Talks about reconciliation 2

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I've never started a thread here before, but I thought some people might be interested in this take on the story by a PR podcast I listened to yesterday (started listening to this podcast as I know very little about PR!).

It would be good to know if any of the resident PR people agree.

When It Hits The Fan: A Right Royal Whodunnit

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Do I have time to pour a glass of 🍷 while we wait ?

Sure, Jan!

Yes! I'm on the ciders tonight! I've tackled my ironing pile, done 2 loads of washing, a weights work out and cooked dinner while I wait!

The RF assassination theory is ridiculous.

But what you say reminds me of what happened with Elizabeth I and her ‘ favourite’, Robert Dudley. Marriage may never have been a real possibility, but it was absolutely scuppered when his wife Amy (who was mortally ill) was found dead at the bottom of the stairs.
Diana’s death didn’t help Charles and Camilla’s prospects at the time. They had to wait it out until the tide of public opinion gradually changed.

He had a verybwell-known feud with Prince Philip, whom he believed was single-handedly preventi g him from getting a Nritish passport. Private Eye gave him the strapline "It's the fuggin' Duke of Edinburgh".
Not so funny after the Paris crash

With the BBC facilitating.

But what else has he got to offer HALO?

Sweet fa I guess 🤷🏼‍♀️

Especially when he's done it before - it must surely lose it's impact by being repeated?

I think this is possibly significant. The school leaving age was raised to 16 in 1972, when Diana was 11 years old. I had left school before then, at the age of 15, and was working full time as a shorthand/typist. Princess Alexandra carried out her first official solo engagement at the age of 17, but she carried out joint engagements younger than that. The expectations of maturity were very different back then.

I wonder if Harry has taken on board this idea that his mother was a young girl when she married and was manipulated by the palace who didn't understand how young and vulnerable she was. That might explain why he sees the palace as being uncaring and not protecting him.

The article posted by Serenster certainly had me thinking: like mother, like son - and maybe Harry sees too many similarities between his mother and himself. Though to be fair, he was only 12 when she died, and I can't imagine what kind of effect such a loss would have on someone who was truly young.

Harry was almost 13 when Diana died and William was only recently turned 15, so the age gap is not as large as it seems
on first sight and William was still young too. I think it’s a bit unfair to link Harry’s age to his difficulties around his mother’s death. It would have been just as difficult for William yet he never seems to get a pass because of his age 🤷‍♀️

I think it’s because William was much taller @smilesy so he wasn’t treated as being so vulnerable.

Yes, I agree. Harry still looked like a little boy, William didn't.

Utter nonsense.

@hoteltango - excellent points. I remember the engagement and wedding very well. Diana was 20, which was considered adult. I had friends who left school at 16 to work full-time, two were married at 18. One at 20.
People look at this through a modern perspective and keep calling Diana "a teenager" as if she was 13.

It is amazing how we make these assumptions and judgments, isn’t it?

I taught 2 boys who were exceptionally tall for their age (one was over 6 ft at 11) and it really did influence people’s treatment of them, particularly in terms of high expectations. Even I, who knew their ages and tried to be mindful of it found myself talking to them differently from their classmates who were a foot smaller! Yes, there’s a general unfair belief that somehow Harry suffered more than William, which can’t be true, especially since Diana seems to have involved William in her romantic troubles to some extent.

My mother in law was married at 21, not unusual at all in her day. She had two kids by the time she was 25. In the days before everyone was expected to go to university leaving school to go into full time work at 16 was normal.

Exactly. When I went to university, only 8% of women did. Most of my school friends left school at 16. I was still at school when some left at 15. People grew up faster.

Friends of mine who didn’t go to university married at 19 and 20. Those who did married soon after graduation- 21 or 22. In those days living together before marriage was not as socially acceptable as it is now.

Diff times, customs and expectations!

I got married at almost 19 and when my husband was granted my visa I left college overnight and a week later was on a plane to a country that was 7 years old. I’m pretty sure people must have thought very badly of mum for allowing it but she made the choice to do/say nothing that could cause estrangement between us because me knowing that I could always go home if things went wrong was her priority. She didn’t want me living a very difficult life because we’d fallen out/I was angry with her and she chose to concentrate on me knowing I could go home anytime I wanted to. It was a lot like my husband who’d ask my daughters even when he’d be on his way out the door to the Mosque for their wedding - are you sure you want to do this, if you’re having second thoughts tell me now and I’ll take care of it. If was along the same lines of him telling their husbands to be - this young woman isn’t coming to you from a house where divorce would be a disaster/a shame and it has been made very clear to them that all roads lead home.

Anyway - what we were doing as teenagers way back in the day is very different to being a teenager now. I had 2 children by the time I was 21 and living a million miles away in distance and centuries from the life I’d been brought up in. And I wasn’t alone in this, there were another 10 girls from various parts of the world also doing it. We were absolutely magnificent and I can now understand why so many people say I/we should write a book. Not that we knew how utterly blooming magnificent we were and still are, even though we know we’re of an era/age that means we’ll be as extinct as the dinosaurs when the last of the 10 of us is no longer here.

Yes, I remember Diana's engagement vividly. She was only 4 years older than me, and I don't think any of us thought of her as "too young".
But we did perhaps struggle to understand her marrying a man who was so much older 🤷‍♀️

@CoffeeCantata I was always taller than other girls my age and grew up being told ‘you’re a big girl and big girls like you don’t ……..’

Anyway, a few of my granddaughters take after me build wise and just recently my 8 year old asked me to go to her school and tell the teacher that just because she’s bigger than everyone in the class she’s still only little and some people in her class have to remember this. So I went because it was all too familiar and I knew just what she meant.

Yes - it's really important to bear this in mind, isn't it? It's funny how physical size influences people so much. I remember a girl in my daughter's class who was very small for her size and the other girls (some younger than her!) constantly fussed over and 'mothered' her, which wasn't good for her really. I'm sure our personalities are affected by this kind of treatment, one way or another.

Then we saw the engagement pictures and her first public outings and it was clear that she was smitten and absolutely loving it all.