This from ‘Queen Esther’ on X:
Harry’s never-ending grief masterclass continues, and now the supposedly blissful freedom of Canada has apparently become another chapter in the trauma story.
Someone should remind Harry that he already wrote Spare.
Because the Canada story he told then is remarkably different from the one he is telling now.
In Spare, the Vancouver Island break was a “taste of freedom.” It “got us thinking.” Canada had “already come to feel like home.” They were looking at houses and asking themselves, “What if life could be like that… all the time?”
That was the story: they escaped the pressure, experienced peace and privacy, and began imagining a life outside the Royal Family.
Now Harry says they went to Canada “to get some space away from everything just to be able to think.” Except within two or three days of leaving the “stressful environment”, he says he had an “adrenaline crash”, became “useless around the house” and “slipped into depression for about two weeks” because he “couldn’t function without adrenaline.”
The very escape that supposedly gave them the freedom and clarity to decide on their future is now being described as the place where Harry crashed because he was no longer getting the stress and adrenaline he apparently needed to function.
And that creates a pretty extraordinary contradiction in the wider Sussex narrative.
For years, Harry has told us that royal life was making him ill. The pressure. The cameras. The panic. The environment. They needed to get away.
Now he says that same environment had apparently pumped his body full of adrenaline, and once he escaped it, he couldn’t function without it.
The stress was supposedly destroying him, but apparently the absence of the stress was also the problem.
Then there is the fact that this wasn’t some long-planned move to Canada. They took a private family break over Christmas, returned to Britain and announced their decision to step back on January 8. Yet this new version makes that break sound like a prolonged period of Harry being unable to function, while Spare presents it as the calm period in which they started imagining their future.
Even the contemporary account doesn’t resemble this. His office described them as enjoying private family time, the warmth of Canada and the beauty of the landscape. There was no public suggestion that Harry had spent the trip crashing because he couldn’t function without adrenaline.
And this is not the first time Harry has described serious mental-health struggles. He has already spoken about panic attacks, anxiety, emotional numbness and therapy years before Canada. He has described difficult periods going back to his military years. Yet now this is presented as something he had “never experienced before.”
So what are we actually supposed to take from all these different versions?
Canada was freedom.
Canada was home.
Canada was where they found the clarity to leave.
And now Canada was where Harry escaped the stress, lost the adrenaline, became “useless around the house” and descended into depression.
It increasingly feels as though it’s the same period but the story attached to them changes depending on the narrative Harry is selling at the time.
And that’s what makes this latest “masterclass” so fascinating. He isn’t just adding another detail to the story.
He is changing what the story was.
And if you put all these versions together, it certainly doesn’t sound like the blissful, freedom-filled life Harry and Meghan have spent years trying to sell us. For all their efforts to push this fairy-tale love story, Harry increasingly sounds like a man who hasn’t been particularly happy since leaving the Royal Family.