women, was dangerous. If you want insight into this mentality, read Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate novels. The education of the Radlett girls is threadbare and inadequate because the boorish Uncle Matthew considers the education of girls a useless extravagance. Mitford’s point about Linda’s disastrous love life is that it proceeds directly from a combination of a privileged goldfish-bowl upbringing and a rotten education which values ‘passion’ and ‘purity’ over thinking and self-discipline. Princess Diana was something of a Linda.

As for the genetic argument, well I’m surprised nobody made the obvious comparison with racehorses, but not surprised Mountbatten wasn’t bright enough himself to draw any kind of logical conclusions.

At least, by this argument, William and Harry have done their bit to counter centuries of inbreeding.

I think that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Education and intelligence aren’t the same thing. Exam results are a blunt tool. Harry had a difficult teenage home life and could even have dyslexia or something similar so his exam results may not indicate his intelligence. Also there are many types of intelligence apart from academic.
And if he does have zero intelligence in all areas (unlikely) - that’s not his fault. 50% of people have an IQ in the bottom half of the population. This will statistically include several posters on this thread, probably especially those posters who post sneering comments on a public forum with no ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Is it helpful to publicly humiliate them?

I'd choose 'manipulative' rather than articulate and intelligent. He and M very transparently wanted to imply that members of the Royal family were racist in the Oprah interview, because that had shock value and suited his narrative at the time in making everyone feel they'd been very badly treated. He's now back pedalling furiously ('no one in the family is actually racist; it's perfectly normal in a family where there's an interracial marriage that members speculate about the colour of the offspring.') This suits his narrative now of supposed wanting reconciliation.

I think you probably have to be fairly bright or at least reasonably competent to be trusted to fly an Apache helicopter.

You'd think that about people who drive cars but....

From Smithsonian Magazine. Flying an Apache helicopter. Short description but very informative.
————————————-

“Ever wonder what it takes to become an Apache helicopter pilot? Former British Army Air Corps pilot Ed Macy gives this description in his 2009 book Apache: Inside the Cockpit of the World’s Most Deadly Fighting Machine.

As the most technically advanced helicopter in the world, the Apache AH Mk1 was also the hardest to fly…. To train each Apache pilot from scratch cost £3 million (each custom-made helmet alone had a price tag of £22,915). It took six months just to learn how to fly the machine, another six to know how to fight in it, and a final six to be passed combat ready. And that was if you were already a fully qualified, combat-trained army helicopter pilot. If you weren’t, you’d have to add four months for ground school and learning to fly fixed wing at RAF Barkston Heath, six months learning to fly helicopters at RAF Shawbury, half a year at the School of Army Aviation learning to fly tactically, and a final sixteen-week course in Survival, Evasion and Resistance to Interrogation, courtesy of the Intelligence Corps’ most vigorous training staff. Three years in total….

Flying an Apache almost always meant both hands and feet doing four different things at once. Even our eyes had to learn how to work independently of each other. A monocle sat permanently over our right iris. A dozen different instrument readings from around the cockpit were projected into it. At the flick of a button, a range of other images could also be superimposed underneath the green glow of the instrument symbology, replicating the TADS’ or PNVS’ camera images and the Longbow Radars’ targets.

The monocle left the pilot’s left eye free to look outside the cockpit, saving him the few seconds that it took to look down at the instruments and then up again…. New pilots suffered terrible headaches as the left and right eye competed for dominance. They started within minutes, long before take-off…. As the eyes adjusted over the following weeks and months the headaches took longer to set in. It was a year before mine disappeared altogether…. I once filmed my face during a sortie with a video camera as an experiment. My eyes whirled independently of each other throughout, like a man possessed.”

———————————————-

And probably even a bit more demanding in a combat zone.

I’d say it would take quite a bit of intelligence. So, can we give up on the ‘Harry is dim’ argument, now?

I have a PhD and can’t even drive! Does that make me stupid?

Of course there are different types of intelligence. But that doesn’t make Harry any more (or less) articulate and intelligent in the context of his book and interviews.

His (ghostwritten) writing reads like a bad romantic novel, with him positioned as a Mary Sue character, and his spoken language is just word salad, frankly.

I have to say, when I read the leaks in the press over the last week I thought, what on earth has he done - the book sounded awful. I have started listening to the audiobook read by Harry and it is no where as bad as made out. It is actually very well written and interesting and (so far) not as salacious or spiteful as has been insinuated.

Exactly VolcanicAshStorm people are reacting to tabloid interpretations of the contents of the book, things that the tabloids have picked out and highlighted without context, to spin it all as negatively as possible…

…. which kind of proves Harry’s point!